To these discussions about relative price scales at the Roxy and other theaters, I’d like to add that NYC’s best value in the late ‘50s-early '60s was the day-of-performance standing-room sale for live performances, which was as cheap as or cheaper than most first-run films. Matinees cost $1.50 and evening performances cost $2.00 for a spot at the rear of the orchestra seats. Both matinee and evening performances at the Met Opera cost $2.00 for a spot beside the orchestra seats and $1.25 for a spot beside the family circle seats.
As a high school and college kid at the time, I saw everything (well, practically everything) that way. In the early ‘60s, Playbill, Inc. had a special deal for students that included free standing room in exchange for distributing and collecting questionnaires during the first weeks of a new show. When hit shows were sold out months in advance, standing room guaranteed entry as long as you arrived well before the box office opened on the day of performance. After the lights dimmed, standees were allowed to fill empty seats. (This was especially good at the Met, where certain subscribers left at the first intermission or else didn’t show up at all). When the Met moved to Lincoln Center in '66, it then placed its standing room tickets on sale a month before the performance, which killed any build-up and climax attending the day-of-performance sales (a cantatus interruptus).
My standing-room days ended in Spring ‘81 when, after prevailing on our feet for “Amadeus” at the Broadhurst (prices had by then risen to $4.00, still cheaper than first-run films), my wife announced that we were getting too old for that sort of thing (thirty-nine? Jack Benny’s age?). Since then, it’s been a continual hunt for cheap seats in the balcony. Bah.
What’s this got to do with the Roxy? In Dec. ‘57 some friends and I were turned away from a sold-out standing-room for “Aida†at the Met. Dejected, we walked up to the Roxy where we saw a terrific stage-and-screen combo featuring Lana Turner in the sex-laden “Peyton Place.” Ever afterward (or at least until the Roxy closed in '61), the name of Rothafel’s World Famous Theater provided a consoling by-word for a band of foot-weary standees in Gotham, eventually making its way into pages of fiction.
Frankie O— It must have been your dad who performed a random act of kindness to me when I was six years old. My grandfather, a character out of “The Gangs of New York” (since ‘02 I’ve been bragging that his father, my great-grandfather, was Leonardo da Caprio), brought me on an outing to Coney Island (or, “The Oyland,” as we called it in B'klyn). It must have been late Spring '48, since I recall seeing a poster for “I Remember Mama” as we passed the RKO Dyker on the bus. Upon exiting the bus at Stillwell and Surf Aves, we passed by the stage door of Loew’s CI. It was open and ready to receive stage sets that stood on the street. Small-fry theater-addict that I was, I pulled da Caprio, Jr., to the door and onwards into the dark. The movie was playing, and the custodian/electrician (Frankie O, Sr.?) invited us further, but not too much further, to survey the space. It was my first time on a stage, and I was amazed at the tangle of ropes and cables, flats and braces, gauze and padding, that contributed to what, in reality, must have been fairly minimal vaudeville sets. I was also amazed that the movie projected through the screen, which was clearly not the opaque sheet that I had assumed movie screens to be. Your dad (?) explained some principles of stage effects to us, and after a few minutes my grandfather tipped him (that’s how you got along in old NY, or at least how he did) and took me on my way. I have no recollection whatsoever of the rest of that day, but for the past half-century and more I’ve had flashbacks of standing on the CI stage as a defining moment and point-of-no-return in my addiction to theater buildings.
Exactly: Morrison’s book must have been the one I read a few years ago— I see its paperback pub. date is ‘99. The Victoria’s odd appearance had long fascinated me, and M’s account of the renovation helped me understand why. Thanks for the ref.
Benjamin: Thanks for all the expert info you’ve contributed. About those publicity composite photos that show the Rockettes as bigger than members of the audience or orchestra: the contour curtain at RCMH drapes at fourteen folds when fully raised (as it was for film presentations). But most (all?) stage productions that I remember from the late ‘40s-'50s would raise the curtain only in its twelve center folds and not to full height. (Even as a kid, I figured this out as I tried to analyze the illusionistic transformations of space in those great spectacles.) For small-scale specialty acts, the curtain rose in even fewer folds. The expansive proscenium simply did not open to a performance area that filled its entire width. To compensate, many productions deployed some stationary scenery on the apron in front of the curtain at either or both sides of the arch: snowy pine trees at Christmas, statuary altar niches at Easter, a lighthouse and some fish nets for the often repeated Underwater Ballet, etc. As a result, for publicity photos that aimed to display the contour curtain in its complete fourteen-fold glory, the composite artist needed to blow up the shot of the Rockettes et al. taken in their twelve-fold setting. These pictures, even the best of them, look contrived and out of proportion.
Right— I’ve read about the aforementioned extension in a book on theater architecture whose title escapes me, but which I’ll search for in the library stacks when I find some time to do so.
