Find out what's playing on existing stages with our Theater Guide.

Go to Growing Pains

Go to Washington World

Second Act

Saturday, December 22, 2001. 7:10 p.m. Light snow. Forrest stuffs his mom's Christmas present -- box seats for "Traviata" . . . she'll flip! -- into his coat pocket and steps from the warmth of Washington Opera's new Casey Opera House onto bustling G Street NW. With almost an hour to walk the four blocks to the Lansburgh Theater for "Macbeth" (Richard Thomas and Kelly McGillis, again?) and all his gifts bought except a stocking stuffer for his kid brother Aaron, there's time to kill.

To his right, Hecht's looks mobbed. So does Timothy's Cafe with its floor-to-ceiling magazine racks. Forrest has already browsed the Old Post Office Pavilion's Virgin Records megastore, so now what? Amble west and mingle with the "Titanic" and "Rent" throngs at the National and Warner theaters? . . . or head east past the MCI Center and the hoops crowd? Hmmm. Maybe there'd be something for Aaron in Chinatown. East it is.

With the crush thinning at Ticketplace's G Street half-price kiosk, Forrest crosses toward it and the Martin Luther King Library, glancing left from mid-10th Street at the two-block-wide former convention center. Cineplex Odeon's huge purple oval is just becoming visible behind the scaffolding covering its H Street side, along with some neon logos for the fast-fooderies that'll fill its dining court. The new megaplex -- with its stadium seating, 16 screens (including an IMAX) and such auxiliary kid stuff as a miniature golf course -- won't open till summer, but Forrest notes that the new Biograph 5 at 11th and E has already increased its signage. Probably smart, since there'll be another few thousand pedestrians wandering the neighborhood when the big guys open.

Even now, the streets are more crowded at night than during office hours. Good thing, muses Forrest, that he Metroed in from Bethesda instead of driving . . .

Implausible as this scenario may seem, there are definite signs that downtown D.C.'s once-thriving theater district is on the upswing again. As with revivals underway in other downtown entertainment areas -- notably New York's once seedy, now Disneyfied Times Square -- the upturn in the area's fortunes wasn't entirely expected. But it could hardly be happening in a more appropriate place.

For more than a century, D.C.'s entertainment hub could be found in the area just east of the White House and north of what in the late '20s became the Federal Triangle -- block after block crowded with theater marquees and audiences eager to catch the latest Helen Hayes play, Jimmy Durante's vaudeville act or those newfangled flickering images on the silver screen.

Today, after five decades of suburbanization and misbegotten or unfulfilled redevelopment plans, marquees are again sprouting downtown, along with restaurants, nightclubs and entertainment-oriented shops. They're part of an unplanned but vigorous revival that could -- if properly cultivated by developers and the city government -- lead to a blooming miracle: the "living downtown" long extolled by Washington's urban planners.

This reinvigorated downtown could be more than a lively, diverse, attractive place, although that alone would be a boon to the largely sterile and segregated Washington area. It could also stabilize the city's tax base, provide more riders for Metro and reestablish the centrality of downtown in a region increasingly dispersing into the nothingness of exurban sprawl. Not least, it could provide the region with more of that rare commodity: streets where there's more going on than there is on cable.

Granted, all hasn't gone as projected in the area: The living downtown was to be a mixed-use neighborhood including new apartments, shops and arts and entertainment facilities. This renaissance was supposed to be driven by the demand for office space, but the office boom imploded in the late '80s. Moreover, all the new residential space was created by an agency, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, that has been abolished. And the overextended retail industry has been hit by shakeouts and consolidations that have destroyed many chains -- including two of the three that operated downtown department stores.

That leaves arts and entertainment as the only remaining engine to power downtown redevelopment. And now -- remarkably -- a wide array of both high-art institutions and popular-entertainment entrepreneurs seem ready to come downtown. The SRO audiences at the Shakespeare Theater near Seventh and E streets demonstrate the appeal of downtown arts; the presence a few blocks west of the Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood and the Warner Bros. Studio Store indicate that mainstream entertainment can also draw crowds into the neighborhood.

