Opening Pandora's Box

Despite the nightly debauchery and alleged drug-taking at Simon Hammersteain's theatrical dinner club, the Box has lost its A-list cachet. So why is it still in business, asks Joshua David Stein

On a recent Monday, rounding half past one in the morning, Simon Hammerstein sits at a booth at his nightclub The Box, grinning like a Cheshire cat behind his bushy black beard. He is wearing a tuxedo though the bowtie has vanished hours ago. About him, the sea of patrons includes about a hundred assorted models and bankers. Some of them have paid up to $2000 for their table. On stage, the show is building to its climax. The emcee is Raven O, aperfectly sculpted, ever-topless ex-Cirque de Soleil He sings, he dances, he flirts, he cajoles, he yells, he strips completely naked. He shakes his moneymaker. He throws a bag of prop cocaine around and screams, “Let’s do drugs. Let’s f**k!”

An impossibly skinny dancer, dressed like a Olivia Newton John circa “Let’s Get Physical” suddenly whips off her shorts and t-shirt. She isn’t wearing any underwear. With a flick of her hair, she’s upside down in a handstand, legs opening and closing, allegro vivace to the music. The crowd doesn’t know where to look, but they can’t look away. Jaws drop. Champagne fizzes.

While The Box’s twice-nightly show is as filthy, creative and shocking as when the club first opened as a “dinner theater” venue in late December 2006, the patrons are a far cry from what Simon and his backers envisioned when they first opened. Simon along with co-owners Richard Kimmel and Randy Wiener wanted to recreate the debased excess of 1920s Berlin, where the wealthy and the artistic meet, where nothing is prohibited and where everyone and everything is a part of the show. Whether they realize it or not. The Box opened with an A-list cast.
Chanel and Louis Vuitton hosted parties before the Box was even open. When the Box first opened Uma Thurman threw a birthday party for her then-boyfriend Andre Balazs there. On another night, Sean Penn made an appearance, and Lindsay Lohan could be often be seen expertly twirling around the stripper pole. (Remember “I Know Who Killed Me”?) “Cameron Diaz, Jay-Z, Puff Daddy, any one who was coming through New York would stop at The Box,” recalls Greg Seider, who was then the club’s mixologist.. Celebrities, including Jude Law, Josh Lucas and Rachel Weisz, supposedly sit on its [creative] board. “This could be the hottest club in New York,” Josh, who is also an investor, said in an interview at the time. “But if that’s all it is, then it’s a failure. If [Simon] turns it into a club, then I’m going to kick his ass.” And, in explaining his vision, Simon told a reporter: “I wanted a mix room, not a 27th Street room where it was all bankers and models.”

But barely into Year Two of the Box, bankers, models, and corporations are precisely whatis keeping The Box open. JC Penney recently hired the place for an event introducing their new line of “trendy merchandise.” JP Morgan’s great-granddaughter celebrated her 25th birthday there. The crowd for the dinner show, on Friday and Saturday at seven, says Raven O, was a ”room of old Jews in tuxedoes,” “Celebrity sightings have gone down and there’s been a change in the feeling of the crowd,” says Page Six reporter, Corynne Steindler “It used to be young, gorgeous and arty. It was a place A club for for creative hipsters. Now, anybody with money for a table can get in.”

The Box is Simon Hammerstein’s ultimate theatrical vision. Handpicked by him and directed by Richard (who has worked with the seminal Wooster Group), the acts are infused with enough art not to be pure smut and enough smut not to be boring. But if Richard’s resume is impressive, Simon’s credentials are genetic. His great-grandfather is Oscar Hammerstein, the German immigrant who first brought opera to America and is the namesake of the Hammerstein Ballroom. Oscar’s grandson, Oscar II, is the Hammerstein half of the musicals duo Rogers and Hammerstein. Oscar II begat James Hammerstein, a “tall and unfairly handsome” producer of everything from Pinter’s Tea Party to Into the Woods of whom was born Simon, originally of Soho, London and, most recently, the Lower East Side. Simon’s actress mother, Dena Sherman, has played everything from Girl Outside Secondhand Shop (Uncredited) in A Hard Days Night to, at age 52, a prostitute in the 1997 film Bent.
With such a weighty mantle, Simon’s relationship to his name and his family has always been tense. In an interview with New York magazine last year, Simon said that at age 16 he ran way from an academy upstate, wrote his parents a ‘declaration of independence’ and called a cab to take him to Manhattan. Once here, Simon set his pedigreed feet in the sawdust and sandbag backstages of New York City theaters. He interned at the Soho Rep. In 2004 he directed the Off Broadway musical The Passion of George W. Bush. Yet he prefers the sexy, dirty, moneyed world that a night in the theater doesn’t offer.