Warren— Thanks for the deatils about this theater’s transition to film. Did this ‘43 renovation extend the length of the theater by demolishing the stage and breaking through its back wall to add an extension of 10’ or so that then touched the rear wall of the Bijou on W 45? Or did yet another renovation bring that addition in the later ‘40s? The main floor consequently raked downwards and upwards and then downwards again as it inclined toward the old orchestra pit, rose over the pit, and finally dipped toward the screen. The side boxes were removed and the ornamented plaster walls were covered by velvet-lined boards (red, matching the traveller curtain) and fronted by a veil of aluminum medallions that gleamed in the screen’s reflected light. That’s how I remember the Victoria, from the first film I saw there (“Joan of Arc” in Winter '49) to the last (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in Winter '68).
Warren— Thanks for clarifying my post of 8 Jan with circumstantial detail. I recounted that post from memory, but checked dates in the NYT Directory of the Film. I didn’t realize that “Give My Regards to Broadway” launched the first ice show, nor that Martin and Lewis performed a stage act with it. I do recall the Viennese ice waltz on with “That Lady in Ermine.” Photos of the marquee in the Joe Coco Collection of THSA at historicthraters.org reveal that the ice show with “Carousel” was titled “Springtime,” not “Gala Paree” as I had claimed: what mad reaction-formation drove the Roxy to name a February ice show “Springtime”? (I ask this question as snow and zero-degree temperatures currently invade our NE region.)
As far as I know, “Gigi” was the only film that played at the Royale. It opened in 1927 with an accent on comedy. Its first big hit was in 1928 with Mae West’s “Diamond Lil.” True, many films derived from plays that unfolded on its stage. But it was live theater all the way (except for “Gigi”).
The Spanish-style design of the Royale seems right for movies. It must have been (one of) Laurence Olivier’s favorite NYC theater(s), because I saw him act twice there, just before “Gigi” in “The Entertainer” and a couple of years later in “Beckett” (with Anthony Quinn as Henry II). I also saw Bette Davis act there in “Night of the Iguana.” In recent years, the Royale has staged “Art” and “Copenhagen.” “Gigi” opened at the Royale on 15 May ‘58, and in the Fall moved to continuous performances at the Sutton where I saw it. Odd, then, that VM’s and CB’s splendid visuals premiered in NYC on relatively small screens. When “Gigi” finally came to the nabes, I saw it again at the Alpine, which boasted of having the largest screen in Broooklyn. The film looked great in that cavernous expanse.
The Roxy presented stage shows from the day of its opening until 16 Sept ‘53, when “The Robe” premiered and the theater suspended its live shows. In the late '40s (I’m not sure exactly when), the Roxy had added a small ice stage. It lowered the central stage elevator, flooded and froze the cavity, and used it for skating acts accompanying the conventional stage presentation with the toe-dancing Gae Foster Roxyettes. It called its m and f ice-skaters the Roxy Blades and Belles, and put them before the footlights during summertime shows (perhaps to cool off patrons with the power of suggestion).
I recall seeing two such shows in Summer ‘48, one accompanying the Dan Dailey musical, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” the other accompanying Betty Grable’s effort with Ernst Lubitsch, “That Lady in Ermine.” The latter’s Viennese theme extended into the ice show, with the Blades and Belles performing unseasonable waltzes.
In December ‘52, the Roxy closed briefly for alterations, shamefully covering up its proscenium’s glorious Spanish retablo with a new contour curtain, and also adding an all-ice stage illuminated by neon lights embedded in the permafrost (the display was called “Ice Colorama”). At this point, the feet-on-the-ground Roxyettes became twenty-four ice-skating Roxyettes. The theater initiated this format with that year’s Christmas show, headlined by “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
All-ice stage shows (without the neon Colorama) resumed with the Christmas show of ‘55, “The Rains of Ranchipur.” A couple of presentations with negligible 20C-Fox films (“The Lieutenant Wore Skirts” and “Bottom of the Bottle”) intervened before “Carousel” opened on 16 Feb '56, with an ice show (“Gala Paree”) somewhat abbreviated because of the film’s longer-than-usual length.
Las Vegas-style neon: yes, that’s an apt description, on the stage and on the marquee.
That’s right too—Even though I was a thirty-year-old presumptive adult at the time, I marvelled that Hollywood could advertise a yet unfinished and certainly unedited movie six months in advance of its scheduled opening—a marketing marvel. That, by the way, was the first time I’d seen coming attractions at RCMH. In the ‘40s and '50s, as Simon L has so eloquently described, the announcement of the next attraction unreeled as a b&w film strip, home-movie-style, in minuscules running bottom to top against a cross-hatched mesh background, while the grand organ played a pertinent melody (minor key for drama, major for comedy), always at the end of the newsreel and before the orchestral overture. In '72, I was shocked that RCMH was showing coming attractions, just as the local dives did. Before “Butterflies,” the previous picture I had seen there was “Up the Down Staircase” in '67, and even on that dark day there were no coming attractions. Sometime in-between, something had happened.
