LED Marquees Steal the Spotlight

When it come to live theater, the show starts long before the first act. From dazzling marquees to blockbuster-sized LED screens, theaters have always rolled out the red carpet outside their doors. Today, it’s dynamic digital displays stealing the scene, setting the mood, and pulling audiences in before the curtain ever rises.

Palace Theater marquee

One theater marquee with endless competition in the attention market is the new one at the famed Palace Theater in Times Square. Among the many renovations for this historic theater and the overall TSX Broadway development—they lifted the entire theater 30 feet!—was an upgraded LED marquee for the 47th Street. The 90-foot-long marquee is almost nine feet tall and wraps two corners for maximum viewing in the Times Square bowtie.

The Palace Theater enhancements—including that lift!—made it to primetime TV on CBS! Watch this segment on America ByDesign: Architecture.

From Broadway to Hollywood, we’ve provided LED marquees and façade-enhancing digital signage that draw in theater patrons, advertise shows, and provide advertising revenue for historic playhouses and cinemas. Enjoy a few examples of LED in the spotlight. 

LED theater marquee

Vogue Theatre

Vogue’s three-piece LED marquee provides a digital facelift to a storied piece of Hollywood history, attracting visitors and opening new revenue streams for the museum inside. The storied film venue’s LED marquee is comprised of three sections: two faces that measure 6’4” x 18’11” (288 x 864 pixels) and a smaller section measuring 4’9” x 12’7” (216 x 576).

Coca Cola Roxy LED marquee

The coca-cola roxy

The Coca-Cola Roxy, a live entertainment venue at The Battery Atlanta, has a multi-faced LED marquee that creates a near 180-degree viewing area. The display, which processes nearly 900,000 pixels, is mounted in three sections above the venue’s entrance and measures approximately 6′ tall x 66’6″ wide (288 x 3,072)

SNA Emerson Colonial Theatre 1.2

EMERSON COLONIAL THEATRE

First-of-its-kind display near in Boston employs a 4 mm pixel pitch with a custom hinge-and-lock cabinet for improved maintenance access. The project includes a display on each face of the 3-sided marquee. The largest and most prominent of the screens is the front face, which is approximately 2’6” high by 17’6” wide and looks out directly over Boston Common.

SNA Playhouse Square 1

PLAYHOUSE SQUARE

Playhouse Square in Cleveland, Ohio, includes six LED displays at the exterior entrances of three adjacent historic theaters: Ohio Theatre, State Theatre, and Hanna Theatre.

James Earl Jones Theatre LED screen

JAMES EARL JONES THEATRE

SNA Displays manufactured the LED screen on the building’s refurbished façade using its 8 mm pixel pitch EMPIRE™ Exterior line of video display products. Each face is 15’9″ high by 8’5″ wide (600 x 320 pixels) and protrudes from the building’s façade in a triangle shape with a 69-degree angle.

SNA-Steppenwolf Theater-Gallery-3

STEPPENWOLF THEATRE

The pair of square, façade-mounted blade signs on either side of the box office at this Chicago theater sport a tight 3.9 mm pixel pitch. The twin LED displays each measure 6’7″ by 6’7″ (512 x 512) and process more than 524,000 pixels combined.

For more LED display projects, visit our portfolio, or enjoy more content from Limelight: The SNA Blog. Big ideas, big experiences, big impacts. We Build Big.

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