Soon this vanguard will be joined by the MCI Center arena and the "Woodies" opera house, which together will bring more than 22,000 warm bodies to the area on many evenings. In addition, Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson has promised to establish a huge entertainment complex hereabouts. Of course, such developments don't assure the future of the smaller arts institutions that give the area its flavor. Nor do they guarantee that the arts district will reach critical mass, without which the area might remain as motley as it is now, or become a drab, lifeless office precinct. Even with opera and basketball crowds swelling G Street, downtown will never again be the only place in the area to shop, dine or catch a movie. But it could again be as vibrant as it was for the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

7:18 p.m. Ouch. Ford's Theater has seats at the half-price booth three days before Yule day, so maybe casting Pat "A Christmas" Carroll as Scrooge wasn't such a hot idea. As Forrest passes under the Washington Stage Guild banners announcing Shaw's "In Good King Charles' Golden Days" (what could the WSG be thinking?), he notices that renovations have begun on the quasi-gothic UDC building next door. Converting that boarded-up eyesore into a home for the university's fine arts department may not bring much nighttime activity to the pedestrian mall, but weren't there rumors about a residency for the African Continuum Theater Coalition there, too? With a 150-seat basement auditorium?

Loping across Ninth Street, past the National Museum of American Art, Forrest notes that new evening hours there appear to be paying off, at least on game nights at the MCI Center. Judging from the aromas wafting down the block, the Restaurant Row that's sprung up on both sides of Seventh Street isn't doing badly either . . .

The first playhouse built in Washington -- the United States Theater -- opened in 1800 in Blodgett's Hotel, on the north side of E Street between Seventh and Eighth streets, and for the next 100 years, no Washingtonian needed to venture far from that spot in search of stage entertainment. The National Theater opened six blocks west in 1835. The Odeon, Adelphi and Olympic created a little theater district two blocks southeast a decade later, and by 1863, when Ford's Theater opened on 10th Street, the area just north of Pennsylvania Avenue was firmly established as the city's entertainment core.

In fact, until 1915 -- by which time the Howard Theater, Liberty Hall and the Knickerbocker Theater had extended the arts' reach to the U Street corridor, Capitol Hill and Adams-Morgan -- all but one of the more than 50 showplaces built in the city were located within a few blocks of Seventh and E streets. Mesopotamia had its fertile crescent; Washington, a theatrically fertile trapezoid, bordered on the north and south by New York and Constitution avenues, and on the east and west by Fourth and 15th streets.

Throughout the 1800s, most theatrical activity centered on Seventh and Ninth streets, but with the advent of film, the action also shifted west to the area around the National Theater. By the 1930s, when a number of historic playhouses between Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues had to be torn down for construction of the Federal Triangle, all the north-south arteries from Ninth to 15th streets were ablaze with marquee lights, and so were F, G and H streets.

The 3,500-seat Fox Theater at 1328 F St. (opened in 1926 and later renamed the Capitol before being demolished in 1963) was easily the city's most spectacular showplace, with its mighty Wurlitzer organ and 50-piece Fox Symphony rising from the orchestra pit on separate hydraulic lifts at the start of the lavish stage show preceding each evening's movie.

But other vaudeville and movie palaces also had their charms. The Gayety (later the Shubert) on Ninth Street billed itself as "the acme of theater perfection" when Katharine Hepburn appeared there in "Much Ado About Nothing." The Lafayette Square Opera House seated 1,700 patrons in what one account called a "simply perfect" auditorium. Fifteenth Street's majestic, blue-and-gold, triple-tiered B.F. Keith's (the entrance now graces Old Ebbitt Grill) was a regular stop for the likes of Red Skelton, and once boasted that it had "one million program readers annually."