Warren—As a kid in the ‘50s, I heard people refer to this theater as “the RCMH,” much as one would refer to its rival as “the Roxy.” On his “Toast of the Town” TV review, for example, the stolid Ed Sullivan would introduce celebrity guests as “starrrs of a fffine fffilm nnnow playing at the RCMH.” The particle nonetheless struck me as funny, since none of my family used it in that way—we always omitted it in deference, perhaps, to the theater’s exceptionality: “We went to RCMH” (often just “Radio City,” without “Music Hall,” but sometimes “the Music Hall” [particled!] without “Radio City”—gotta assign a linguist to this case). I remember a neighborhood kid who wrought a splendid inversion: “Radio Music City Hall.” (Fatefully, she is now married to a world-class musician and is herself a great political activist.)
Vincent—Through a quirk, I too had seen “Butterflies Are Free” at RCMH, and I vividly remember the Rockettes' routine: the thirty-six of them (still thirty-six in ‘72) opened their act on center-stage, then filed out onto the narrow (what-do-you-call-it?) runway that rimmed the orchestra pit to perform their high kicks. I was sitting in the third row, and could only hope that one of them might dropkick a shoe into my lap—just as in '40s Hollywood musicals would happen to a perplexed old geezer in the front stalls.
Vincent—that could be true. I did not see “South Pacific” there, but I did see “Anatomy of a Murder” which followed it there in Summer ‘59, and the house seemed unchanged (perhaps they had dismantled the special screen). The last film I saw at the Criterion was “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (day-dating at the Tower East)in Summer '66. Same old trappings, but the audience was so garrulous that I decided to avoid Times Square for serious films and to take my business to the East side. I’ve never been to the Ziegfeld, since I decamped from NYC before it was built. Should I visit it if I happen to be in town?
My memory of the Criterion stretches back to “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” in July ‘48 and “The Life of Riley” in April '49, through various Disney features in the early '50s (“Alice in Wonderland,” a revival of “Snow White”) to “The Ten Commandments” and beyond. It seems to me that the theater remained the same throughout, clad chiefly in red plaster with a red traveller curtain. (See Warren’s web link posite on the Criterion page last 25 July and my reply on 7 August.) I remember being slightly disappointed that the VistaVision screen for “The Ten Commandments” was not as large or curved as the Todd-AO screen at the Rivoli, but that kind of screen would have required alterations such as thrusting the viewing surface in front of the proscenium, which the Criterion refrained from doing. The theater might have been spruced up for its roadshows with brighter lighting and new fabrics, but in the original colors and with no change in design.
Oops—a gremlin crept into my preceding note. Not “Sayonara” but “Teahouse of the August Moon” was the Christmas film at RCMH concurrent with “Anastasia” at the Roxy. But, hey, both of those films are set in Asia (and both would have pitted Brando against Bergman), so: point made (though I should have said “Asian thematics” in the above post). Gaffes like this will erode my credibility.
On the RCMH page yesterday, SimonL evoked the “Ave Maria” chorales that the Roxy had offered (inconsistently) in their Christmas shows. He rightly questioned my recall of that presentation with the screening of “Anastasia” in ‘57. But since after twenty-eight years I recently opened my sealed storage-box of programs and playbills from the '50s and '60s, I’ll act badly and quote from the souvenir of that show.
It was an expanded program celebrating the first anniversary of return of the Roxy’s stage shows, which had been suspended since CinemaScope overtook the proscenium in ‘53 (“The Robe,” et al.). The show was titled “Wide Wide World Holiday,” and Sandy Szabo, who last 10 October wrote on this page that she had skated at the Roxy, is listed among the Ice Roxyettes. It began with a segue from the Fox Movietone Newsreel, in which the then ubiquitous television personality Dave Garroway congratulated the theater’s Managing Director Robert C. Rothafel for his wisdom in resuming the live presentations. Next followed “the Roxy Orchestra under the baton of Robert Boucher and the Roxy Caroleers under the direction of Robert Nicholson” [at this point might it have been possible that the latter intoned “Ave Maria”? I remember this chorale from shows past, but might have transposed it here?].
Segment #2 was called “Happiness Street—Anywhere, U.S.A.” and it enlisted “the entire ensemble featuring the Ice Roxyettes” along with the Caroleers, first in a number entitled “Song to a Star,” and then in a number (confounding Cole Porter, Mary Martin, and Eartha Kitt) entitled “My Heart Belongs to Santa Baby,” the latter “introducting Miss Mae Edwards …a 1957 Chrvrolet Corvette … Manuel Del Toro [the lead male skater] … the Roxy Blades [the male skating corps] and Paula Newland, vocalist.” My memory of this scene goes quietly blank.
