NEW YORK (AP) - A once gilded Brooklyn movie palace that's been crumbling for decades, with pigeons infesting its stage, is back - again a glittering gem from the 1920s.

 

Diana Ross headlines Tuesday's opening night at the 3,200-seat Kings Theatre in the Flatbush neighborhood where a teenage Barbra Streisand spent afternoons enjoying double-features.

After a two-year, $95 million renovation, every detail from its jazz age 1929 incarnation has come to life amid computerized sound and LED lighting. The theater that first opened weeks before the Wall Street crash is now the largest in New York's biggest borough.

"We don't want to make it look brand new; its character, its patina, is the glow and the warmth and the burnishing of the gold- and the copper-leaf, of the beautiful light fixtures, the seats, the carpet and the fabric - it all blends together so perfectly," says David Anderson, president and CEO of the Houston, Texas-based ACE Theatrical Group selected to restore and operate the city-owned property.

"And yet," he added, "if we can't make it be a piece of successful commerce, we've wasted our time."

In the next few months, programs will feature entertainers from Gladys Knight and Crosby, Stills & Nash to Sarah McLachlan - the first of about 200 live annual events being planned.

Gone are the pigeons that left years of droppings inches deep in a space that also served as a refuge for homeless New Yorkers. Balconies that had collapsed onto water- and mold-soaked floors are up again, complete with new red velvet seating.