Keith's and its smaller neighbor, the Playhouse, anchored the western edge of an entertainment district that from the 1920s to the '60s regularly drew tens of thousands of patrons to the heart of downtown. Alas, audience migration, urban unrest and the ascendance of suburban movie houses sounded the death knell for these stately giants in the next decade, both here and in other cities. By the mid-'70s most of D.C.'s downtown showplaces had been demolished or converted to other uses -- the Town Theater, for instance, is now the National Museum for Women in the Arts -- and all that remained of a once thriving entertainment district was a closed-for-renovations National, a mostly dark Warner, a recently reopened Ford's and a row of tawdry porno palaces on 14th Street near McPherson Square. Oh, yes . . . and two joined-at-the-hip Smithsonian museums on Eighth Street of which the public seemed blissfully unaware.

In the late '70s and early '80s, however, alternative arts spaces and punk and dance clubs began thriving in the old, underused buildings east of 10th Street. The Washington Project for the Arts, d.c. space, the Museum of Temporary Art, the 9:30 Club and Fifth Column brought a new sort of arts patron to the neighborhood, while artists and galleries took advantage of cheap space and high ceilings. A gallery complex opened at 406 Seventh St., and the WPA bought a building nearby.

Unfortunately, the same '80s office development that cleaned up the strip joints began to drive out these artists and musicians. There are still nightspots and galleries in the central arts trapezoid, but the 9:30 Club has moved to the hipper, cheaper U Street corridor up north, the WPA got crushed by its mortgage, and another group of artists was recently evicted from studios in the historic LeDroit Building across from the National Portrait Gallery. These retreats might suggest that the area's arts presence is dwindling -- except that there's a countervailing trend, and it's backed by big bucks.

7:25 p.m. As Forrest turns toward Chinatown's gilded arch, he sees an almost unbroken string of bistros and pubs stretching two blocks north to Coco Loco. Opening up the MCI Center's ground floor eateries and Discovery Store outlet to the street turns out to have done what the architects promised -- integrate the massive sports arena into the streetscape.

The marquee for MetroStage's four-year-old, 94-seat Goethe Institute Playhouse catches his eye as he crosses to the Chinatown Mall entrance by the Metro stop. "Ibsen's never been such fun!" it gleams. Yeah, right, he thinks, and ducks inside . . .

Of the major arts and entertainment projects planned or under construction downtown, the furthest along is the MCI Center (possibly to be renamed after MCI and British Telecom merge into a company called Concert PLC), the basketball/hockey arena rising at Seventh and G streets . This project will include a three-level Discovery Store, an example of the kind of large, interactive, entertainment-oriented retailers that are seeking locations in American downtowns -- and exactly the sort many D.C. developers are trying to lure.

Though Smashing Pumpkins or Garth Brooks may occasionally borrow the arena from the Wizards or the Capitals, this is not exactly an arts facility. Still, it will bring thousands of people downtown, new customers for the restaurants and clubs that are already there -- and the sports bars and pubs that are planning to open nearby.

Three blocks west, the Washington Opera intends to convert the old Woodward & Lothrop flagship store to a new 2,100-seat opera house. After some initial hesitation, the city now supports this project, although the Opera's boosters are currently more than a few million dollars short of the necessary funds to build the place. Still, it seems likely that within five years Mozart and Verdi aficionados will be packed into Metro trains next to fans of the latest NBA sensation.

While Betty Casey, who contributed $18 million to buy the Woodies building for the Opera, tries to keep a low profile, Virgin's Richard Branson may contribute to a downtown renaissance just to achieve a higher one. In June, as Branson celebrated his airline's new flights from London to Washington, he also announced that he would open two Virgin Records megastores in the District -- one downtown and one in Georgetown.

The projected downtown store, which would stock CDs, videos, books and related products, would also include a theme restaurant and eight to 12 movie theaters, Branson said. The proprietors of the Old Post Office Pavilion have been negotiating unproductively for several years with Virgin, whose stores in London, Paris and Amsterdam are major attractions. According to Branson, however, downtown will definitely get a Virgin megastore. "We want to come in and modernize retailing in Washington," he told The Post in June.