Segment #3 was called “Three Spots of Cheer” and it featured the Roxyettes, Blades, and Caroleers “in a holiday visit to Merrie London Town and Holand and … a touch of ‘Christmas in Killarney.’” Here my visual recall summons an image of those snow villages that you place on train sets at this time of year, with appropriate Victorian, Dutch, and Gaelic touches.
Segment #4 was called “The Bruises” and offered “holiday hilarity and nonsensical fun!” Clowns on skates, no doubt: don’t hold me to it.
Segment #4, “Winter Blossom Time,” introduced, with thanks to Eastman Kodak, “the scenic presentation of the innovation known as ‘SpectaColor.’” I recall that the latter was a gigantic projection device, like a 35 mm home-slide-show pumped up to unimaginable dimensions. Its three numbers were comprised of “The Jingle Belles of Ming in Fan Fare” with Miss Edwards, the Roxyettes, and Caroleers (hazy memories of the Tibetan Roof, Chongqing, Suzhou, the Great Wall, and the like), “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” with Miss Edwards and the Blades (the program notes “with apologies to the Kabuki and Noh plays of Japan”: but why apologize?), and “Geisha Gaiety” with “the entire ensemble in a holiday celebration.” Here SimonL recalls a striking image of Japan’s Matsumoto mountain as the curtain fell.
Two notes: (1)The Christmas film at RCMH that year was “Sayonara,” and the co-incidental Japanese thematics conveys a whiff of the rivalry that those theaters pitched coyly at the time. (2) The following year, Kodak photographed the Rockettes in their Christmas routine accompanying “Auntie Mame” (my Showplace program for the week of 4 Dec. ‘58 calls the number “Rocket to the Moon”). That enormous photomural was then put on exhibit at Grand Central Terminal, and in Dec. '61 was returned to the stage of RCMH as a self-referential backdrop for the Rockettes who were clad in the same outfits they had worn for the picture. By that time, as we all know, the Roxy had been razed, with a scant remainder of Kodak moments to remind us of what it had been.
Right, SimonL, as you well should know, since last 15 July, 1 September, and various times in-between you wrote vividly about your ushering at the Roxy in ‘56-'57. (Anyone skiming this post who hasn’t read those contributions should scroll back to them immediately.) I’ll meanwhile continue my current comments about the Roxy on that theater’s site page.
As a kid who grew up in Brooklyn NY in the late ‘40s-early ‘50s, I visited Boston a few times in ‘49-’50 when an aunt lived nearly. I recall that at that time films at the Paramount played day-and-date with a theater named the Fenway, presumably located near the Fenway. When I visited Boston as an adult, I could not locate that theater. Had its name changed? I remember the Paramount vividly. One January day in ’50, we walked down Washington Street, gazing at all the theater lobbies along the way. “Samson and Delilah†was playing at the Paramount (and at the Fenway). I had just seen the film at NYC’s Rivoli, and I marveled at how studios could distribute their films simultaneously across the map of my universe. As a jaded college student a decade later, I visited friends in Boston, and we went to the Paramount to see a revival of “Samson and Delilah.†We sat in the balcony and made snide comments about Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. A disgruntled patron complained about us to an usher, who told us to shut up or get out. For all its art deco, the Paramount bore stylized traces of French Renaissance enough so that the theater struck me as a smaller facsimile of the Times Square and Brooklyn Paramounts with their high, narrow prosceniums and sweeping balconies.
Yes, at the Roxy a choir in an enormous elevated pulpit, flanked by sparkling Christmas trees, intoned “Ave Maria.” Programs on screen included such holiday fare as “The Prince of Foxes” (with Orson Welles as Valentine Borgia, ‘49), “For Heaven’s Sake” (with Clifton Webb as an angel, '50), “Anastasia” (Bergman’s comeback, '56), and “Peyton Place” (all about sex, '57).
At the beginning of The Glory of Easter pageant, the curtain used to rise minimally at two spots equidistant from the arches to enable a procession of altar attendants to emerge bearing lit candles. As the attendants proceeded to climb the choral staircases, some member of the audience would inevitably express a fretful prayer that the curtain might not catch fire (each attendant was careful to cup a hand around the battery-powered wick). The two openings would close momentarily and then, after some verses of “Kamenoi Ostrow,” the entire contour would rise on the flower-bedecked altar and radiant stained-glass windows. At length, the in-house nuns would appear and form their blossoming cross, but you could get the full effect only if you sat in the exact center of the auditorium or in the mezzanines; otherwise, your perspective would distort the transversal.
Nothing could distort those magnificent Rockettes on the steps of the Trocadero/Chaillot. I wish we could see those pix too, Dorothy.
Di Caprio (sorry for the above misspelling—my Italian got in the way) was the weak link in that film — shoudda been a young Sean Penn. Or my grandpa.
