The New 42nd Street Revenue and Competitors

The New 42nd Street Studios, designed by Charles Platt and Ray Dovell of the firm Platt Byard Dovell Architects, has been honored for excellence in design by the local, state and national chapters of the American Institute of Architects. This brand new, ten-story, 84,000 square foot, $33.7 million, state-of-the-art facility consists of five floors of rehearsal studios, dressing rooms, showers and bathrooms; three floors of permanent office space housing seven nonprofit performing arts companies, including The New 42nd Street; and a 199-seat, workshop/experimental theater appreciatively named The Duke on 42nd Street in recognition of a generous grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The 14 rehearsal studios feature exceptionally large, column-free floor space, high ceilings, sprung dance floors, mirror walls, theatrical lighting, excellent acoustics and cityscape-view, sound-proof windows. The ground floor of the building shares three functions: the entrance to the New 42nd Street Studios and The Duke on 42nd Street, PAX and the entrance to Roundabout Theatre Company's American Airlines Theatre. For over three years - from its opening on June 21, 2000 through June 30, 2003 - the building has run at full capacity. At current count, 70 nonprofit dance companies, 134 nonprofit theater productions, and 34 Broadway and Off-Broadway plays have rehearsed in the building's studios; and 50 productions have played in The Duke on 42nd Street to over 33,000 audience members. Perhaps the best tribute to the success of the building, is the reaction it generates from theater professionals. According to Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Susan Stroman, "The best part of rehearsing The Producers at the New 42nd Street Studios was the quality of the space where we spent those long grueling days. The air, the light, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms are the best I've known, and to have all this just around the corner from the theater we were headed for was a great blessing."The largely glass building was conceived as a "structure of light" in collaboration with lighting designer Anne Militello, an award-winning veteran of the New York stage. An innovative, state-of-the-art system of multicolored lights play across the facade of the New 42nd Street Studios. Among the features are colored spotlights that wash upward and crossfade over louvers of perforated stainless steel; a translucent "light screen" encasing the space for The Duke on 42nd Street; and a 175-foot wand of light soaring skyward at the west end of the building. By day, the building stands as a work of post-modern architecture; by night, it is a fantasy of light and motion, hinting at the creative processes transpiring within.