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THE NEW VICTORY THEATER in the heart of Times Square is about to live up to its middle name. The 95-year-old theater, being refurbished at a cost of $11.4 million, will reopen Dec. 11 after a long dark period. As the first in a series of dramatic reclamations on the West 42nd Street block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, it symbolizes victory over the sleaze that had settled onto once-glamorous Times Square.
Cora Cahan, president of New 42nd Street Inc., recalled that the mandate to reinvent the blighted street arrived during a real estate slump "and no one wanted to come here but mud-wrestling clubs . . . Obviously, that was not going to fulfill our hopes, our aspirations . . . So we asked ourselves, `What can we do that doesn't replicate anything else in New York?' ."
The answer was a theater for young people and their families, "where they could see their similarities and their differences, the full range of life and experience. And it can't be all sugar-coated fairy tales. This is New York City, after all."
After the Dec. 11 gala, the season will begin with Cirque Eloize, the fanciful Canadian circus, Dec. 19-31. The Crossroads Theater Company from New Jersey will cross the Hudson Jan. 5-21 with "Sheila's Day," a play depicting the day off enjoyed by domestic workers in South Africa. The Metropolitan Opera Guild will present the premiere of "Different Fields," a sports-oriented opera, Feb. 7-18. The Black Filmmaker Foundation will show a series of movies for young people April 9-14, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese will offer a selection of films...