To these discussions about relative price scales at the Roxy and other theaters, I’d like to add that NYC’s best value in the late ‘50s-early '60s was the day-of-performance standing-room sale for live performances, which was as cheap as or cheaper than most first-run films. Matinees cost $1.50 and evening performances cost $2.00 for a spot at the rear of the orchestra seats. Both matinee and evening performances at the Met Opera cost $2.00 for a spot beside the orchestra seats and $1.25 for a spot beside the family circle seats.
As a high school and college kid at the time, I saw everything (well, practically everything) that way. In the early ‘60s, Playbill, Inc. had a special deal for students that included free standing room in exchange for distributing and collecting questionnaires during the first weeks of a new show. When hit shows were sold out months in advance, standing room guaranteed entry as long as you arrived well before the box office opened on the day of performance. After the lights dimmed, standees were allowed to fill empty seats. (This was especially good at the Met, where certain subscribers left at the first intermission or else didn’t show up at all). When the Met moved to Lincoln Center in '66, it then placed its standing room tickets on sale a month before the performance, which killed any build-up and climax attending the day-of-performance sales (a cantatus interruptus).
My standing-room days ended in Spring ‘81 when, after prevailing on our feet for “Amadeus” at the Broadhurst (prices had by then risen to $4.00, still cheaper than first-run films), my wife announced that we were getting too old for that sort of thing (thirty-nine? Jack Benny’s age?). Since then, it’s been a continual hunt for cheap seats in the balcony. Bah.
What’s this got to do with the Roxy? In Dec. ‘57 some friends and I were turned away from a sold-out standing-room for “Aida†at the Met. Dejected, we walked up to the Roxy where we saw a terrific stage-and-screen combo featuring Lana Turner in the sex-laden “Peyton Place.” Ever afterward (or at least until the Roxy closed in '61), the name of Rothafel’s World Famous Theater provided a consoling by-word for a band of foot-weary standees in Gotham, eventually making its way into pages of fiction.
Frankie O— It must have been your dad who performed a random act of kindness to me when I was six years old. My grandfather, a character out of “The Gangs of New York” (since ‘02 I’ve been bragging that his father, my great-grandfather, was Leonardo da Caprio), brought me on an outing to Coney Island (or, “The Oyland,” as we called it in B'klyn). It must have been late Spring '48, since I recall seeing a poster for “I Remember Mama” as we passed the RKO Dyker on the bus. Upon exiting the bus at Stillwell and Surf Aves, we passed by the stage door of Loew’s CI. It was open and ready to receive stage sets that stood on the street. Small-fry theater-addict that I was, I pulled da Caprio, Jr., to the door and onwards into the dark. The movie was playing, and the custodian/electrician (Frankie O, Sr.?) invited us further, but not too much further, to survey the space. It was my first time on a stage, and I was amazed at the tangle of ropes and cables, flats and braces, gauze and padding, that contributed to what, in reality, must have been fairly minimal vaudeville sets. I was also amazed that the movie projected through the screen, which was clearly not the opaque sheet that I had assumed movie screens to be. Your dad (?) explained some principles of stage effects to us, and after a few minutes my grandfather tipped him (that’s how you got along in old NY, or at least how he did) and took me on my way. I have no recollection whatsoever of the rest of that day, but for the past half-century and more I’ve had flashbacks of standing on the CI stage as a defining moment and point-of-no-return in my addiction to theater buildings.
Exactly: Morrison’s book must have been the one I read a few years ago— I see its paperback pub. date is ‘99. The Victoria’s odd appearance had long fascinated me, and M’s account of the renovation helped me understand why. Thanks for the ref.
Benjamin: Thanks for all the expert info you’ve contributed. About those publicity composite photos that show the Rockettes as bigger than members of the audience or orchestra: the contour curtain at RCMH drapes at fourteen folds when fully raised (as it was for film presentations). But most (all?) stage productions that I remember from the late ‘40s-'50s would raise the curtain only in its twelve center folds and not to full height. (Even as a kid, I figured this out as I tried to analyze the illusionistic transformations of space in those great spectacles.) For small-scale specialty acts, the curtain rose in even fewer folds. The expansive proscenium simply did not open to a performance area that filled its entire width. To compensate, many productions deployed some stationary scenery on the apron in front of the curtain at either or both sides of the arch: snowy pine trees at Christmas, statuary altar niches at Easter, a lighthouse and some fish nets for the often repeated Underwater Ballet, etc. As a result, for publicity photos that aimed to display the contour curtain in its complete fourteen-fold glory, the composite artist needed to blow up the shot of the Rockettes et al. taken in their twelve-fold setting. These pictures, even the best of them, look contrived and out of proportion.
Right— I’ve read about the aforementioned extension in a book on theater architecture whose title escapes me, but which I’ll search for in the library stacks when I find some time to do so.
