ok, quick little theater interior design history lesson from someone that does this kind of stuff for a living:
Historically theater interiors were big and grand not just to show wealth or style, but to heighten the senses of the audience before the production began. The idea was that to full appreciate the opera or symphony or whatever you were seeing you needed your senses acclimated to a higher level of taste by an interior that intricate and awe inspiring. You would spend the time before the production started visually investigating the way the crystal chandelier refracted light and discovering golden cherubs intertwined with plaster vines and ceiling that replicated perfect skies. The belief was that this would make you enjoy the production more than a blank space. They used reds and golds quite often because while lush, beautiful, and rich, once the houselights were turned off the dark reds pulled back and the gold stopped shimmering letting you focus on the stage instead.
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Palais Garnier, Paris
This notion of "heightening the senses" with the theater's interior transformed slightly with the advent of electric lights and modernism. Awe was no longer achieved through detail and sumptuousness, it was instead conveyed through grand shape, bold gesture, and technical prowess. The chandeliers rising before a show at Lincoln Center's Metropolitan Opera House, the imbedded lights and sweeping curves in Radio City Music Hall, The folding planes of the Sydney opera house interior. These shapes and details were also used to create spaces that imbued awe and wonder into patrons just in new, clean, modern ways, banishing the old stuffy ways modernism was all about getting rid of.
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Radio City Music Hall, New York
The idea of a "black box" or "flexible stage" theaters came about in the 1920s or so for small, avant-garde theater in Germany. Slowly its ideas of stripping the space bare to allow for the performance to exist on its own bled into the design of larger proscenium style spaces. In my opinion, the peak of this stripping back of detail to let the work speak is the Olivier at the National Theatre. No longer worried about heightening the senses through gold molding or technical prowess, the architects instead tried to heighten the relationship of the audience to the stage. Playing with stage shapes, sightlines, acoustics, and the distance from the Point of Command on stage to each individual audience member. The awe from these spaces was no longer just visual but instead about how the audience members' body and senses related to the performance hall in full.
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Olivier Theatre, National Theater, London
The renderings of the interior for this MGM Music hall are tragically dull. I can get not wanting the first or second type of design I've listed here, but for a theater that is going to be one of the gems interims of size in Boston theaters this is not at all what we should be designing its interior like. The flat proscenium and unadorned walls are saying "we want detail but cant be bothers with actually giving you it". The awe obviously does not come from relationships to the stage, as just looking at the rendering you can see how horrible the side seats will be near the stage and the people crammed on a flat floor under a low balcony that will be unable to see large parts of the stage. I think what thy are doing is trying to make the space as transformable as possible but by trying to make it ok for hosting a bunch of various things you are not giving it the opportunity to be great any any one. Give me something to look at before the show starts or a way to connect with the act on the stage beyond them just yelling "How's Boston doing tonight!" I'd suggest some interesting acoustic baffling, a better design for that proscenium, an intricate main curtain, or a grand central lighting fixture/speaker array. Something that can give the room a sense of place and something to talk about while waiting for the band to start.
TL;DR We design theater interiors nicely so that you feel connected to the performance. MGM Music hall is not doing that.
