Word: musicalized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Music Hall had three sires--John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world's richest man, whose eponymous Depression-defying venture in urban optimism was the greatest accomplishment of his life; S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, a monomaniacal showman whose idea of appropriate scale ranged from enormous to gargantuan; and Donald Deskey, a design buccaneer whose best-known work, eclipsing even the Music Hall, would be the Crest toothpaste tube. But what these three unlikely collaborators built, and what renovation architect Hugh Hardy and his colleagues at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates have now reinvigorated, changed the course of American interior design...
Given that Deskey had first been inflamed by the idea of the modern at the epochal Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in 1925--whence the term (and style) Art Deco--the clothing he draped over the muscular lines of the Music Hall was surprisingly American. He commissioned paintings from America's leading modernists, designed hundreds of furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick...
Oddly, the two finest works that Deskey commissioned and Hardy has reinstalled haven't been on display for years. Stuart Davis' witty Men Without Women was exiled a few blocks north to the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, when the Music Hall was in such a state of desuetude that at some performances less than 10% of the seats in the immense auditorium were filled. Hardy had a potent ally in his effort to yank the Davis painting back from MOMA. Jerry I. Speyer, the manager and co-owner of Rockefeller Center, is vice chairman of the museum...
...painting over it. Entirely. And in a style that someone thought was Kuniyoshi's yet was really more like what you might see on the homemade backdrop of a high school production of Oklahoma! But the handsomely repainted version by Yohannes Aynalem will delight no more than half the Music Hall's audience. It decorates the ladies' powder room on the mezzanine...
...what the entire building cost when new. But while most of us are gaping at Hardy's delicious restoration, Cablevision CEO James L. Dolan will be focused on where the bulk of the money went--into an entirely new electrical system engineered to transmit high-definition-television versions of Music Hall spectaculars over his company's cable systems. But what Dolan can't wait to see, he says, is the HDTV view of that other great work of Music Hall art--the Rockettes...