Warren— Thanks for the deatils about this theater’s transition to film. Did this ‘43 renovation extend the length of the theater by demolishing the stage and breaking through its back wall to add an extension of 10’ or so that then touched the rear wall of the Bijou on W 45? Or did yet another renovation bring that addition in the later ‘40s? The main floor consequently raked downwards and upwards and then downwards again as it inclined toward the old orchestra pit, rose over the pit, and finally dipped toward the screen. The side boxes were removed and the ornamented plaster walls were covered by velvet-lined boards (red, matching the traveller curtain) and fronted by a veil of aluminum medallions that gleamed in the screen’s reflected light. That’s how I remember the Victoria, from the first film I saw there (“Joan of Arc” in Winter '49) to the last (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in Winter '68).
Warren— Thanks for clarifying my post of 8 Jan with circumstantial detail. I recounted that post from memory, but checked dates in the NYT Directory of the Film. I didn’t realize that “Give My Regards to Broadway” launched the first ice show, nor that Martin and Lewis performed a stage act with it. I do recall the Viennese ice waltz on with “That Lady in Ermine.” Photos of the marquee in the Joe Coco Collection of THSA at historicthraters.org reveal that the ice show with “Carousel” was titled “Springtime,” not “Gala Paree” as I had claimed: what mad reaction-formation drove the Roxy to name a February ice show “Springtime”? (I ask this question as snow and zero-degree temperatures currently invade our NE region.)
As far as I know, “Gigi” was the only film that played at the Royale. It opened in 1927 with an accent on comedy. Its first big hit was in 1928 with Mae West’s “Diamond Lil.” True, many films derived from plays that unfolded on its stage. But it was live theater all the way (except for “Gigi”).
The Spanish-style design of the Royale seems right for movies. It must have been (one of) Laurence Olivier’s favorite NYC theater(s), because I saw him act twice there, just before “Gigi” in “The Entertainer” and a couple of years later in “Beckett” (with Anthony Quinn as Henry II). I also saw Bette Davis act there in “Night of the Iguana.” In recent years, the Royale has staged “Art” and “Copenhagen.” “Gigi” opened at the Royale on 15 May ‘58, and in the Fall moved to continuous performances at the Sutton where I saw it. Odd, then, that VM’s and CB’s splendid visuals premiered in NYC on relatively small screens. When “Gigi” finally came to the nabes, I saw it again at the Alpine, which boasted of having the largest screen in Broooklyn. The film looked great in that cavernous expanse.
bad movie, poor stage show, just days before strike.
The Roxy presented stage shows from the day of its opening until 16 Sept ‘53, when “The Robe” premiered and the theater suspended its live shows. In the late '40s (I’m not sure exactly when), the Roxy had added a small ice stage. It lowered the central stage elevator, flooded and froze the cavity, and used it for skating acts accompanying the conventional stage presentation with the toe-dancing Gae Foster Roxyettes. It called its m and f ice-skaters the Roxy Blades and Belles, and put them before the footlights during summertime shows (perhaps to cool off patrons with the power of suggestion).
I recall seeing two such shows in Summer ‘48, one accompanying the Dan Dailey musical, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” the other accompanying Betty Grable’s effort with Ernst Lubitsch, “That Lady in Ermine.” The latter’s Viennese theme extended into the ice show, with the Blades and Belles performing unseasonable waltzes.
In December ‘52, the Roxy closed briefly for alterations, shamefully covering up its proscenium’s glorious Spanish retablo with a new contour curtain, and also adding an all-ice stage illuminated by neon lights embedded in the permafrost (the display was called “Ice Colorama”). At this point, the feet-on-the-ground Roxyettes became twenty-four ice-skating Roxyettes. The theater initiated this format with that year’s Christmas show, headlined by “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
All-ice stage shows (without the neon Colorama) resumed with the Christmas show of ‘55, “The Rains of Ranchipur.” A couple of presentations with negligible 20C-Fox films (“The Lieutenant Wore Skirts” and “Bottom of the Bottle”) intervened before “Carousel” opened on 16 Feb '56, with an ice show (“Gala Paree”) somewhat abbreviated because of the film’s longer-than-usual length.
Las Vegas-style neon: yes, that’s an apt description, on the stage and on the marquee.
That’s right too—Even though I was a thirty-year-old presumptive adult at the time, I marvelled that Hollywood could advertise a yet unfinished and certainly unedited movie six months in advance of its scheduled opening—a marketing marvel. That, by the way, was the first time I’d seen coming attractions at RCMH. In the ‘40s and '50s, as Simon L has so eloquently described, the announcement of the next attraction unreeled as a b&w film strip, home-movie-style, in minuscules running bottom to top against a cross-hatched mesh background, while the grand organ played a pertinent melody (minor key for drama, major for comedy), always at the end of the newsreel and before the orchestral overture. In '72, I was shocked that RCMH was showing coming attractions, just as the local dives did. Before “Butterflies,” the previous picture I had seen there was “Up the Down Staircase” in '67, and even on that dark day there were no coming attractions. Sometime in-between, something had happened.