Sony, which has built large cinema complexes in other cities, is also discussing a downtown entertainment/retail facility that would combine cinemas and CDs. And Cineplex Odeon, the city's dominant movie-house chain, has looked at downtown locations. (In fact, it once negotiated inconclusively for Old Post Office Pavilion space.)

Under a longstanding agreement with the city, any developer of a proposed office building at 11th and E streets must include a five-screen cinema in that structure. Cineplex Odeon might run those theaters, although five screens is paltry by the standards of the chain's recent developments. The project might be a better fit for the Biograph, whose co-owner, Alan Rubin, wants to replace the theater's shuttered Georgetown location with a five-screen complex. (He's said to be looking at sites close to George Washington University.)

MetroStage recently announced that it will move into the Goethe Institute's new theater near Seventh and H. The Tariff Commission Building at Seventh and E, though badly dilapidated, is an ideal site for expansion of the neighboring National Portrait Gallery or National Museum of American Art, or for some other museum use. (The Smithsonian just relinquished its claim on the structure, however, and the federal government is seeking a residential or hotel developer for it.) Across the street, there will be arts space in Hecht's old Seventh Street building, vacant for more than a decade, after that's redeveloped. Developer Herbert S. Miller, chairman of the public/private Interactive Downtown D.C. Task Force, has proposed moving the Capital Children's Museum from Northeast Washington to that block.

Under current zoning, all new buildings erected between Sixth and Ninth streets in the old downtown must include arts space. Though such space is rather loosely defined -- restaurants and bars qualify -- that requirement does mean that more arts and entertainment uses will arrive as the real estate market enjoys a modest revival. Construction begins soon on Market Square North, an office/residential complex at Ninth and D streets east of the FBI headquarters. Metro is also seeking bidders for its property north of the MCI Center at Seventh and H streets; Miller, one of the leading contenders, would use the land for a combined 2,700-space parking garage and 350,000-square-foot mall with a "sports-related focus."

Hordes of well-heeled sports fans, by and large, will not benefit the area's artists and arts groups, nor will the increased property values that are sure to follow. The arts and high rents seldom coexist easily. In fact, unless government and nonprofit groups soon take several simple, concrete steps, the arts could actually be squeezed out of the arts district.

7:40 p.m. Forty-two shops in the six-story Chinatown Mall and not one item Aaron won't turn up his nose at. Maybe there'll be something at the Children's Museum.

Forrest sprints down the block past the basketball latecomers toward the ornate high-ceilinged entryway of what was, back in the 1950s, the first Hecht Co. building. Reclaiming that gorgeous, white-marble edifice for the grandkids of the folks who once shopped there has sure transformed this corner of the arts district, he thinks to himself. The Seventh Street art galleries all have child-friendly windows now, Olsson's Bookstore looks like Sesame Street, and since Zenith Gallery's neon artists electrified every building on the east side of the street from the MCI Center to the Archives Metro stop, the place is a candy-colored riot . . .

Virgin and Sony can take care of themselves, but downtown won't be resurrected unless a coherent arts and entertainment district survives around these corporate players. Nonprofit groups and the city government have a role, too, and they need to move quickly, before private developers claim the entire area.

First, the arts district needs a group that plans development, supervises events and publicizes the area -- roles once played by the Downtown Partnership, the public/private planning group that collapsed with the office-space market in the early '90s, and the now-defunct Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation. Fortunately, the city has finally passed a bill that authorizes Business Improvement Districts. Funded by a neighborhood-wide levy collected by the city, a BID management agency could create a sense of identity for the area, sponsoring streetscape improvements and neighborhood events. This organization, or some allied nonprofit group, should also maintain spaces for the artists, galleries and performance venues that kept the neighborhood alive -- and even made it fashionable -- during the last 25 years. As rents increase, the area must retain buildings, owned by the city or nonprofit groups, that provide lofts where artists can live and work, as well as room for galleries and performance spaces.

