Lavish & Legit

The Road is booming. The latest, most extravagant evidence is Detroit's 2,008-seat Fisher Theater, which opened last week with a pre-Broadway production of Kermit Bloomgarden's The Gay Life. Significantly, the space it occupies contained until recently a movie theater.

Built as a personal monument by Detroit's auto-framing Fisher Brothers ("Body by Fisher"), the new theater cost $3,500.000, has a lobby big enough for tennis matches, is full of Italian marble, East Indian rosewood and cut-glass German chandeliers. The auditorium is steeply pitched to provide an unimpeded sight line, and the orchestra pit is recessed under the stage so the mouths of tubas cannot eclipse the legs of the chorines. Despite its huge capacity--bigger than any house on Broadway--no seat is more than 92 ft. from the stage. Designed by Chicago Architects Rapp & Rapp, the Fisher also has a giant aluminum acoustical screen that drops from the balcony ceiling, reducing its capacity by 402 seats in order to improve the conditions for intimate drama. Similarly, the proscenium arch is made of sliding panels so that the stage can be narrowed for small shows and broadened for spectacles.

For this season's nine-show series, 23,000 subscription books have already been sold in a city that also supports two other legitimate theaters. Most of the Fisher's offerings will be secondhand Broadway but Detroit can look forward after The Gay Life to two more special events: the road opening of a new musical called The Crime of Giovanni Venturi (with the Metropolitan Opera's Cesare Siepi), and the pre-Broadway trial of Richard Rodgers' No Strings.

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