Right—the setting was Hawaiian, and the routine concluded on the runway. I should’ve stayed through repeat performances ‘till I caught a shoe.
Warren—As a kid in the ‘50s, I heard people refer to this theater as “the RCMH,” much as one would refer to its rival as “the Roxy.” On his “Toast of the Town” TV review, for example, the stolid Ed Sullivan would introduce celebrity guests as “starrrs of a fffine fffilm nnnow playing at the RCMH.” The particle nonetheless struck me as funny, since none of my family used it in that way—we always omitted it in deference, perhaps, to the theater’s exceptionality: “We went to RCMH” (often just “Radio City,” without “Music Hall,” but sometimes “the Music Hall” [particled!] without “Radio City”—gotta assign a linguist to this case). I remember a neighborhood kid who wrought a splendid inversion: “Radio Music City Hall.” (Fatefully, she is now married to a world-class musician and is herself a great political activist.)
Vincent—Through a quirk, I too had seen “Butterflies Are Free” at RCMH, and I vividly remember the Rockettes' routine: the thirty-six of them (still thirty-six in ‘72) opened their act on center-stage, then filed out onto the narrow (what-do-you-call-it?) runway that rimmed the orchestra pit to perform their high kicks. I was sitting in the third row, and could only hope that one of them might dropkick a shoe into my lap—just as in '40s Hollywood musicals would happen to a perplexed old geezer in the front stalls.
“A Clockwork Orange” opened in NYC at Cinema I — did the management there do that? Whew!
Vincent—that could be true. I did not see “South Pacific” there, but I did see “Anatomy of a Murder” which followed it there in Summer ‘59, and the house seemed unchanged (perhaps they had dismantled the special screen). The last film I saw at the Criterion was “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (day-dating at the Tower East)in Summer '66. Same old trappings, but the audience was so garrulous that I decided to avoid Times Square for serious films and to take my business to the East side. I’ve never been to the Ziegfeld, since I decamped from NYC before it was built. Should I visit it if I happen to be in town?
My memory of the Criterion stretches back to “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” in July ‘48 and “The Life of Riley” in April '49, through various Disney features in the early '50s (“Alice in Wonderland,” a revival of “Snow White”) to “The Ten Commandments” and beyond. It seems to me that the theater remained the same throughout, clad chiefly in red plaster with a red traveller curtain. (See Warren’s web link posite on the Criterion page last 25 July and my reply on 7 August.) I remember being slightly disappointed that the VistaVision screen for “The Ten Commandments” was not as large or curved as the Todd-AO screen at the Rivoli, but that kind of screen would have required alterations such as thrusting the viewing surface in front of the proscenium, which the Criterion refrained from doing. The theater might have been spruced up for its roadshows with brighter lighting and new fabrics, but in the original colors and with no change in design.
Oops—a gremlin crept into my preceding note. Not “Sayonara” but “Teahouse of the August Moon” was the Christmas film at RCMH concurrent with “Anastasia” at the Roxy. But, hey, both of those films are set in Asia (and both would have pitted Brando against Bergman), so: point made (though I should have said “Asian thematics” in the above post). Gaffes like this will erode my credibility.
On the RCMH page yesterday, SimonL evoked the “Ave Maria” chorales that the Roxy had offered (inconsistently) in their Christmas shows. He rightly questioned my recall of that presentation with the screening of “Anastasia” in ‘57. But since after twenty-eight years I recently opened my sealed storage-box of programs and playbills from the '50s and '60s, I’ll act badly and quote from the souvenir of that show.
It was an expanded program celebrating the first anniversary of return of the Roxy’s stage shows, which had been suspended since CinemaScope overtook the proscenium in ‘53 (“The Robe,” et al.). The show was titled “Wide Wide World Holiday,” and Sandy Szabo, who last 10 October wrote on this page that she had skated at the Roxy, is listed among the Ice Roxyettes. It began with a segue from the Fox Movietone Newsreel, in which the then ubiquitous television personality Dave Garroway congratulated the theater’s Managing Director Robert C. Rothafel for his wisdom in resuming the live presentations. Next followed “the Roxy Orchestra under the baton of Robert Boucher and the Roxy Caroleers under the direction of Robert Nicholson” [at this point might it have been possible that the latter intoned “Ave Maria”? I remember this chorale from shows past, but might have transposed it here?].
Segment #2 was called “Happiness Street—Anywhere, U.S.A.” and it enlisted “the entire ensemble featuring the Ice Roxyettes” along with the Caroleers, first in a number entitled “Song to a Star,” and then in a number (confounding Cole Porter, Mary Martin, and Eartha Kitt) entitled “My Heart Belongs to Santa Baby,” the latter “introducting Miss Mae Edwards …a 1957 Chrvrolet Corvette … Manuel Del Toro [the lead male skater] … the Roxy Blades [the male skating corps] and Paula Newland, vocalist.” My memory of this scene goes quietly blank.
