Speaking of the New Amsterdam, when I went to the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2008 to see a 1920 silent While New York Sleeps, I was astonished to see in the film footage that could only have been filmed in the New Amsterdam roof theater itself or in a compete replica made on a sound stage. But from the looks of it I believe it was the former.
The roof theater was where Ziegfeld put on his Midnight Frolic revue nightly after the Follies curtain came down in the main theater. And there was an ongoing exchange of acts between the Follies and the Frolic, where cabaret seating was spread over the orchestra floor and balcony.
The Roof theater was delightfully intact in the mid-1970s when I toured it. It was a gem of a place. Long after the main theater had become a grind movie theater in the 1930s, the roof theater was still used for rehearsals of Broadway productions.
In the late-1970s it was used as a television studio. But in 1982 , three years after landmark status was granted, the roof theater was gutted for a Peter Brook production–that never happened. Fire exits didn’t conform to contemporary code.
The roof theater is a real loss. Why was it allowed to demolished, AFTER the theater was landmarked?
In While New York Sleeps, we see the stage with stairs to the dance floor. There are cabaret tables all around. We are given snippets from what would have been a typical Frolic program, perhaps the actual program that was running when the film was made.
There’s a production number with renowned showgirl Dolores in her famous peacock costume, which fans out at the touch of a control inside her dress. She walks down stairs on stage with a slight pause at each step: the famous showgirl strut. Then she walks backwards and releases her fantail.
There’s also a tightrope walker, a woman doing a Spanish dance turn that looks like Ted Shawn’s Serenata Morisca, one of Martha Graham’s numbers during her Denishawn days. A woman in Turkish trousers throws streamers and they throw them at her. All performers link hands and march to the footlights, in commedia coda style.