Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

The best test of a New Yorker's street cred is how many generations they can go back in any given establishment's history. With bars and nightclubs changing hands with the frequency of a speed dating rotation, it can be disorienting. What is now called Z used to be called Y after it was X. And so I headed to The Box, the latest venue to hit the Lower East Side (NYC's Shoreditch). Both to hear a friend DJ and to get my alphabet straight.

Oh, but did I mention it’s 'dinner theatre'? “Please don’t call it a nightclub. It’s dinner theatre for a younger generation,” begs the London-born, New York-bred theater director, Simon Hammerstein (of one of Amerca's most famous theatre-owning families) who I chatted to over a neuteured purple squirrel the other night. The idea for The Box was born, Hammerstein said, when he was directing late-night theater and “got tired of going across the street to get drunk with the audience." He calls it “submersion theater" (take that Hoxton hipsters).

The space is located in a 70-year-old, two-story, 5,000-square-foot converted sign factory. Most of the materials including the lighting, bars, wallpaper, and marble fireplaces are salvaged antiques from the 1920s, which create a wacky patchwork that feels part theater, part brothel, and part speakeasy.

The actors Jude Law and Rachel Weisz sit on the board of the opera house-cum-concert saloon. The entertainment line-up for the coming weeks is eccentric: Thai fighters one night and opera singers in Mexican wrestling masks the next. The signs of success could hardly be clearer.

Go there:
The Box
189 Chrystie Street, NYC
(212) 674-7113

Back in London tomorrow, BA permitting.