Fox Lion

Last Saturday, Anne and I went to the Fabulous Fox Theater to see the touring Broadway show, ‘The Lion King’. The Fox on north Grand is the heart of the Saint Louis theater district. This theater originally opened in 1929. It is one of five large movie palaces that the Fox Film Corporation built in the 1920s. The Fox closed in the late seventies and reopened in 1982 after extensive renovations. According to Wiki:

The Fox was designed by an architect specializing in theaters, C. Howard Crane, in an eclectic blend of Asian decorative motifs sometimes called Siamese Byzantine. The interior is the architectural twin of another Fox Theatre built in Detroit in 1928. Reporters in 1929 described the Fox Theatres in St. Louis and Detroit as “awe-inspiringly fashioned after Hindoo [sic] Mosques of Old India, bewildering in their richness and dazzling in their appointments … striking a note that reverberates around the architectural and theatrical worlds.” William Fox nicknamed the style the “Eve Leo Style” in tribute to his wife, who decorated the interior with furnishings, paintings and sculpture she had bought on her trips overseas.

The Fabulous Fox Theater itself is half the show on any performance that occurs there. Its architecture is a bizarre cacophony of clashing cultural styles and motifs. Somehow though the Fox pulls off of this brazen concoction.