Radio City Music Hall

Here’s a Program from April, 1956:

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Mario Lanza’s “Serenade” might rank among RCMH’s worst holiday film selections, but it points to the tremendous purchase that “the singing Clark Gable” held on the American public. It certainly drew a trio of teenagers to W. 50 Street, largely to flaunt their cruel boyish talents for mocking grand opera. As our elders threatened to call upon ushers to eject us, we simply kept changing seats. At one time or another that day, we had occupied just about every section in the orchestra and third balcony.

During the stage show, we greeted “The Glory of Easter” with at least some pretense of decorum, but the act that seized our sincere and undivided attention was Larry Griswold’s gymnastic turn. One of the inventors of the trampoline, Griswold impersonated a rubber-limbed drunk who climbed atop a high-diving-board and swing precariously from its edges, only to plunge into and bounce back from a spring-netted “swimming pool.” The shtick, widely performed on t.v. variety shows at the time, invariably brought the house down, and it thrilled us to see the real thing live On The Great Stage.

Less could be said for the musical finale that featured the pop song “No, Not Much.” The previous summerâ€"the summer of ‘55â€"Bill Haley seared our imaginations with “Rock Around the Clock,” and after that we could no longer tolerate any tunes from earlier decades. RCMH did not allow R&R to degrade its sound system until much later that Spring (see above, 5 Jan.). Meanwhile, its management had to have conceded that Lanza was washed up and that hooligans like me portended the future of ticket sales. At least in those days, the Showplace of the Nation knew how to adapt.

“Serenade” and the Easter show drew such a diverse clientele only a few weeks short of fifty years ago. As I look through my collected programs, I’m surprised to find that I have none from the mighty year that preceded it. In 1955 I had turned thirteen and had fallen in with a bad crowd. For a while, I feigned great indifference to the Rockettes and preferred to hang out with my friends in barrooms and back alleys, or at least at Loew’s Alpine where we smoked Kool cigarettes and watched Martin and Lewis movies. Fathers warned one other, “Lock up yer daughters; Box Office Billy’s a hormone-raging teenager now.” By the time I finally snapped out of that phase, I had lost a great deal. But I still have a clutch of programs from 1954 and earlier, and I’ll share them eventually on this site. Under the crunch of upcoming work, I’ll be running for the next couple of months with no access to a scanner. Till that’s over, this seems a good time to pause.

Luis,

I never saw the Roxy, either, but I remember Penn Station as a kid. I get more than a knot in the stomach when I travel to NYC and have to use that poor excuse for a train station … the present Penn Station. Yuck!

The thanks for saving the Hall most properly goes to folks from the Showpeoples' Committee and people like Denpiano. His employer (and he) probably know more about the Hall than space here on this forum would permit. If it weren’t like Denpiano and his colleagues, the Mighty WurliTzer would probably have been sold years ago or worse, hauled off to a landfill. I well remember when I visited there in January 1978 admidst the uproar of the closing of Radio City, a collector from the West Coast had already made inquiries about buying the instrument.

Astrocks… I was not one of those people dancing in a circle, I can assure you. I was never one of the twirlers, as they were known. I do a fair amount of boogie-ing at a good concert, but I mostly confine it to the space I occupy standing in front of my seat. I was not there for the show where the dude leapt or fell from the mezzanine, but I remember folks buzzing about it on the street and in the lobby when I got there for MY first show of that run.

As for WHT, if you didn’t have the Wometco converter, you could still tune into channel 68 – since it was a regular UHF station – but you would see a scrambled picture and the audio was some laid back guy who basically played music and would talk about how great a WHT subscription would be between tunes. I remember I would tune in just to check this guy out. He played decent music and would talk about the movies playing that month on the service – all in a very warm and charming manner. He probably had an audience that numbered in the dozens at best, but he did his thing as if he really wanted to entertain the people who happened upon the channel. I also remember that the station broadcast regular unscrambled TV during the day and would scramble only at night – around 7 or 8pm. It was an independent channel out of Newak – or somewhere in north Jersey. One of the regular programs was the comedy show of “Uncle Floyd” Vivino. When subscriptions starting reaching further east on Long Island, I remember they had to begin a duplicate broadcast on another UHF channel – 72 perhaps?

Ah well… I digress. I have a habit of doing that. I now return you to your regular programming.

EdSolero WHT huh? If I am not mistaken WHT was Wometco Home Theatre.A friend of mine use to have it and had an antenna on the roof with the converter box.

Disney and RCMH? Wow thats a new one on me.