"It's so important to have local arts and local culture mixed in with the Shakespeare Theater and the National Gallery," says Ceridwen Morris, whose WPA/Corcoran series at the Central Armature Works near Seventh and D streetsembodies the spirit of do-it-yourself arts curating.

"It only works if they make rents affordable for arts groups," notes the Shakespeare Theater's Michael Kahn. "It's fine to make everything pretty and appealing so people want to come here for culture, but if it doesn't make financial sense, the institutions won't survive."

In addition, a few crucial gaps in the neighborhood must be filled. The trapezoidal arts core that was once home to Washington's premier movie palaces currently has no cinemas. It needs an art house or two and a large, 10- to 20-screen complex of the sort the major chains build these days. One possible site for the latter could be the Convention Center at Ninth and H streets, which is to be replaced by a larger facility north of Mount Vernon Square. High ceilings and few columns make the adaptation structurally feasible, while two nearby Metro stops make it an easy commute for many D.C.-area residents and hotel guests. And even with AMC's Union Station nine-plex just eight blocks away, says one Cineplex Odeon executive, "the location could support 16 screens."

The neighborhood also lacks one essential component of any cohesive downtown theater district, a half-price ticket booth. Incredibly, the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington's Ticketplace was evicted from downtown by a misbegotten F Street resurfacing project. (It's now hidden away at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium.) Half-price ticket booths are centerpieces of London's West End and New York's Times Square, and Ticketplace should have a similarly prominent position in Washington's resurgent theater district.

A reinstated Ticketplace could sit on one of the existing downtown pedestrian malls (the 900 block of G or the 700-800 block of F) and should also provide -- or be adjacent to a booth that provides -- tourist, transportation, and arts district information. (Washington must be the most-visited city in the world not to offer such a service downtown.)

When the opera house in the Woodies building joins the four major playhouses on the E Street theater spine (Ford's, National, Warner and Lansburgh) there will be a total of more than 7,000 seats to fill for live theatrical attractions. That assumes that the Shuberts, who have long balked at offering the financial guarantees producers require for major attractions, change their policy or find some other way to keep the National Theater lit more than 13 weeks annually, its average in recent years.

Finally, the neighborhood needs more density and more activity, more people on the street and more places for them to go -- weekdays, weekends, afternoons and late nights.

"We need more presenters at this end," says the Shakespeare's Kahn, lamenting the six-block trek up E Street from his theater to the National. "A dance place, maybe, and a second, smaller experimental stage for us. Also lots more bars and cafes -- outdoor dining that stays open late, so our artists can hang out and get a hamburger and salad at 1 a.m. -- something like Phoebe's or Joe Allen's in Manhattan." The Manhattan-style complexity of the new arts district should be able to serve up both experimental theater and after-midnight burgers -- provided that the area isn't overwhelmed by Disneyfication.

7:49 p.m. Yesssss. A metallic whatsis Aaron can use to store his collection of broken guitar picks from Fugazi shows. Perfect. Shopping's done for another year.

Forrest saunters the half block from the Children's Museum to the Lansburgh Theater, gazing curiously at the cutesy Eurohotel that's taken over the Tariff Commission Building at Seventh and E. Too bad the Smithsonian waffled so long on turning it into an Exploratorium-style science center. That would have been a better playmate for the Children's Museum.

His family must still be at Cafe Atlantico around the corner. Forrest shudders at the array of high-concept eateries that has crept eastward from the Hard Rock Cafe . . . Planet Hollywood, House of Blues, the Fashion Cafe, Dive, the Picasso Cafe and David Copperfield's Magic Underground. Most downtown regulars consider these places tacky, but the tourists seem to like them.

There are two potential problems with this scenario for a lively downtown arts/entertainment district. One is that it might not happen. The other is that it might.

The former is easy to imagine. Despite the projects already underway, the neighborhood might fail to reach critical mass -- either because mainstream retailers are intimidated by the District's reputation, or because they think the Washington area is already saturated with malls, shopping centers and entertainment complexes. Or because they decide downtown will face too much competition from other potential projects such as the infotainment theme park proposed for Children's Island.

It's also possible that there just aren't enough potential stores that fit the entertainment-retail profile. From the old Garfinckel's building at 14th and F to the Metro site at Seventh and H, all the developers seem to want Niketown, Borders and the Virgin megastore. "Everybody has the same five tenants in mind," says one architect with a long involvement in downtown redevelopment.

Suppose, however, that the reinvigorated arts/entertainment district is an incredible success. That could be terrible, too, if the result were a sanitized, Disneyland sort of district stripped of history, character, local color and local artists. "I think that what's coming is an entertainment district and not so much of an arts district," says Rex Weil, an artist and art critic who has managed to keep his studio downtown despite dwindling space for such uses. Weil expects an area largely shaped by "slash and burn development" and suburban white middle-class paranoia. "As long as there's a black person on the street who's not wearing a suit," he scoffs, "people are going to be demanding more police."

Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, thinks that the neighborhood can keep some of its identity. "Downtown has to offer something unique that the malls don't have," he says. "There is a large segment of the market that is looking for diversity. If you recreate what the suburbs have, you won't have success."

Still, Lynch allows that recent redevelopment has destroyed "80 percent of the '40s and '50s character that made [downtown] unique" and worries that the city won't stand up for its own longstanding plans for a "living downtown." "The mayor will do whatever is expeditious rather than follow through on good planning," he says. "That's always been a problem."

As the rents rise, the artists and galleries could simply disappear. Indeed, the city has already attempted to renege on its commitment to support the Stables Art Center, a small arts-studio building near Eighth and E streets, for another decade. Almost as devastating, the buildings that contain the neighborhood's most interesting spaces could be converted to offices or simply demolished for bland new buildings. The artists and arts groups that survive might be shunted to small, low-ceilinged spaces in basements and retail spaces better suited to copy shops and Federal Express offices.

Huge spaces "encourage creative thinking," says Ceridwen Morris about the Central Armature Works building, the sort of hulking (and highly adaptable) industrial structure rare in Washington. "It's hard for me to imagine getting performers excited without this space."

Another casualty could be housing, long integral to plans to create a downtown that's lively around the clock. With the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation out of business, efforts to create new living space may slide. The city has already eliminated residential requirements for the MCI Center site, and seems inclined to waive them for the Metro-owned parcel directly north of the sports palace (the property where Herb Miller would build his garage/mall).

Yet attorney Charles Docter, a downtown resident who is active in the battle to create more apartments in the neighborhood, is optimistic. The city's "commitment to downtown housing has waffled," he says, but "you can't just put office buildings down there. The demand is not there."

"On paper, the city is still for housing. We keep pushing for it. And there is some hope that the city's backbone can be stiffened." He cites Market Square North and the northeast corner of Seventh and E streets as two places where additional housing units will be built relatively soon. "It's a necessary counterbalance for the arts and entertainment uses," he argues.

"Speaking for myself, I want to work downtown," says Weil. But "an arts community doesn't really exist unless people also live there." Studios have "to go hand in hand with living space."

While Weil is wary of upscaling, homogenization and hordes of suburbanites, Docter doesn't dread the crowds that will follow the MCI Center and other possible developments. "You want hustle and bustle," he says. "That's what we moved in for. I bargained for that. I'm not opposed to that, and I don't think any of my neighbors are."

7:58 p.m. The throngs heading for "Macbeth" and other nearby events nearly swallow Forrest and his family, who arrive just as the Lansburgh's curtain is about to go up. As he enters the lobby, Forrest contemplates the rapid changes in the neighborhood, and in the local theater and concert community. Many theatergoers felt a pang of regret, he recalls, when the Kennedy Center was converted into a storage facility for the new snowplow fleet the District bought with its suddenly booming sales tax revenue. Still, he thinks, it was for the best.

Mark Jenkins has written about urban issues for the Washington City Paper and The Washington Post. Bob Mondello reviews theater for the City Paper and film for National Public Radio.