Radio City Music Hall

Ken mc
you probably went in ‘71. There was a Christmas Circus stage show with that one. Scrooge was '70.
Robert that’s a great Music Hall Christmas ad. I always liked that illustration of the Leonidoff Nativity used until '69 though its a bit fuzzyy on microfilm.

The 1961 Christmas show
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Vincent-
You are totally correct about showcasing the theatres many “Capabilities” and one would think that the “Norm' would be to run a wonderful Summer show!! Unfortunately we are thinking with our hearts,not our corporate heads. Its like any other business, when Mom & Pop pass on the STORE to the kids, it usually signals the end of a glorious era. I can only hope that some of our finer execs will come through this coming year. I can tell you that I have come to know some nice people here and I feel there is some hope.
KEEP THE FAITH Folks!

RobertR,
There is a good Times' article on the death of the roadshow from ‘69. It would be great if you could find it and post it on the Rivoli or Criterion page.

Here is a very good 1978 NY Times story on the Music Halls booking problems.
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Vincent—
Thanks for your kind comments on my reviews of 1957. I have one more before moving on to 1956. Here’s a Program from January 1957:

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This must be a rare document, because in a post on 14 July 2004 above, SimonL pointed out that “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” garnered the smallest attendance of any film in the glory days of RCMH. The opening week earned $85,000, at a time when the theater’s standard receipts usually hit $140,000 or higher. The show stayed on for an equally dismal second week, and then folded. I can only wonder what prospective audiences might have thought. “Just who were the Barretts of Wimpole Street?” “I think they lived in England.” “O.” “And I think one of them was sick, took morphine, and wrote poetry.” “O.” “And I think she married a guy who was younger than she was and who also wrote poetry.” “O.” “And I think they eloped to Tuscany.” “O. What’s playing at the Roxy?”

If I remember correctly, the movie stopped short of depicting the birth of the Barrett-Brownings’ son in Italy when Elizabeth was forty-three years old and still hypochondriac. They named the boy “Pennini” (I am not joking). The film’s major nod to poetry came in its first frames with an off-screen Jennifer Jones reciting “How Shall I Love Thee?”over images of trees. But the great contour curtain rose slowly and the Grand Organ’s final strains muffled out the sound of the words till they got lost in the high arches. It’s a shame that MGM made these poets’ lives seem so shallow. Besides “Shakespeare in Love,” what good movies are there about poets? Rudolf Friml’s “Vagabond King”? Someone should film Goethe’s “Tasso” or Pierre Louys’s “Sappho” and give it a midnight screening at RCMH. For the record, “Anastasia” was playing as a Christmas hold-over at the Roxy, to be followed by Frank Tashlin’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” with Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard, and a dozen other Rock’n’Roll stars.

For all that, I remember the stage show as being quite good. The newspaper theme opened with the Choral Ensemble singing about frantic nights at the daily press and moved to the Rockettes who boogied on the thirty-six keys of a giant typewriter. The entertainment and metro pages were filled by Richiardi, a magician who in the ‘70s mounted his own show on B’way, and by Janik and Arnaut, exotic dancers (in the old sense of the words) who executed a snake charmer number. The conclusion took us to a front-page report on President Eisenhower’s Inaugural Ball that year, with the Corps de Ballet garbed in red, white, and blue for a gambol along the Potomac. There was no Jenna to contend with.

BOBill,
Your descriptions of the year ‘57 have been especially wonderful.
St Louis is a terrific film and with some of that amazing photography and the great set pieces it must have been very exciting on the Music Hall screen. I’m just sorry Wilder didn’t get a younger actor for Lindberg. Stewart was far too old to play a young fearless aviator at this point(He would have been perfect in '37.)