Astrocks… then you must remember me! I was one of the great many hordes of dirty, hairy Dead Heads that descended upon the Hall for a series of 10 concerts the Grateful Dead played there in October of 1980! I’m joking, naturally. But I was there for 5 of those shows, although I was neither dirty nor hairy – nor did I travel in a horde. As this run (along with a matching set of shows at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater) was an unofficial celebration of the band’s 15 year anniversary, the final show on Halloween was simulcast, I believe, for closed circuit broadcast to other theaters. Either that or it was broadcast live on cable TV. Not too long after the concert, I remember a replay on the old Wometco Home Theater pay-service – remember WHT? You needed a special UHF antenna with a decoder box and tuned into channel 68 in NY to receive the transmission (this was mostly for the outer boroughs, which did not have cable TV like Manhattan did).

Anyway… I recall that many in the crowd were disrespectful of the old gal, but I always thought of her as a Queen and was sure to leave nothing but the proverbial tracks when I left the theater. I was just thrilled that the theater I cherished from childhood had been saved from demolition and that – just a cherry on top of this delicious cake – my favorite band was going to settle in under those magnificent proscenium arches for a nice long run of shows. What was your job there, astrocks?

Hey Organized, please accept my heartfelt thanks for standing up way back when to save Radio City. I never got to see the Roxy or the old Penn Station and I always get a knot in my stomach that we lost 2 of the most incredible structures ever built before I had a chance to at least see them. I try to console myself with the knowledge that the loss of Penn Station in particular, enabled us to save Grand Central and Radio City, but it still hurts! Thanks again, Luis

I only had the oportunity to see 2 movies at Radio City in my youth. One was Disney’s “Follow me Boys” in the 70’s which was paired with what I believe was a 30 minute stage show with the Rockettes. The second was a special engagement of Fantasia in the late 70’s. I remember being so taken with this theater that when I heard they were considering tearing it down, I made a commitment to myself to lay before the bulldozers. Luckily, it never came to that, but I was unaware of how many other glorious theaters were lost because no one stood up. The sad reality is that there were so many wondrous theaters in the past that there is no economical way they could have been preserved into today’s world. The truly sad thing is that so few are still left. This web site has made that painfully clear. Thanks Cinema Treasures for doing such a great public service.

Since disability has meant the use of a wheelchair 24/7, my best memory of that Mighty Wurlitzer is as close as my phonograph with one of the discs from my 2-LP disc recording of RCMH Christmas music on it.

Quoting Denpiano’s: I’m 53 and think nothing was better than the 60’s and 70’s.

I remember my high school senior class trip to RCMH in May 1969. The movie playing IIRC was Winning. It was about NASCAR racing … I think Paul Newman was in it.

The stage show featured a “mock” NASA rocket launch from the Great Stage since the first moon walk was planed for July that year. It was nothing short of spectacular. The “smoke and steam” coming from the “rocket engines” was provided by C02 fire extinguishers as I found out almost ten years later on one my my “insiders” tours with the one and only Ray Bohr. I saw these used fire extinguishers up above the curved ceiling on the “roof” of one of the prompt side organ chambers. Ray said they never threw anything out at the Hall. Even the original WurliTzer console pedalboards that were replaced were up there. But, I’ve run off track here.

Getting back to the show, I was seated in the front orchestra and during the organ interlude, I got up and walked over to the prompt side console and discovered Ray at the console, much to my delight. A lady and her son were there and we got into a conversation about the Mighty WurliTzer. She told me that their family had an electronic organ just like the one in front of us. I knew that Ray could hear her. I politely told her that she was not listening to an electronic organ by no means but to the largest original theater pipe organ built to date.

Denpiano, I only have two years on you, and the memories of the 60’s and 70’s shows are great aren’t they? I can only well remember standing in line for hours up 50th street, around Rockefeller Plaza, almost to 51st Street, waiting to get in to see an Easter or a Christmas show and MOVIE. And that’s after traveling from train for three hours to New York City.

It was worth making this year’s Christmas Spectacular as usual. My wife and I liked the new digital screen. Since my 1970’s-type private visits, augmented with a too-short one in 2000, are gone, I consider my annual pilgrimage to RCMH my annual “fix.” My Church where I am organist installed a new church organ (digital) last month and I can get a lot of WurliTzer sounds out of it … much to the pleasure of the congregation.

The late Ray Bohr’s “signature” tune was The Song is Ended, But the Melody Lingers On. It’s so appropriate to what we all talk about here as were share our individual thoughts and recollections of this fabulous place.

IMHO.

Multiple posts, I find, usually occur when you click the “Submit” button more than once. If it seems like the Submit request is taking a long time, you should still refrain from clicking the button again. Even when the site times out on me during the Submit process, often when I go back in, I find that my comment has been posted after all.

I agree as I have my personal email addressed on my profile page and wish others would do the same as there have been times when I would like to contact a particular CT member about additional theatre information or related topic.

Rccker: I guess I do recall making that remark sometime in my CT past and it was probably over multiple exact posts as sometimes happens. I really enjoy reading all of the many RCMH posts as it has a rich history in the Big Apple.