Golden Opportunity

There used to be an angel there.

Yohannes Aynalem could see it, through the accumulated grit and soot of 70-odd years and through the grimy detritus of a decade's worth of the building's decay. His artist's eye caught just the faintest shadow of a hand and the barest outline of the bell of a golden trumpet, and in that artist's eye, he could still see the angel there.

Aynalem always had the artist's eye. His family saw it back in Addis Ababa, and so he went off to art school. But Ethiopia had torn itself apart in a long internal conflict that was one of the Cold War's small and bloody sideshows.

Aynalem ended up in a refugee camp. Fifteen years ago, he moved to New York and took a job with EverGreene Painting Studios, a company that specializes in art restoration, particularly the mural art of great public buildings. He worked on projects at Radio City Music Hall and at the New York Public Library. In his work, he not only had to look through his own artist's eye but also through the eye of the artist who'd originally painted what Aynalem had come to restore. Now, as he races against a hard deadline of July 16, when Disney's The Lion King will come galumphing onto the stage of Boston's newly restored Opera House and usher in what many hope is the new age of this city's Theater District, Aynalem digs deep to find where all the angels used to be.

He spent time in libraries. He pored through art-history books. He studied original materials. He had to re-create the past in the present, carrying the other artist's work forward in his own. Slight, with long, tapered fingers and the build of a distance runner, Aynalem carries the burden of another man's integrity as well as his own.

"This is my specialty," Aynalem explains. "I am like an actor, working in a play that somebody else wrote. If I have to, I can be somebody else when I work."

In 2003, EverGreene contracted to restore the mural art and ornamental details in the Opera House on upper Washington Street, a 75-year-old pile that had begun its life as the B. F. Keith Memorial Theatre, a luxuriously appointed monument to the creator of modern American vaudeville. Eight years earlier, in 1995, Mayor Thomas M. Menino had managed to have the Opera House declared one of the 11 most endangered historical sites in America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The building was optioned a year later to Theater Management Group, a company that subsequently was gobbled up by Clear Channel, the Texas-based entertainment conglomerate that owns, besides the Opera House, one in every 10 commercial radio stations in the United States and three-quarters of a million billboards.

The owners committed themselves to the restoration of the Opera House, and restoration is not renovation. Restoration means dozens of artisans working six days a week for more than a year. It means uncovering the original materials and re-creating them. It means using real marble, because real marble was what the builders used in the first place. It means 14,000 square feet of gilded surfaces, and it means somewhere around $38 million by the end of the project, and all to keep faith with an architect named Thomas Lamb, who's been dead for 62 years but who'd been commissioned to design the theater as one man's tribute to his late business partner. Blessed with a blank check, Lamb did not scrimp. Everyone working in the Opera House is working with someone else's art and looking through another artist's eye. History swirls in the air, thick as the plaster dust and the smell of new-sawn wood.

"I'm trying to keep faith with what Thomas Lamb tried to do here," says Steve Marinelli, who's directing the project for Clear Channel. "We're getting into his mind here. I mean, the plasterers tell me that when we go to recapture his glazes, for example, there was burnt sienna in the glaze. We're going right back to his glazes, the same shellacs, the same everything that was used.

"All the methods and materials have to be signed off on in Washington, because the theater has the status that it does. I have teams of historical consultants, on everything down to how we polish the metal, how do we recast the bronze, to plaster renovations and the terra-cotta facade. Every piece of the history has to be approved. Plaster is being redone with plaster. The bronze is going to be bronze. The marble is being replaced with marble.

"You won't see my signature here, though," says Marinelli. "I try to avoid anybody's signature here except Thomas Lamb's."

"We've worked hard," says Gary Martinez, the architect who's overseen the restoration from Washington, D.C., "to make sure that everyone's aware that this is Lamb's masterpiece. Every time I walk through the place, it continues to surprise and delight me."