In 2005 Simon and Richard, partnered with Serge Becker the owner of trendy Soho restaurant La Esquina, Randy Weiner, of Donkey Show fame, and Cordell Lochin, the consummate party promoter. They had a horde of 30 investors—including actors Josh Lucas and Jude Law—and they chose an abandoned sign company to stage their “production.” They signed a 15-year lease on the 5000 sq foot, two story building on a still seedy strip of Chrystie. The foresaw the Box as embodying a modern day Weimar cabaret. The Box was Simon’s first foray into the nightclub business and it showed. Recalls one, present at many planning meetings: “There was no hierarchy. Simon and Richard would sit around a table and throw around crazy ideas.” Midgets in glass houses, a rotating stable of international performers, a den of sex, a dose of drugs, a nightly show. Tout est possible!

When they began the sixteen-month renovation process, the atmosphere within the space was electric and at times chaotic. Hammerstein took long road trips with Hecho Inc. designer and investor, John Cole. “We’d buy anything that was even close to what we wanted,” recalls Cole: Headboards in Staten Island, chandeliers from Michigan, vintage wallpaper from the 1920’s, light fixtures from the subway. They built a mezzanine and painstakingly recreated a 1920s speakeasy-cum-cabaret club. According to one source familiar with the property, the team spent three million dollars alone in renovating the space. Budget was of no concern.

There’s no show in New York City, or indeed the world, that comes close to what’s one sees at The Box. Like some sort of Magellan of the obscene, Hammerstein has unearthed an array of beautiful women willing to do filthy seemingly physically impossible things very well. He presides over a panoply of magicians, strongmen, strippers, hoofers, singers, dancers and gorilla-suited tumblers that would make PT Barnum proud. The derangement of the senses one senses on stage and in booths could only be brought to life by an artiste, bent on making his vision a reality. Everyone seems to have a story about the debased revelry that saw on Chrysie street: rampant fellatio, fully stocked drug dealers roaming around like illegal Rite-Aids, hookers on call, tables full of cocaine, sex in the booths, a rabbi who performed unspeakable acts with a bottle of Manishevitz.

From the moment The Box opened, it became next to impossible to separate truth and myth. Rumors swarmed like clouds of moths attracted by the celebrities who flowed endlessly through the place. The entire layout of The Box is meant to preserve opacity, not only from the outside world but even from those cool enough to get inside. The downstairs bar, the booths, the divans, the upstairs back room, the VIP mezzanine, each come with their own cluster of privacy and insinuations of cachet. In the upstairs VIP section where tables are concealed by heavy brocaded curtains, however, one can still snatch glimpses. Hikari Yokoyama, an ornately beautiful curator who worked briefly at The Box when it first opened (she, along with Nina Clemente, the painter Francesco’s daughter, dressed the waitresses) recalls peeking in and seeing “tables of fully naked girls.” She adds, “I’ve definitely seen a lot of drugs.” Empty dime bags with cocaine residue litter the tile floors of the bathrooms. As one recent patron observed: “If you run your finger along the porcelain toilet tops you’ll leave a trail in the snow.”

But multiple sources say that Simon's apartment--just two doors down on Chrystie--is the ultimate party den. It was from there, according to one tale, that Simon descended, naked save for a poorly fastened bathrobe. He lay down on the bar and began to imperiously order around the cocktail waitresses. One reveler swears he saw half-naked performers go straight from the bathroom to Simon’s apartment. “That’s where he takes people to go do drugs. That’s where it really gets crazy,” she said.

