Radio City Music Hall
1260 6th Avenue,
New York,
NY
10020
1260 6th Avenue,
New York,
NY
10020
118 people
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Fiction should by fixion.
I’m also curious and wonder if you could go back in time and see only 3 shows at the Hall what would they be?
Mine;
Singing in the Rain Easter show
Till the Clouds Roll By in burn your eyes Technicolor and Christmas show which in ‘46 I’m sure it was pretty lavish. And with everybody decending on New York at holiday time in the first year euphoria after the war it was probably where everyone was trying to get in during Hollywood’s most suuccessful year.
Swing Time the best of the Music Hall’s most popular couple.
The Time’s in it’s review said it looked like a riot outside the theater on the opening morning. Back then when people got excited about a new movie and they were first run exclusives at the Hall it was a major event.
Now on opening day you can buy it on DVD in a subway station. No excitement there.
Al Alvarez seems to say Calvacade ran at the Hall for 2 weeks but it was the first Easter Show.
Instead of GOE they presented for the holiday The Last Supper. I’d like to think that in the following year they presented The Crucifiction with the Rockettes as Roman soldiers. A kick line in front of the 3 crosses would have been fun getting some heavy mitting.
God I wish I could go back in time. Some of these stage shows seems so bizarre.
Especially the one for Sign of the Cross. It had a chariot race! And I think the Rockettes were dressed as Gladiators for that one.
And then there’s the one where Santa goes to the bottom of the sea. And then he went to Mars.
I am not making this up.
After the renovations in 1999, the Hall looked like it was new again, and it still is. It’s still one of the best guarded places in New York, and one that’s more famous and better than The Garden. If the Rockettes were a sports team, they would beat up them Knicks, Rangers, and Liberty!!! After the Newsday debacle and the removal of the Voom HD channels from Dish TV (only Cablevision is the only system to have those 15 channels, which is too much for compression), Cablevision is not focusing on its other companies such as AMC, which is starting to show more drama shows ala FX, as well as Clearview Cinemas, which is putting nearly all of its newer cinemas with digital projection. Not to mention the classy Hall!!!
Leon :
whadaya mean? i’m lost
“The place has been scrubbed too clean. It’s historical patina has been washed away along with so many memories.”
Movie534 : you are obviously angry, you alluded to “getting the axe” in a Feb post….whats the deal ?
Does anyone have any color pictures of the Hall in the 1930’s? Was the marquee orignally bulit with red, gold and blue neon?
Yep, just another example of something, in this case something wonderful and beautiful, that Jimmy Dolan and his band of pencil pushers managed to screw up. Everything they get their hands on turns to !@#$. Can’t wait to see what they do to the newspaper Newsday.
Nice to have seen a watchable film like Fantasia at the Hall back then in the 70’s. Especially since ‘69 the halfway decent movies that played there were as rare as natural pearls.
Only been back twice since then. A Christmas show(ugh!) and Ella.
Ella was great I was in the third row towards the center(bought the ticket at the box office right before) so it was easy to tune the place out and pretend I was in an intimate club.
Other than that not worth going to. Too heartbreaking. No more movies, no more stage shows taking place at the bottom of the sea and no more Easter Show.
The place has been scrubbed too clean. It’s historical patina has been washed away along with so many memories.
It now has as much resonance as the Gap store by the Channel Gardens.
Now when you bring people to Rockefeller Center they look at it and say “so what?” And you have to answer honestly “I don’t know. It seemed so special once.”
Thanks to your list, Al, I can proudly say that the last movie I saw at the Music Hall before the closing was a great one, “Fantasia”.
Sadly, the only time I visited RCMH prior to the end of the film/stage show era in 1979 was for a weekday matinee of “Smokey and the Bandit” in May 1977. I was in the front mezzanine, and I recall that the performance was very sparsely attended—-probably no more than several hundred people.
Speaking of “Smokey and the Bandit” failing at RCMH after being a blockbuster in other parts of the country, I recall being surprised to find that some (many?) John Wayne movies opened later in Manhattan than in other parts of the country. It was as if they avoided New York reviews on the assumption, probably based on a lot of precedent, that they’d be less favorable in NYC than anywhere else. Wayne was huge almost everywhere. I gather that was relatively less true in NYC. And how weird that “The Cowboys,” of all Wayne movies, should get a RCMH booking. It was, I think, easily the most mean-spirited movie in which he had participated and the only one I outright dislike. – Ed Blank
1776, THE STING and FANTASIA were, of course, revivals.
I think it is very telling that even SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT failed at RCMH as it was succeeding elsewhere. New Yorkers are not above watching a redneck romp but we will not tolerate wholesomeness!
