In New York, the production has the cast, including Bobby Cannavale as the brawny ship stoker Yank, perform on a turntable that circles the audience like a conveyor belt.

“The Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory — completed in 1881 by the then-brand-new dream team of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler and Samuel Colman — may be as close as any room in New York City comes to such beyond-words fantasia. Depending on which inch you’re looking at, it’s Islamic, Chinese, Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Persian or an indefinable mélange of them all, on which no expense was spared. It’s never been a secret (the year it opened, this newspaper declared it “undoubtedly the most magnificent apartment of the kind in this country”), but for decades its glories have been concealed beneath bad repairs, inadequate lighting, brown paint and a patina of Gilded Age cigar smoke.”

“The New York City cultural landscape is mapped by the surnames of great patronage: Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Frick, Cooper Hewitt and, more recently, Geffen, Koch and Bloomberg. Now the name of another donor seems likely to enter the lexicon: Wade Thompson. Mr. Thompson, who died in 2009, made his money by reviving the Airstream brand of shiny aluminum trailers, and in the 1990s, he began devoting a sizable amount of his fortune to reviving the grand but crumbling Park Avenue Armory, at 66th Street, which has transformed itself into a hangar-size stage for art, music and performance. The Thompson Family Foundation, which Mr. Thompson began in the late 1980s, has decided to add to the largess and is giving the armory $65 million, which will be used to create an endowment for arts programming and educational initiatives.”

​“Pierre Audi is a serious multitasker. He has led the Dutch National Opera since 1988 while also serving as artistic director of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam from 2004 until 2014. Somehow he found time to work as a critically acclaimed director, after founding London’s avant-garde Almeida Theater. Now he’s taken on yet another major position: artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, a young institution with an ambitious reach.”

The blue-blooded Park Avenue Armory has announced the next stage of its modernization. The architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron will restore the building’s opulent Veterans Room, which has one of the few surviving interiors designed by Louis C. Tiffany and Company, the firm identified with the American Aesthetic Movement, led by Louis Comfort Tiffany, working with Samuel Colman, Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler and Stanford White. The work, which began in January, is part of a $200 million renovation of the landmark, and it follows the 2013 restoration of its Board of Officers Room.

Over the last few years, Culture Shed, the visual- and performing-arts institution planned for the Far West Side of Manhattan, has been nurtured by prominent designers (Elizabeth Diller and David Rockwell); substantial city support ($75 million); and influential advocates (former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his deputy, Daniel L. Doctoroff). Hanging over the project was always a question: Who is going to run it? Now there is an answer: Alex Poots has been named artistic director and chief executive.

When the ambitious refurbishing of the landmark Park Avenue Armory is complete, New York will have an alternative arts center unlike any in the world: a national treasure that carefully weaves together historical and new design while encompassing industrial austerity and Belle Époque excess.