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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 145
Room, which literally perch atop the New York City skyline. In the auditorium,
lights concealed behind the concentric panels can create a rainbow effect, a
sunset, or the aurora borealis that pull together and focus the viewing masses.
Or, left natural, muted beige and gold tones give a sense of sunrise. Indeed Carol
Hershelle Krinsky notes that a sunrise service was often held there on Easter
Sunday (176).
Thus the power of the Music Hall’s design is in its ability to induce a sense of
anticipation through symbolic associations with better things to come, new
dawns, or new beginnings, as well as in its potential to unite the viewers with that
which they view, drawing them into the event through a series of ever-decreasing
ovals that flow continuously from the auditorium to the proscenium.
Additionally, “the light console, far in advance of its time, can turn the great
auditorium into an extension of the stage and the audience into part of the
spectacle, another Roxy principle” (Karp 88). In this way, the design and the
lighting minimize the bicameral roles of performers and spectators. Add to this
celestial setting the world’s largest organ playing as patrons enter, during
intermissions, and at the conclusion, and the metaphor of tomorrow’s heaven on
earth is more or less complete.
Krinsky feels that the Music Hall is “unforgettable because its form is simple
to understand and to describe, and because its size, its lack of intelligible scale,
and its ‘celestial’ shape can both exalt and overwhelm” (180). Likewise, Alan
Balfour suggests that the setting creates an awesome sense of anticipation, the
auditorium appearing as a boundless space. He comments, “perhaps in this
soaring quality that conveys a sense of almost spiritual pleasure, of
entrancement, the setting and play are one” (97). But the gigantic space is only
one element of the total experience.
In 1982, Walter Karp wrote that the Music Hall stage
was—and still is—the largest and best-equipped stage in the world. Its
three lengthwise sections can each be raised 13 feet above stage level and
lowered 27 feet below it by huge lifts of such advanced design that the
Department of War was to make use of the system during World War II
and treat it as a military secret. The stage contained, in addition, a
revolving circular section that is 43 feet in diameter. The seventy-fivepiece
orchestra, carried in a special band car, can go above the stage, below
the stage, across the stage and under the stage. It can disappear from out
front and re-emerge at stage rear. The stage has equipment that can send up
towering fountains of water or bring down cascades of rain. …The great
stage curtain, driven by thirteen motors, can produce so many patterned
shapes that Roxy decided to make it the first act of his opening show.
(88) 11