Segment #3 was called “Three Spots of Cheer” and it featured the Roxyettes, Blades, and Caroleers “in a holiday visit to Merrie London Town and Holand and … a touch of ‘Christmas in Killarney.’” Here my visual recall summons an image of those snow villages that you place on train sets at this time of year, with appropriate Victorian, Dutch, and Gaelic touches.
Segment #4 was called “The Bruises” and offered “holiday hilarity and nonsensical fun!” Clowns on skates, no doubt: don’t hold me to it.
Segment #4, “Winter Blossom Time,” introduced, with thanks to Eastman Kodak, “the scenic presentation of the innovation known as ‘SpectaColor.’” I recall that the latter was a gigantic projection device, like a 35 mm home-slide-show pumped up to unimaginable dimensions. Its three numbers were comprised of “The Jingle Belles of Ming in Fan Fare” with Miss Edwards, the Roxyettes, and Caroleers (hazy memories of the Tibetan Roof, Chongqing, Suzhou, the Great Wall, and the like), “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” with Miss Edwards and the Blades (the program notes “with apologies to the Kabuki and Noh plays of Japan”: but why apologize?), and “Geisha Gaiety” with “the entire ensemble in a holiday celebration.” Here SimonL recalls a striking image of Japan’s Matsumoto mountain as the curtain fell.
Two notes: (1)The Christmas film at RCMH that year was “Sayonara,” and the co-incidental Japanese thematics conveys a whiff of the rivalry that those theaters pitched coyly at the time. (2) The following year, Kodak photographed the Rockettes in their Christmas routine accompanying “Auntie Mame” (my Showplace program for the week of 4 Dec. ‘58 calls the number “Rocket to the Moon”). That enormous photomural was then put on exhibit at Grand Central Terminal, and in Dec. '61 was returned to the stage of RCMH as a self-referential backdrop for the Rockettes who were clad in the same outfits they had worn for the picture. By that time, as we all know, the Roxy had been razed, with a scant remainder of Kodak moments to remind us of what it had been.
Right, SimonL, as you well should know, since last 15 July, 1 September, and various times in-between you wrote vividly about your ushering at the Roxy in ‘56-'57. (Anyone skiming this post who hasn’t read those contributions should scroll back to them immediately.) I’ll meanwhile continue my current comments about the Roxy on that theater’s site page.
As a kid who grew up in Brooklyn NY in the late ‘40s-early ‘50s, I visited Boston a few times in ‘49-’50 when an aunt lived nearly. I recall that at that time films at the Paramount played day-and-date with a theater named the Fenway, presumably located near the Fenway. When I visited Boston as an adult, I could not locate that theater. Had its name changed? I remember the Paramount vividly. One January day in ’50, we walked down Washington Street, gazing at all the theater lobbies along the way. “Samson and Delilah†was playing at the Paramount (and at the Fenway). I had just seen the film at NYC’s Rivoli, and I marveled at how studios could distribute their films simultaneously across the map of my universe. As a jaded college student a decade later, I visited friends in Boston, and we went to the Paramount to see a revival of “Samson and Delilah.†We sat in the balcony and made snide comments about Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. A disgruntled patron complained about us to an usher, who told us to shut up or get out. For all its art deco, the Paramount bore stylized traces of French Renaissance enough so that the theater struck me as a smaller facsimile of the Times Square and Brooklyn Paramounts with their high, narrow prosceniums and sweeping balconies.
Yes, at the Roxy a choir in an enormous elevated pulpit, flanked by sparkling Christmas trees, intoned “Ave Maria.” Programs on screen included such holiday fare as “The Prince of Foxes” (with Orson Welles as Valentine Borgia, ‘49), “For Heaven’s Sake” (with Clifton Webb as an angel, '50), “Anastasia” (Bergman’s comeback, '56), and “Peyton Place” (all about sex, '57).
At the beginning of The Glory of Easter pageant, the curtain used to rise minimally at two spots equidistant from the arches to enable a procession of altar attendants to emerge bearing lit candles. As the attendants proceeded to climb the choral staircases, some member of the audience would inevitably express a fretful prayer that the curtain might not catch fire (each attendant was careful to cup a hand around the battery-powered wick). The two openings would close momentarily and then, after some verses of “Kamenoi Ostrow,” the entire contour would rise on the flower-bedecked altar and radiant stained-glass windows. At length, the in-house nuns would appear and form their blossoming cross, but you could get the full effect only if you sat in the exact center of the auditorium or in the mezzanines; otherwise, your perspective would distort the transversal.
Nothing could distort those magnificent Rockettes on the steps of the Trocadero/Chaillot. I wish we could see those pix too, Dorothy.
Microfilmed newspapers would be the best bet — look for Summer ‘50 for a sure bet.