But there are other, more modern, elements to the Opera House's story. It is part of the city's attempt essentially to create a new neighborhood out of something the development folks have chosen to call the Ladder District. And it's no accident that Clear Channel has chosen an enormous, splashy production of The Lion King to reopen the Opera House. The show has run for seven years on Broadway, and when tickets went on sale in Boston last November, the initial burst of interest encompassed not only the production but also the building in which it will be staged. The Opera House will be as big a star when the curtain goes up on opening night as Simba or Scar, its marble and bronze as much a part of the production as Julie Taymor's costume designs. The effect of the restored Opera House as a luxurious performance venue alone may well be enough to bring more people downtown and into the less opulent houses.

"There's plenty of the pie to go around," says Jeff Poulos, the executive director of StageSource, a nonprofit group that promotes Boston's theater community. "If people come in and get dazzled by the Opera House when they see The Lion King, then they'll come back downtown to see something else."

Times being what they are, there also has been the usual blizzard of memos and the customary hail of writs. The Opera House will stand hard by the gleaming new glass towers of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Next to it, there are other once-decrepit theaters -- the Paramount, the Modern -- in what used to be called lower Downtown Crossing and, before that, merely the gateway to the furtive trench-coat delights of the Combat Zone. But that's all the language of planning and development, the language of renovation, which is the context within which the restoration of the Opera House now takes place. Restoration is harder and more subtle work. It means turning something old into something new by bringing the past forward into the present, rather than allowing the present to obliterate it. Now, on a rainy winter's afternoon, Yohannes Aynalem is standing atop a scaffolding platform 80 feet above the orchestra pit, at eye level with a mural that patrons soon will be gazing up at, showing a visitor where the angel is supposed to go.

"See," he says. "Because I read about this guy when I got up here, and I saw that there was half a figure right there. There were three hands, so I knew there was another figure there. There had to be two figures, and one of them had a trumpet, because that's the way this guy worked. It was like a puzzle, see?"

Authenticity has become a great paradox for us. Can you create a neighborhood and make people believe it was there all along? Can you re-create something so thoroughly and accurately that it appears that the years have never passed? Can you figure out where all the angels went?

Whether it's a hunger for political candidates whose life experiences make them more or less genuine than their opponents, or teenagers wearing throwback jerseys of sports teams that went bankrupt decades before they were born, or genuine replica ballparks designed to capture some lost golden innocence (at $9 a beer), "authenticity" has become the new nostalgia. It's more concrete, and it's certainly become more commercial. That there's an obvious conundrum at the heart of the phenomenon -- can something truly be "authentic" when it is created specifically for a burgeoning trade in "authenticity"? -- is beside the point. There's an obvious desire for escape into a less homogenized, more individualized past, where a Cadillac didn't look so much like a Buick and where line drives had corners into which they could dive and rattle around for a spell.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the Ladder District and, ultimately, to the Opera House that will be at its heart. Around the time that the Opera House was built in 1928, the configuration of the streets in the tightly packed neighborhood already looked on a city map very much like a ladder, with Washington and Tremont streets as the long upright sections. However, the area became known as the Ladder District only recently, when a group of young restaurateurs used the name to give a kind of geographic trademark to the area within which they do business. "It really is a figment of somebody's imagination," says one local theater producer.

For its part, the Boston Redevelopment Authority devised an ambitious plan in the 1980s for the entire downtown theater area, extending east of the Common and from the Orpheum Theatre all the way south to the Tremont Theatre. In the middle of this was the Ladder District, and within it were the Paramount and Modern theaters, as well as the Opera House, all of which the BRA saw as fuel for growth in everything from hotels to restaurants to high-end residential developments.

Admittedly rosy BRA estimates pro-ject that, by the end of the development phase, this area will contain 31 hotels providing 8,196 rooms. By the time the whole thing is completed, the area will be home to 12 different performance venues, from the Wang Center to the Opera House. This is not bad for an area that once served as a staging area for peep shows.