Thank you very much for that list, Al Alvarez. Things sure did change at RCMH in the 1970s, didn’t they? In earlier decades, many of those movies would have premiered at the neighborhoods on double bills. — Ed Blank
Too bad “Star Wars” didn’t play at this theater when it came out nearly 31 years ago this month. BTW, when will the Ziegfeld page be back? It’s been nearly a week and no one has posted comments on it!!!
THE SUNSHINE BOYS ran until January 22, 1976
March 12- May 12, 1976 ROBIN AND MARIAN
May 13- June 3, 1976 THE BLUE BIRD
June 4- June 17, 1976 1776
June 18- July 28, 1976 HARRY & WALTER GO TO NEW YORK
July 29- Sept 15, 1976 SWASHBUCKLER
Sept 16- October 6, 1976 PAPER TIGER
October 7- November 3, 1976 A MATTER OF TIME
November 4-January 12, 1977 THE SLIPPER AND THE ROSE
March 3- March 30, 1977 MR. BILLION
March 31 – April 27, 1977 THE LITTLEST HORSE THIEVES
April 28- May 18, 1977 THE STING
May 19- June 29, 1977 SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT
June 30- September 15, 1977 MacARTHUR
November 3- January 11, 1978 PETE’S DRAGON
March 2- April 16, 1978 CROSSED SWORDS
April 27- May 17, 1978 THE SEA GYSPSIES
May 18- June 21, 1978 FANTASIA
June 22- August 2, 1978 MATILDA
August 3- ? THE MAGIC OF LASSIE
November 2- January 17, 1979 CARAVANS
March 8 â€" April 25, 1979 THE PROMISE
Ed, if you click on ‘advanced search’, then ‘theatre search tool’ and highlight all three boxes, you will find such an option. Theatres like the chameleonesque Movieland on 47th street would be lost without it.
I will look into the late seventies RCMH.
These Cinema Treasures blogs really are a treasure. It is with no lack of gratitude that I concur with those who say it would be wonderful if we could access each theater’s blog under any and all of the theater’s identities. Very often I cannot remember what a theater was called in its final years. I had forgotten, for example, that the Trans-Lux East was called the Gotham at the tail end. Sure wish it were possible to cross-reference them so that a blog would pop up under any of the (correct) IDs we type in. But thank you, one and all, for what we have. – Ed Blank
Hi, Al, I had found, and did print out, that entry in addition to yours. Thanks for making sure I saw it. Still need to fill in 1975-79 when the programming became more irregular, I guess. I’ve enjoyed immensely going over the lists and noting precisely how many movies I saw at RCMH. Have been looking up every one of the dozens of Manhattan moviehouses I frequented in visits from 1955, starting with “Mr. Roberts” at RCMH, through the spring of 2006. I loved and miss much the era when Manhattan was loaded with classic rep houses. I appreciate the hundreds of great blog notes by you and Warren and many others and love hearing about the double bills people saw at various sites. – Ed Blank
Ed, if you check out the post from Ron3853 on Jul 18, 2004 at 8:26am you will find he did a great job covering that.
AlAlvarez, Were you ever able to compile a list of RCMH movies and their opening dates from “Scrooge” through “The Promise” in 1979? – Ed Blank
The way I understand it, the Hall represented wholesome entertainment at a time when a G rating was the kiss of death at the box office. Distributors did not want their movies associated with being that squeaky clean
What movies today would fill the Music Hall bill if there were still a stage show and old distribution patterns?
I do think back to the early 70’s and wonder why they didn’t get films like Orient Express or Way we Were.
I agree with you. Making stuff out of clay is more fun than creating something out of CGI.
Justin, I have to disagree (politely) with a couple of your previous posts. Making the Radio City Marquee an LED display would be a silly thing to do. For one thing, the old milk glass letter marquees are now rare and historical artifacts, they’re also more attractive than LED displays. Please remember too that today’s high tech is tomorrow’s worthless junk (until it gets to be about 50 years old, at which point it becomes an artifact itself ;–)). As far as entertainment in “the old days” I would say there was one entertainment device at our fingertips, it was called a book. I still use them myself! These always work best when coupled with an imagination, something that people don’t seem to want to bother developing anymore. People also had more resources within themselves to be entertained with; such as the ability to play an instrument or to do something creative. I wouldn’t even refer to the things we have nowadays as entertainment, they’re more like some sort of electronic drugs to keep us from thinking for ourselves or being able to actually do anything productive.
maybe outage related issues….
Does anybody know why the Ziegfeld page is not working?
/theaters/12/