Music Hall, Metropolitan Theater
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Wang Center for the Performing Arts (Music Hall, Metropolitan Theater)
1923–1925, Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore; 1991, Finegold Alexander + Associates. 252–272 Tremont St.
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Wang Center for the Performing Arts (Music Hall, Metroploitan Theater) (Keith Morgan)
The big act in the Theater District, the Wang Center for the Performing Arts seats 4,400 in an auditorium inspired by Charles Garnier's Paris Opera. Built as the Music Hall, a socalled movie palace and appropriate for films or stage shows, the Wang Center is the last and largest of the fourteen theaters that Clarence H. Blackall designed in Boston. Buried within a fourteen-story limestone Renaissance Revival office building, lavish lobbies usher the theater-goer into the gilded auditorium, embellished with cast-plaster sculpture and murals. Now the home of the Boston Ballet, the theater has become the principal performance space for musicals and was substantially restored in 1990–1991. Across Tremont Street, the more intimate Schubert Theater (1908–1910, Hill, James and Whitaker, 263–265 Tremont Street), fronted by a modest two-story, cast-stone facade dominated by a Palladian window, provides an elegant space for drama in a building named for the dominant family of theater industry from the first half of the twentieth century.
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Location: Boston, MassachusettsRegional Overviews:Architect:Styles:Materials:
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Citation
Keith N. Morgan, "Wang Center for the Performing Arts (Music Hall, Metropolitan Theater)", [Boston, Massachusetts], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-TD15.
Print Source
Buildings of Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston, Keith N. Morgan, with Richard M. Candee, Naomi Miller, Roger G. Reed, and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, 127-127.
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