"We knew Boston was looking to rejuvenate its center city," says David Anderson, the president of theater management for Clear Channel. "Washington Street had been decaying. When we first looked at the Opera House, Millennium Place was a parking lot and the State Street Bank building was vacant and scary. You could walk through all these corridors of boarded-up retail. It had failed."

"People wouldn't invest down there," explains Harry Collings, the BRA's executive director. "With the Opera House commitment of that $30 to $40 million, it spurred the development of others. It's really gotten us to move with the Modern. The owner was preparing to tear that down and turn it into a parking lot. The catalyst clearly was the Opera House project, and, because of Clear Channel's involvement, it wasn't going to drain money from other nonprofits."

And there seems little doubt that the Opera House is the showpiece of the effort. "The people who go to see shows in that place are going to go for the experience of seeing that house," says the BRA's Susan Elsbree. "There's no other place like it in the country."

"I've been in this business for 25 years, and what most people saw as a wreck, I saw as an opportunity," explains Clear Channel's Anderson. "I mean, that place was built at a cost of four times what most people were building theaters for back then. Instead of a couple of crystal chandeliers, there were a lot of them."

The first time that Steve Marinelli went into the Opera House, he walked through with a flashlight. He'd come to Clear Channel as an art history graduate from Temple University in Philadelphia and, most directly, from a job constructing shopping malls in Texas. At the Opera House, walking through the darkened hallways, rain dripping down on him from the roof, Marinelli felt all of his old college lessons coming to life around him.

"My first impression," Marinelli says, "was that this place had to be done."

He and his colleagues wandered around the hallways, coughing from the accumulated mold. (In fact, the first field supervisor on the job quit for health reasons early in the project.) "We were all in line, single file, just walking around with flashlights," Marinelli recalls. "We had to find our way to the original electrical panels and throw them on." As the bulbs that still worked in the huge crystal chandeliers came to life, Marinelli and his team were bathed in a weird, crepuscular glow.

The Opera House had gone dark in 1991, after Sarah Caldwell's Boston Opera Company finally gave up the financial ghost. But Caldwell had not sold off the place for scrap. "The chandeliers were all still there," says Anderson. "I've been in theaters where there were only tiny pieces of them left up there, because people took them as souvenirs or sold them. It's a tremendous credit to Sarah Caldwell that she never did that."

Instead, there was enough of the original, elaborate construction left beneath the rubble and decay for Marinelli and his artisans to work with. Early on, Marinelli brought in a team of experts to examine the marble and discovered that the great columns had been rolled near Carrara, Italy, and transported whole to Boston. He determined to replace whatever had been marble with marble, and not with a plaster substitute.

"One of the problems I had early on was people telling me that the marble wasn't marble -- that it was polished plaster with paint," Marinelli recalls. "And I was so disheartened by that, because everything else in this building was real, until I brought the marble experts in here, and they went, 'This is Carrara, grade 9 out of 10.' Because the white is white, and usually a lesser Carrara would have a gray vein in it. This has a beige vein in it, top-quality stuff that was milled over there and shipped here. I'm like, 'Thank you very much.' That's all I needed to know. They were just overwhelmed by the quality of the marble."

Elsewhere in the battered hulk of the theater, the plasterers were amazed at the detail on the grotesque heads fashioned high above the orchestra pit. Marinelli replaced bronze with bronze, and he found a way to re-create Lamb's unique glazing formula, which contained burnt sienna pigments to give the glaze a kind of aged, burnished look. Marinelli and his team did that by analyzing drip patterns under a microscope. (The drip patterns were found at the very top of the walls, leading the restorers to conclude that the less-competent artisans had been sent to work up high.) They even dug out the original wall fabrics and carpeting and managed to re-create them despite the fact that the looms had been melted down into weaponry during World War II. The more the team worked to bring out what Lamb had done, the more impressed it was with what he'd accomplished.

"Look, the acoustics in this place are magnificent," says Anderson. "And these guys built the place long before computer technology or the developments we've seen in the science of acoustics. They developed a science on their own that I'm not sure our brilliant guys have figured out yet. These guys knew what they were doing."

