The Business Of Decoration Previous Page (81)
All these and other vast changes have brought about a corresponding change in the designing of theatre interiors. They have centered the minds of architects and managers on their problem as one not lightly to be dealt with, and the enormous increase in the numbers of theatres built, especially in New York City during the past few years, has made the building of them more or less of a competitive matter in which each owner tried in some way to outdo his competitor and to produce a structure more beautiful than those which had come before.
There are still a number of decorative problems that have not been dealt with entirely adequately. The lighting of the auditorium, for example, is generally either too glaring or too dull and a perfect suffusion of soft light has rarely been secured. In the Princess Theatre, where the management attempted to hide ugly ceiling fixtures by merely covering them with large silk inverted domes, there is so little light that the audience can scarcely read their programs. The same thing may almost be said of the Belasco Theatre. Another difficulty is the decoration of the ceiling, which is customarily carried out as a unit, but as half of it is obscured from a large part of the audience by the
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100INTERIOR DECORATING
balcony, a rather unsatisfactory effect is created. The proscenium arch, which is ordinarily ornamented with heavy plaster relief, gilded or painted, is a problem not very satisfactorily solved. The front of the balconies and their juncture with the side walls of the building have not, in any theatre that I know of, been designed in any original or very pleasing way; and the side walls themselves, for reasons of economy, have generally been left entirely too bare as compared with the elaborate ornamentation accorded to the boxes, the proscenium and the ceiling. Also for reasons of economy the theatre chairs have been ordered after a stock model and have not been designed with any effort at the creation of beauty.
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