To keep The Box viable, Hammerstein and Kimmel rely on these stories of excess to preserve its reputation as a hyperbolic den of sex and drugs. According to Richard Kimmel, the Rick Moranis look-a-like co-owner “It’s theatre from the door to the alley. Getting in, the show – it’s all part of the theatrical experience. Not to get too meta, but it’s also what you hear about The Box in tabloids. It’s total theatre; It’s paratheatre.” He namedrops Jerzy Grotowski, the great Polish avant garde theatre director. In other words, ambiguity is key. Perhaps that’s one reason Simon refused to be interviewed for this story and that, after speaking with Mr. Kimmel and Raven O, Bryan McCalister, a PR flak for the Box threatened to portray this reporter as drunk and dishonest if I quoted them.

To the NYPD, not known for their appreciation of either mid-century avant garde Polish dramaturgy nor legal ambiguity, the theatre of felony looks a lot like an actual felony. Though there hasn’t been a raid since last year, in August 2007, the Department of Health and the New York City Police department raided the club. According to eyewitnesses, patrons were searched. No arrests were made that night. Cameron Diaz, Jay-Z and Cuba Gooding Jr. were among the few who were able to flee during the "classic shutdown," doormen and security men told the New York Post at that time. Simon claims it was a Department of Health misunderstanding. A rep for the club told reporters: "The marshals came in citing the venue for a misprint on the food-handling permit – a clerical error that was overlooked but has since been corrected.” The DOH, however, cited at least 92 violations. Simon’s vision of hedonistic excess comes into friction with the real world in more traumatic ways as well. In late 2007, two inebriated females patrons were sexually assaulted in separate incidents after leaving the venue.

Simon’s devotion to excess comes with a price. According to one insider, Simon’s eight weekly shows cost him “between $20,000-$30,000 per week and Simon is hemorrhaging money.” In order to recoup some of the expenses, Simon’s charging a minimum of $600 per table downstairs and $900 on the mezzanine. On weekend nights, when tables are at high demand, they can skyrocket to $2,000 each. “It’s like airline seating,” laughs Raven O. Hammerstein—like any great showman--is savvy enough to know that what brings money is sex and drugs. He—and perhaps even moreso his many investors looking for a return—know that no one spends money like bankers and corporate clients. With an angry community board (The Box has been the cause of “hundreds of 311 calls”), a history of violence and drug use, one wonders how long the Box can last. One nightlife insider says, “I don’t see it being around in 12 months.” Corynne Stiendler agrees: “If it’s still around next summer, I’ll be surprised.”

“Twenty five minutes to places,” says a stagehand as he sticks his head into Raven O’s basement dressing room. And Raven, we’re doing Twincest in the late show.” Raven shakes his head. “Twincest should go earlier. It’s gets people excited.” The stagehand disappears. Richard Kimmel pops in. “No, no man. Twincest should go last,” he says, taking a bite of a hors d’oeuvre. “It makes people feel good, go home and f**k.” The two look contemplatively at the set list, a long document hanging from a clipboard on the wall. Simon is gone, off to London to try to drum up interest in opening a Box there. Twenty five minutes later, when Raven O appears back on stage, he is shirtless, tattooed and wearing tight leather trousers. He introduces identical sisters from Portland called the Porcelain Twinz who will perform “Twincest,” an act involving two George Bush masks with two red sequined gas masks under them, American flag boxing gloves, humping, Hitler salutes, and of course a lot of nudity. There are a few uncertain cheers; many more gasps. The air is as tense as any director could wish. In the back of the room, people are pushing and shoving, trying to glimpse the action. A schlubby woman strains for a glimpse over the shoulders of the models in front of her. She turns to her husband and spits, “I’m being jostled. Protect me!” If they feel good and are going home to f**k, they’re hiding it very well. Then again, according to Simon and Richard, they’re just another pair of actors in the show too. Just like the angry cluster of wannabe patrons arguing with the doorman in the rain outside, the models packed like cigarettes at the bar, the drunk corporate goons dropping thousand of dollars on a table, the rumors of drugs, the drugs, the rumors of sex, the sex; it’s all part of the theatrical experience. Perhaps that’s one reason Simon is trying to pack up his Box of tricks and ship the club abroad. He knows that every show eventually has to end.