"My take on things was that this was called a vaudeville palace because it actually was built to be a palace," says Terry Brackenbury, EverGreene's head artisan on the Opera House project. "It represented the moment when vaudeville houses changed from just being vaudeville houses to being built like palaces for people who wouldn't ever get to Europe to see a real palace, so they leaned much more toward fantasy."

"It had," says architect Martinez, "such a high level of completeness to it in so many different places -- in the men's lounges, in the lounges in the basement. You could walk through this thing endlessly, like a baroque palace." And the first time that Marinelli took a wrecking ball to the backstage wall, the ball bounced away, harmlessly. The place was built as a memorial, permanent and authentic as a mausoleum.

Back in '28, while building his masterpiece, Thomas Lamb hired two workmen named Barry Deady and Phil Welsh, and contemporary research has shown that Deady and Welsh did not get along. In fact, Deady suggested that Welsh perform certain anatomical impossibilities, and, in keeping with the formalities of the day, Deady put it in writing -- namely, scrawled on a slab of wall underneath the seating area in an old dressing room. Workmen uncovered this old grudge only a few months back. Barry Deady's dislike, apparently, was an undying one.

"What do you think?" Steve Marinelli jokes. "Should we leave it there? I mean, it is part of the history of the place."

There's always been entertainment in the area, and most often, that entertainment has been anything but genteel. Back in the 1700s, the block on the west side of Washington Street drew people into the Lamb Tavern and the Lion Tavern, adjoining saloons. By the middle of the next century, however, the Lamb had been turned into a hotel, while the Lion was converted into a playhouse in 1836 under the auspices of the New York Zoological Institute. The Lion provided Boston with the city's first regular venue for indoor equestrian performances. The building went through several subsequent incarnations. It was briefly a lecture hall before becoming a theater again at the end of 1839. It was variously called the Melodeon, the New Melodeon, the Melodeon (again), and the Gaiety.

In 1881, the Gaiety was thoroughly remodeled and reopened as the Bijou, the first American theater to be lit entirely with electricity. The people who gathered to see a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe on opening night apparently were equally amazed by the elaborate Egyptian chandelier that hung over the main staircase. Four years later, a famous theatrical team leased the Bijou in order to put on five daily performances of The Mikado -- at a dime a seat -- and the Bijou became a true destination for the first time in its history, beginning a process that would take one city block from opulence to ruin and back again, all because of the genius of one man who'd virtually invented the uniquely American form of theater called vaudeville.

B. F. Keith was born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, and by the time he was 18, he'd run away from the farm to join the circus. Specifically, he went to New York, where he first worked amid the grotesques and wonders at Bunnell's Museum. He went on to work for P. T. Barnum and for Adam Forepaugh's circus. He then struck out on his own, taking smaller shows on the road and bankrupting himself three times in the process.

In 1883, Keith opened the Gaiety Theatre and Musee on Boston's Washington Street on the spot where the Lamb Tavern once had stood. A year later, after his original partner bailed out on the enterprise, Keith hooked up with E. F. Albee, a shipmaker's son from Maine whom he'd met when they'd both worked for Barnum. Over the next several decades, the two reinvented the American theater.

Vaudeville long had been the province of ribald variety shows. Keith and Albee opened up vaudeville theaters around the country and insisted that the shows be aimed at a broader and less coarse clientele. (Some historians point to Keith's wife, a pious Catholic named Mary Branley, as the force behind Keith's attempts to clean up vaudeville, and Albee apparently was something of a fanatic on the subject of dirt and grime.) In addition, Keith and Albee brought an element of professionalism to theater management that had been woefully lacking up to that point, improving everything from salaries to backstage amenities.

