Content area
Full Text
LONNIE GADDY remembers that the first time he came to 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, perhaps to this very theater, he was 15 years old and had traveled from Harlem with his friends to see Clint Eastwood in "Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More" for $1.50. He then ate two hamburgers for a quarter.
Thirty years later, he is standing in the orchestra pit of the oldest theater in New York - the oldest and also the newest . . . and for the youngest. The New Victory Theater, which was built in 1900 - before New York had a subway - officially reopens tonight as a children's theater, the first opening of at least nine planned over the next several years on what is probably the most famous street in the world.
"When I tell people I'm working on Forty-Second Street," says Gaddy, one of the Victory's four new permanent stagehands, "they stop and gaze at me." He tilts his head and narrows his eyes in imitation of their look of shock and suspicion. "When I say it's geared to the family, then they settle down."
The top of his head level with the refurbished floor, he peers up at the steep, narrow theater that has only about 500 seats, past the first gold balcony with the little bumblebee motif, past the now-unusual second balcony, up to the domed ceiling with the original pairs of cherubs and the reconstructed harps.
"It's going to be a wonderful house," he says. "I want those people to say, `You know that theater on 42nd Street? The place is beautiful. It feels like home.' "
"I need a staple hammer," Carl Van Praagh says suddenly, interrupting Gaddy's reverie. Van Praagh is 23, and recalls the street mostly as the hairy place where someone not too long ago snatched a shopping bag full of clothes he had just bought.
He understands the history better than most people his age, though. His great-grandfather worked as a stagehand in vaudeville more than a century ago, when the theater district had not yet reached 42nd Street and the street was known (prophetically?) as Thieves' Lair.
His grandfather worked as a stagehand in the first theaters built on...