In the four decades since George Balanchine left his native Russia, he has never had a theater to compare with the one he grew up in — the grand Maryinsky in old St. Petersburg. With the desperate wit of a tenement boy playing stoop ball, he has fashioned his art to survive its locale — and in New York, where Balanchine has lived and worked for the past 30 years, its locales have been dingy, gloomy, unfriendly or cramped. But when Balanchine's New York City Ballet opened its spring season in the crystal splendor of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center last week, the jewel was at last in a proper setting. The new theater is magnificent, and so was the ballet.
"Papered with People." The opening achieved a kind of quiet beauty entirely new to New York (see color pages). The theater's columned entrance faces Philharmonic Hall across a wide plaza, and the two buildings reflect each other in scale and design as well as purpose.* With audiences arriving at each and the fountain splashing between, both buildings acquire an air of excitement that is beyond the reach of either alone. But where Philharmonic Hall evokes a modern age of icy grandeur, the New York State Theater is a warm and elegant restatement of traditional splendor — reminiscent, in fact, of the old Maryinsky.
Architect Philip Johnson fully shared Balanchine's notion of what a ballet theater's mood should be: he designed the building, he says, to make everyone in it feel formally dressed whether he is or not. Two sweeping grand escaliers lead up to an immense promenade. There Johnson put carpets on the walls, gold leaf on the 200-ft. by 60-ft. ceiling, and patterns of travertine merlino rosso marble on the floors. Then he ringed the room with three inner balconies.
The promenade is within easy reach of everyone in the theater, and when the balconies fill with strollers at intermissions, the walls, as Johnson says, seem "papered with people." Intricate grilles along the balconies, crystal lights against the inner wall, and a golden bead curtain across the full sweep of the glass wall that faces the plaza give the room a noble, vaguely Venetian glow. It is the perfect place in which to pop a champagne cork.
The auditorium is ringed with five shallow balconies that stand out like golden horseshoes against the garnet walls; the orchestra seats stand in an island unbroken by aisles, European-style. Although the theater is as big as the acrophobia-inducing Metropolitan Opera House, it has a feeling of closeness and intimacy that makes it seem far smaller. Only 550 of the 2,729 seats are farther than 100 feet from the stage, and all but a few of the $1.05 seats at the top have a perfect sight line. Single seats are placed Indian-file along the balconies at an angle that encourages their occupants to lean out over the rail, as though fascinated to be present; again the walls appear decorated with people.