Editing the Venue Beacon Theatre

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Venue Description
The Beacon Theatre is a historic theater at 2124 Broadway (at West 74th Street) on Broadway in Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York City. The 2,894-seat, three-tiered theatre was designed by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager and opened in 1929 as a movie palace for motion pictures and vaudeville. Today it is one of New York's leading live music and entertainment venues, under the management of the Madison Square Garden Company. The theater was the site of the 2011, 2012, and 2016 Tony Awards. History The Beacon Theatre was originally conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin in 1926 as part of a projected chain of deluxe New York City movie palaces. The planned Roxy Theatre Circuit was to be operated by Lubin and Samuel L. "Roxy" Rothafel with the famous Roxy Theatre as its flagship. Planned as the Roxy Midway Theatre, the future Beacon was designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager of Chicago, the architect of the 6000 seat Roxy, as a smaller mate to the larger Times Square theater. However, the collapse of Lubin's fortunes doomed the Roxy scheme and the Midway was never opened. The nearly completed theater sat vacant for a time and was eventually acquired by Warner Theatres to be a first-run showcase for Warner Bros. films on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The renamed Warner's Beacon Theatre opened on December 24, 1929. Designed as a silent film showplace, the theater's delayed opening featured a talking picture (Tiger Rose with Lupe Vélez), silent films having already become obsolete. Later operated by Brandt Theaters, the Beacon continued as a primarily first-run movie theater into the early 1970s. In 1974, Steven Singer bought the theater to present live pop concerts promoted by Stephen Metz. They were followed by Marvin Getlan and Allen Rosoff who bought the theater in 1976 and continued its new life as a major presenter of live concerts, including a series of 1976 concerts by the Grateful Dead. In November 1977 the Beacon hosted a performance of Erik Satie's symphonic drama Socrate in tribute to the mobile artist Alexander Calder, featuring a recreation of Calder's set for a 1936 production of the work. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. In 1987, an effort to convert the theater into a nightclub was blocked in court on the grounds that it would irreparably damage the theater's historic and protected architecture. Subsequently, the theater underwent a revival in its concert hall business, filling New York's low-to-mid-sized venue notch between the larger Radio City Music Hall and various smaller clubs and ballrooms. The Madison Square Garden Company began operating the Beacon in 2006. In November 2006, the theater began a 20-year lease by Cablevision, which also leases Radio City Music Hall and owns Madison Square Garden. The company announced a planned $10 million renovation of the theater.