Fox Theatre
You’re usually staring rapt at the stage—so would you have guessed that there are 6,516 jewels on the auditorium ceiling of the Fox Theatre? The glass cabochons were made a century ago in what was then Czechoslovakia. Architect C. Howard Crane was as lavish high on the canopy as he was in that grand Siamese Byzantine lobby. Sunk into the ceiling’s plaster, the jewels crown the elephant and outline the border. Backstage, each show that travels through paints its logo, which the cast members autograph. You’ll find these logos on staircases, back walls, below the stage…all over the place. It’s a literal history of Broadway.
Stifel Theatre
Formerly the Peabody Opera House—and before that Kiel Opera House and before that the Municipal Auditorium—the limestone masterpiece now known as the Stifel Theatre once had an entire wall tagged by every artist who’d performed there. (The Kiel drew some of the world’s best shows, dancers, and musicians.) Alas, the wall had to be removed during the renovation; we’re hoping that it’s still intact somewhere, possibly in somebody’s family room.
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra / Jeff Hirsch
Powell Hall
Stand across the street and look up at Powell Hall: In the stained glass insert in the huge arched windowabove the marquee, you’ll see Saint Louis (the king, not the city)—a reminder that the building was originally the St. Louis Theatre. To raise the acoustics to symphony hall standards, convex walls were added where the screen once stood, and decorative pillars enclosed the old pipe organ. The backstage alcove now houses percussion instruments: crotales, tambourines, anvils, maracas, even jawbones. Up on the sixth floor, the music director’s suite juts out over the ceiling of the five-story auditorium, and an anteroom leads to the apex of the dome. Its door shows the scars of a frantically whacked broom handle: Maestro Leonard Slatkin once accidentally locked himself in that cavernous room, and he pounded on the door until a stagehand finally heard the ruckus.
The Muny
If you go backstage to the props room at The Muny—well, to the former backstage; a new one is being built—there’s an informal ritual of posting photographs of all the stagehands. The job often passes through a family, so you’ll see sons and fathers, grandfathers and uncles, and also an old shot of a stagehand in his twenties, grinning and eager, and the same guy 40 years later. This is how The Muny works.