The partnership eventually became the Clear Channel of its day, controlling a chain of 500 theaters around the country and virtually the entire American vaudeville circuit. If you wanted a career on the stage, you likely had it on a stage belonging to B. F. Keith. In 1893, The Four Cohans -- including the young George M. -- made their Manhattan debut in one of Keith's theaters. Seven years later, Keith personally signed a promising new comedian named W. C. Fields. In Boston, Keith's influence was so pronounced that lower Washington Street once boasted 15 operating theaters with 20,000 seats among them for everything from the song stylings of Jenny Lind to the lubricious delights of the burlesque houses to the novelty of rudimentary motion pictures.

In 1894, Keith and Albee spent $600,000 on the flagship theater in their chain -- B. F. Keith's New Theatre, which they built behind the Bijou in Boston. Everything about the place was state of the art, and the most notable thing about it was the care that was taken in accommodating the public. The whole theater was so clean that the public was allowed to tour the generator room and the mechanical room. The generators were nickel-plated and shone under the gleaming brass light standards. The men working in these technical areas wore spotless white uniforms and propped their equipment on gilt-and-onyx tables.

On March 26, 1914, B. F. Keith died. His only son died four years later in the great influenza epidemic. Albee eventually fell heir to most of Keith's assets. Albee saw his theatrical company through several mergers over the next decade and his theaters through the transition from vaudeville to motion pictures.

By 1928, Albee was said to be worth $25 million, a fortune he'd accumulated at least in part by selling his stock in what had become known as the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters to a rising young businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy, who'd evinced a sweet tooth for both theaters and for the actresses who worked in them. However, Albee was 70 years old, and he wanted in his waning years to pay tribute to his late partner. With Kennedy's help, Albee built the most extravagant theater he could as a lasting memorial to his partner, one that would make the old B. F. Keith theater, where the gearboxes shone like jewels, look like the tawdriest of burlesque parlors.

To that end, they hired Thomas Lamb, a 54-year-old Scot who ultimately would build more than 300 theaters around the world. Albee spent $5 million on the project, and Lamb gave him his money's worth. He built a terra-cotta beaux-arts facade facing Washington Street, and he crammed the interior of the theater with as much exotic ambience as he could find. There were elements of the Arabian Nights and the Italian Renaissance. There were fireplaces in Italian marble and mirrored French doors and huge blown-glass chandeliers and everything else that the people working there today are trying to dig out of the past.

"Albee told Lamb the sky was the limit," says Gary Martinez. "What architect wouldn't love that?"

The B. F. Keith Memorial Theatre opened on October 29, 1928. James Michael Curley, for the moment the former mayor of Boston, was the master of ceremonies, and he compared the friendship of Keith and Albee to that of Damon and Pythias, and he was heckled when forced to introduce Kennedy, the son-in-law of John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Curley's hated archrival in Boston's politics.

The Keith Memorial ran combined bills of live vaudeville and movies for only one year; the live performances were discontinued in September 1929, but there was a huge show put together in 1935 as part of a monthlong tribute to B. F. Keith. Thirty years later, the building was sold to the Sack Theatre chain, which refurbished it and opened it as a movie theater called the Savoy. The neighborhood was still rowdy; on May 6, 1967, a crowd that had attended a 4 a.m. showing of the James Bond spoof Casino Royale at the Savoy started a riot that police said involved as many as 15,000 people. The Keith Memorial became the Opera House in 1978, when the Opera Company of Boston moved in and, a year later, took ownership of the property and changed the theater's name.

So it's a tangled, cluttered history, full of serendipity and accident. There is the Lamb Tavern and Thomas Lamb, the architect, there is the Lion Tavern and The Lion King, all jumbled together on the same long historical stage. But of all the characters in the history of the Opera House, B. F. Keith is the most compelling. After all, it was in his memory that Edward Albee enlisted Lamb to build a palace for a theater, and it is in Lamb's name -- and, thus, in Keith's spirit -- that Steve Marinelli and Yohannes Aynalem and all the other artisans have come to the old place to make it new again, to bring an old heart into a new neighborhood.