Site that lists some of the dancers, articles written about and other info about the Rockettes:

http://www.streetswing.com/histmai2/d2rockt1.htm

Here’s a Program from March, 1957:

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Another rousing show that year, “The Spirit of St. Louis” and its stage presentation marked a couple of departures. For one, the film bore none of Billy Wilder’s trademark cynicism or irony; or, if it did, those qualities worked so subtly against the film’s celebratory grain that they provided just enough grit to form a pearl. I found it amazing how one actor and a buzzing fly could sustain such attention for so long in a film whose outcome we knew from the start. I shall never forget the ending with the actor and the plane alone in the hanger at Le Bourget as French crowds intoned Lindbergh’s name, the actor naively intoning “There were 200,000 people there that night. And when we came back home, there were 4 million people waiting,” and finally the cut to actual footage of Lindy’s ticker-tape parade in NYC, with “Stars and Stripes Forever” on the soundtrack, now synchronized with the Grand Organ as the great contour curtain fell.

A second departure, as I’ve already remarked on this page (23 July 2004) is that the organ interludes before and after the movie and stage show were framed in a way I’d never experienced before or after at RCMH. Instead of using the golden houselights on the contour curtain and arches, the tech crew lit the entire auditorium in sky blue to match the movie’s theme. And instead of using organ #1 on the left as usual, they used organ #2 on the right. I remember thinking, jees, all these tourists here for the first and maybe last time will never see the famous “sunset” effect of the golden curtain. Some might recall that the newsreels and next-attraction announcement always took place under dimly blue-lit arches to enable arriving and departing patrons to navigate the aisles. For the interludes at this show, the intensity was ratcheted up several levels to bathe the house in Lindy blue. Odd.

A third, but expected, departure was a very brief stage show to make up for the extreme length of the film. I remember its prevailing color scheme figured as blue, too. The opening classical ballet gave way to 1920s-ish Gershwinesque tunes sung by the Foursome (who would reappear later that year in the stage show with “The Pajama Game”). That in turn gave way to a stage set of enormous magazine covers, from which the Rockettes stepped out to perform their routine. Then came the finale and that was it for the show. The program provides credits for umbrellas used in one of the acts, but for the life of me, I can’t remember how they played out in the scenario.

RE PeterApruzzese’s: “From what I understood, the organ always used to be amplified – the microphones were embedded in the outer edges of the chambers. Once when the interior was repainted, the microphones were painted over and ruined and then never used again. As of now, it’s difficult to hear the organ when there’s a large crowd.”

Denpiano would probably give us a definitive answer on this. IIRC, the amplification was only used for the percussions, such as the piano, glockenspiel, chimes, etc. Now, the house sound system is so loud, the organ is “softer” than what’s played through the system. As mentioned previously, there was a time that the loudest musical instrument in the theater was the organ. I agree, there is no reason to blast everyone’s ears off during the show.

It’s difficult to hear the organ when people in the audience don’t shut up when the organ starts before the show. They don’t realize the organ “Prelude” is part of the show. <SIGH> I ‘spose audiences aren’t what they once were. Also, it depends on where you are sitting in the theatre to hear the organ the best. I think Denpiano would agree with me that the center front of the third mezzanine is a great place to hear the entire organ as those seats are fairly adjacent to the organ chambers.

From what I understood, the organ always used to be amplified – the microphones were embedded in the outer edges of the chambers. Once when the interior was repainted, the microphones were painted over and ruined and then never used again. As of now, it’s difficult to hear the organ when there’s a large crowd.

Hello again.
Just came across this in moms Rockette collection: 8x10 photo and original press note for it that might interest some of you:

Associated Press Photo from New York City

“Chorines Help Load Scrap
Chorus girls snappily load scrap onto a truck at one of the theatres in Radio City in New York Oct 14. About 30,000 pounds of scrap metal were collected at the Theatre.
Associated Press Photo 10/14/42

The b&w photo is of the Rockettes handing items to a truck parked outside as a few onlookers stand on sidewalk watching.

Yes… It’s annoying that producers do not trust the natural acoustics of a theatrical space work their magic. This has long been a point of consternation with respect to the amplified presentation of most legitimate Broadway productions in recent years. Projection of one’s voice has become a lost art of sorts among current Broadway performers… Or perhaps “hidden art” is a more appropriate term since many capable singers are probably asked to tone it down and let the mic sell the number to those in the farthest reaches of the mezzanine.

Surely, the RCMH organ doesn’t require electronic amplification… does it?