City Center

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre | 2004 | 700+ words | Copyright

City Center (New York). The Mecca Temple, built on West 55th Street in 1923 as the home of the Masonic Shriners, was opened in 1943 as an auditorium owned by the city and devoted to presenting opera, ballet, musicals, and plays at popular prices. Many of the productions were return engagements of Broadway hits that had completed their road tours, but with time the theatre began to offer its own mountings, and the practice of producing both musical and nonmusical revivals there was abandoned. It is a large house (nearly 3,000 seats) and not ideal for most theatre productions. But there are two smaller spaces in the building, called Stage I (299 seats) and Stage II (150 seats) that have housed many productions by the Manhattan Theatre Club. In recent years the large City Center auditorium has been home to the popular Encores! Series, which presents staged reading of old and/or neglected musicals.

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Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "City Center." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "City Center." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-CityCenter.html

Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "City Center." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-CityCenter.html

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