"This was Albee's attempt to pay homage to his partner," Marinelli explains. "Through that, you find the history of Keith, how he took the old Barnum act and created vaudeville with it, which is to say, mass entertainment. If you want to get cosmic, I can get cosmic with Lamb, because he had a psychology of this building which I've reviewed. I mean, this project is not heir to the high culture. It's always been geared to the ordinary citizen of Boston, from vaudeville to Tin Pan Alley shows to movies. So Lamb's goal was that his theaters were built for the common people, the people who couldn't make the grand tour of Europe, so he brought pieces here for them, so they could feel they're in Paris or in Italy. Lamb built these palaces for ordinary people."

Of course, no matter how faithful the restoration is, it invariably will involve conflicts of the most modern variety. At first, there was some ominous talk in the city's theater community about the sudden appearance of Clear Channel on the scene. The entertainment giant's reputation among smaller local operations -- particularly as regards its radio stations -- is that of a voracious corporate carnivore. However, after a while, the theater community seemed to make peace with the company's presence on the grounds that, by restoring places like the Opera House, the number of local venues for live theater was growing, a process that had begun in the original Theater District with such efforts as the restoration of the Emerson Majestic Theatre. However, in January, when Clear Channel confirmed that it was quietly shopping around to sell the naming rights to the Opera House, more than a few people in the preservationist community held their breath, dreading the advent of the Gillette Opera or some such unwieldy moniker that might indicate the Big Bang of a new commercialized universe around Lamb's old pile.

"Depending on who you talk to and what field they happen to be in, Clear Channel is either a godsend or the devil itself," says Spiro Veloudos, the artistic director of the nearby Lyric Stage Company of Boston. "In terms of their theaters in other cities, they've been a godsend. They've given consistent management to their theaters, which is a lot better than the absentee management a lot of places had a number of years ago."

Beyond that, the restoration of the Opera House was held up for more than a year in a legal dispute with neighborhood residents. Any restoration of the building for the purposes of staging modern productions always had to involve expanding the stage and the backstage area. (The stage as designed by Lamb was built not with lavish Disney musical productions in mind but, rather, to accommodate trained seals and comedians.) Clear Channel's original design proposed expanding the stage by shutting down Mason Street. This angered local residents, especially those in Tremont on the Common, a luxury condominium building, who argued that closing the street would cut off easy access for deliveries and emergency vehicles.

In 2002, Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford ruled in favor of Clear Channel's plan. A compromise was worked out that allowed Mason Street to stay open, and the restoration commenced shortly thereafter.

"We were never opposed to the Opera House," explains Elena Massarotti, chairwoman of Tremont on the Common's board of trustees. "It's a wonderful thing for the neighborhood. We just couldn't live with the expansion of the stage."

Even now, months before it will open, the Opera House already has had an impact. Tickets for The Lion King have sold briskly, and at the beginning of February, Clear Channel struck a deal with Boston Ballet to have the annual production of The Nutcracker staged at the Opera House beginning in 2005. Ironically, officials at the Wang Center had claimed that competition from new spaces like the Opera House was forcing it to replace The Nutcracker with the more profitable Christmas show from Radio City Music Hall in New York.

Inside Thomas Lamb's old masterpiece, up the great marble staircase that is beginning to sparkle with a fresh, deep luster, the clatter of power tools drowns out all the ambient commercial white noise from the neighborhood. The past is beginning to appear again as the present, and the authentic is reborn as a whole new thing, with marble replacing marble, and bronze shining now where bronze once shone before, and above it all, the lost angels, with all their lost trumpets, calling here again.

Nothing is left to chance. Follow a hallway into what once was a men's smoking lounge, and, close by a huge marble fireplace, there's a staircase that rises up into a blank wall. This staircase once led to a door, and the door reportedly led into a brothel in an adjoining building, where male theatergoers could retire for a bit of entre'acte entre nous.

"You know," says Gary Martinez, "only speaking in the spirit of restoration, of course, but I had a real temptation to do something with that."

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff.