Playhouse Square Restoring Ornamentation Yummy as Cake Icing at State, Ohio Theaters

By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Viennese modern architect and all-around party pooper Adolf Loos once famously declared that adding ornament to any buildings was a crime because it obscured the timeless, machinelike style he advocated.

If Loos was right, then Thomas Lamb, the early 20th-century American architect who designed the State and Ohio theaters at Playhouse Square was guilty, guilty, guilty.

When the downtown movie palaces opened within weeks of each other in 1921, Lamb made sure their Italian Renaissance-style interiors were dripping with rosettes, acanthus leaves, curlicues, and medallions and lunettes festooned with reclining goddesses.

It was all as as sinful as cake icing, but visually just as yummy and much beloved by generations of Clevelanders.

Unfortunately, the Ohio lobby burned in 1964 and has been masked since the early 1980s by an historically inaccurate remodeling that was part of the Playhouse Square revival that started a decade earlier. 

And at the State, much of the ornamentation inside the auditorium has been muffled by layers of muddy brown paint splashed over it in 1984 when the theater reopened.

Now, decades later, the Playhouse Square Foundation, the nonprofit entity that attracts a millions patrons a year to 10 stages in the city's nationally acclaimed theater district, is taking fresh action on Lamb's legacy.

Using part of the $62 million raised so far in its $100 million Advancing the Legacy capital campaign, Playhouse Square has hired skilled contractors from New York's Evergreene Architectural Arts and Dependable Painting Co. of Cleveland to clean, repair, re-light and repaint the State's interior.

And they've hired Evergreene and the Cleveland architecture firm of Westlake Reed Leskosky to restore the Ohio lobby to its original grandeur.

Work began inside the State's auditorium June 20 and is scheduled to be finished by Aug. 25, in time for the opening performance of "Book of Mormon."

Additional work in the State's lobby will extend into February. The overall thrust is to bring as much of the theater as possible back to its original appearance in 1921.

"This is an opportunity to take the entire theater from the Euclid Avenue doors all the way to the proscenium and bring it back to one period," said Tom Einhouse, vice president for real estate services at Playhouse Square.

A separate project aimed at restoring the Ohio Theatre lobby to its original appearance started in March, and has now reached the point in which workers will demolish the existing lobby. Audiences will still be able to access performances through a walkway – essentially a tunnel – that will extend through the space.

The Ohio restoration, scheduled for completion in May 2016, will include a re-creation of three murals that burned in the 1964 fire.

"This is like Christmas," Einhouse exclaimed during a hardhat tour of the work in progress at the State and Ohio on Monday.

Over a 35-year career, Einhouse has helped manage Playhouse Square's performance venues and a real estate portfolio that supports the district's artistic productions.

He has overseen restorations and adaptive reuse projects that have brought new life to once-dark theaters such as the Allen and the Hanna.

And last year, in a project also funded by the current capital campaign, Playhouse Square completed a $16 million streetscape project centered on Euclid Avenue at East 14th Street that included hanging what is touted as the world's largest outdoor chandelier.

But Einhouse has been itching for years to put a higher polish on the palatial State.

"The palette in here was so dark and heavy, you couldn't see any of the detail," he said Monday. "The whole ceiling was brown – flat brown," he said.

That will no longer be the case.

High up on a scaffold, workers on Monday were daubing the central dome over the State's orchestra and dress circle sections with a sticky, slow-drying, lemon yellow glue.

The plan was then to attach to that surface delicate, shiny, feather-light sheets of micron-thin composition leaf, a poor man's version of gold leaf made of brass, bronze and copper. When seen from the orchestra seats below, the effect will be the same as gold, Einhouse said.

Elsewhere, the vast ceilings that stretch over the State are being lightened from brown to pale green, amber, violet and eggshell white.

"It's going to be a significantly lighter palette overall," Einhouse said.

The effect will be "warmer and more regal," in Einhouse's words, in part because cove lights, chandeliers and other fixtures are being illuminated with new, warm-toned LED fixtures, rather than the hotter and far less efficient incandescent bulbs.

After finishing work inside the theater, the Evergreene and Dependable crew will repaint ceiling ornamentation in the State's vast lobbies, which include the recently conserved "Spirit of American Cinema" murals painted by artist James Daugherty in 1921.

Playhouse Square will also restore other lobby details, such as the fine marble wainscot panels removed in an earlier renovation.

Half a dozen decorative urns will be re-fabricated – based on molds taken from two existing examples – and installed atop Corinthian columns from which they were removed in the past.

Historically appropriate ceiling chandeliers and newel-post lights on staircase balustrades will be installed. Einhouse said he expects the work in the State lobby to be finished in February. And reproduction vintage wallpaper will be installed.

Einhouse declined to say how much the State project costs, because contract details are still under negotiation, but he said the sum is in the seven figures.

The work on the Ohio lobby, budgeted at $5 million, should produce an effect similar to the restoration inside the State.

It will be many months before the full impact will be visible, but if historical photographs installed in the passageway outside the Ohio are any clue, the re-created theater lobby should vie with its neighbor in gorgeousness.

Adolf Loos would no doubt think it's all a crime, but in this architectural debate, thanks to Playhouse Square, Lamb is very much getting the last word.

View a picture slideshow of the project.