The Lego theatre building

This is the Grand Theatre building, built from red brick with a white facade, in a somewhat richer version of the mid-fifties deco style found in the 1955 Lego Byggebog (see earlier posts). The grand entrance is flanked by a box office on each side, topped by a balcony for the patrons from the best first floor seats and two more levels for the more popular seats higher up.

The outer wings have room for other businesses. On the left is a branch of a well-known chain of pastry shops in my native The Hague. At the right is the Ristorante del Teatro, where an Italian restaurant was a fashionable and still quite exotic novelty around 1960.

All the red bricks are mostly cellulose acetate, which was a nice chance to make use of a lot of those. They're somewhat warped, but still good enough to make a solid wall with. The white parts and windows are ABS plastic for reasons of strength and availability. With the exception of the printed beams which are period cellulose acetate. 

The 'Grand Theater' and 'Koek Banket' beams were for the Dutch market, where 'Koek Banket' has an erroneous grocer's apostrophe instead of an ampersand. Both words have no exact equivalent in English - 'Koek' (pr "cook") is any larger cake or similar baked good that's sliced or cut up into portions (in fact 'cookies' is the diminutive of 'koek'), whereas 'Banket' (pr "bahngKET") is a collective word for pastry, pies and smaller glazed cakes etc next to its other meaning of banquet. The 'Ristorante' and 'Teatro' beams were of course for the Italian market, and specially imported to use for this restaurant.

The rear of the block is just a blank wall, with some gaps in it due to the bricks having warped. But I was pleasantly surprised I could still build a wall out of them, and this saved me a lot of other more useful bricks.

As with any of the larger buildings, what I've built is just a facade. A real theatre building would easily be as deep as it's wide or even more and probably a lot wider to begin with as well.  But well, that's where fantasy comes in, also in Lego sets in the shops today.