Radio City Music Hall

Vincent-
The organ is used in May for all the graduations and also
for any renters of the hall that request it, though rare, they
sometimes ask for “walk ins” 20 minutes or more prior to whatever
extravaganza they are throwing. Update: tomorrow (SUN)we are supposed
to have an orchestra run thru for the christmas show, I hope they settled their differences!!

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In answer to the above post I remember seeing a RCMH Ad in the late 50’s – early 60’s showing a price of 90 cents before 10:30 AM. And here are a few insignificant memories of my own about RCMH.
As a six year old in 1947 my family drove up from Florida for a NEW YORK CITY VACATION.
It was the beginning of my love for NYC with the Empire State Building and the RCA building where
a tour of the radio studios ended with a display of, oh my GOD, TELEVISION. But it was e RADIO
CITY MUSIC HALL that impressed me the most. A STAGE SHOW and a MOVIE. I thought I had gone to heaven and I remember especially all the curtain maneuvers (not just the GRAND DRAPE) but all the runners. Its been 58 years ago but the split timing of the show is still with me. The Rocketts would all be dancing and singing or whatever for the big finale and the curtain would close and then
immediately open and there was the Movie., How did they do that so quickly was my thought.

I also remember that well into the 50’s (when I was in high school and in New York again) I attended a RCMH show and remember the newreel contained just ONE news event (about 45 seconds with the intro and close). The Coming Attraction trailer as mentioned above was very impressive because it was custom made (like a formal invitation) and accompanied by the organ playing subdued music. I remember the Grand Curtain dropping down and wondering whether the preview would run out before the curtain completed its drop since it takes some time for the curtain to complete its
closing.
I was lucky to see (probably around 1960) or so the Underwater Mermaid Sequence which was fantastic.
Around 1970 I was with a friend who was well versed in the ARTS and MUSIC and who had never been to RCMH. We attended the 3:43 or something like that and the movie was almost over. The curtain closed and immediately this giant Symphonic orchestra rose up playing all the while. I remember him laughing at the audacity of the presentation (I mean the orchestra was actually playing as it rose and this was not just some small band but a damn symphonic orchestra. He just couldn’t believe it. But he was impressed and enjoyed the entertainment value of the show if not the
sophistication he was used too.
The last film I saw and it must have been in the middle or late 70’s was MAME with Lucille Ball. I sat in the upper balcony. stan

Geoffrey- I am not one of the BISHOPS, I do however work for the family. The Prompt console in fact has two extra stop rails, on the right are Tibias ( White Tabs) at all pitch levels for Ease? of finding them. Dick, Ray & co. never had trouble finding them and neither do I. Left side bottom are Black tabs for MIDI control. Now you can play Midi on all manuals & Pedals. There are also extra toe pistons on the console for more control. A dear friend of mine who also worked on the organ and has recently passed away was a Dick Liebert & Ray Bohr fan and knew them both VERY WELL! He gave me some of Rays intros to learn & I enjoy duplicating the old sound at 3AM
when the theatre is quiet & I can experiment the quieter voices of the organ. The OLD LADY as the guys call her is in fine tune, too bad
it may not be used for the show do to the musicians strike.
PS, you’re correct! The Theatre Organ Did put musicians out of work
except for the organist.

Denpiano – I should have included Ray Bohr in my comment as I was able in my sophomore and Junior years to arrange my classes so that my Friday afternoons would be free, thus enabling me to arrive before the afternoon stage show around 3, hear Ray play that one, stay for the movie and then do the show all over again at 6 with Leibert presiding.

Ray always appeared to be very tense when he played, but his arrangements were excellent and you could tell he really loved that organ. I only wish I had shown up for more house openings, when he would, as I was told much too much later, play for up to half an hour before the first movie. I met him at the stage door a couple of times (I was a teen-age theatre organist groupie) and even exchanged a couple of letters with him later on, and he was always very polite and patient with my youthful exuberance and curiosity.

I also learned to arrange my dates for after 10 and to bring a book so that if Leibert was especially “on” I could sit out the next movie in the grand lounge (in those days it really was both those things) and catch him again at 9. And all for something like 99 cents, as I recall! My interest in Leibert’s astonishing playing, in the Music Hall and in the organ bordered on the pathological in those days, and has not waned much since, despite almost 40 years and the distance to Toronto. Leibert, Bohr and Jack Ward, along with Ashley Miller, Lee Erwin and a few others were as you say the last of their kind. And each had his unmistakable style of playing – you just don’t find that much anymore.

I broke into a broad smile over your comments about the virtual orchestras, coming as they do from the person who takes care of the largest Wurlitzer ever built. The Wurlitzer Hope-Jones Unit Orchestra was marketed the better part of a century ago to be precisely the same thing – a one-person substitute for pit orchestras in theatres where the proprietors couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for all those musicians but wanted the same richness of sound to accompany the films and stage presentations. Eventually just the organists were left, especially in England.

I must admit that I am full of envy that you get to take care of that wonderful behemoth (you must be one of the Bishops, no?), and since you do, I have a question. I have noticed in recent photos of the prompt console that there is an extra stoprail at the bottom on either side – stops that were not there originally. Would you be able to enlighten me as to what they are for? I understand that in the conversion to a solid state relay the original stoplist and stoprail layout was not altered – are these additional Tibia unifications and things for those present-day organists who might not be able to play without them? (LOL)

“Don’t Go Near the Water” was the Thanksgiving attraction that year(see my post of 13 Oct above). Yes, “Peyton Place” was the Roxy’s Christmas rival that year, and its lurid reputation possibly pushed the family crowd into the gloom of “Sayonara” at RCMH— better suicide than (gasp) teen-age sex. But the show at the Roxy was wonderful— I remember its stage presentation as one of its best, though I no longer have the program.

Bless you, BobT!!! I’ve been trying to figure that out for ages, now. I’ll have to dig around online for more historical info and hopefully some photos, but that’s a personal project apart from the doings at this site. Thanks for the push in the right direction!

Geoffrey—

Thanks for the clarification in your splendid post. Daniel Okrent, until last June the Public Editor of the NY Times (appointed in 2003), has written generalist books on such topics as baseball and New England, and he gets his stuff right. Carol Krinsky, an architectural historian of distinction who teaches at NYU, sorted out the problems and issues in her 1978 book. She recounts that the design of Rockefeller Center was thoroughly collaborative as it enlisted the talents of several companies (Todd, Robertson, and Todd; Reinhard and Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison, and MacMurray)under the combined name of The Associated Architects. Harrison designed the building and appointed Stone as design supervisor of the auditorium. Ground was broken in summer ‘31 and construction was well underway by the following June when Deskey won the competition for interior decorating, which itself had enlisted the talents of mural, furniture, fabric, and lighting artists. The rapidity of its completion is staggering.

Here’s a Program from September, 1957, a quarter-century later when RCMH was at its height of day-to-day operating success:

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RCMH was flooded with long-running musicals that year. “The Pajama Game” opened as its Labor Day attraction, the rare Warner Brothers musical that could stand up to the MGM competition flanking it. This program does not note that Bob Fosse did the choreography, but who could ever forget “Steam Heat” or “Hernando’s Hideway” after seeing Carol Haney performing them? Four years earlier Fosse and Haney had both appeared on the RCMH screen in the amazing “From This Moment On” number in “Kiss Me Kate.” Rich stuff.

The stage show matched the tune fest on the screen, from the Gershwin overture to the featured appearance of India Adams in two segments. Adams had dubbed the singing voice of Cyd Charisse in “The Band Wagon” and held a steady career performing B’way pop in supperclubs and variety shows. The Foursome who accompanied her as an opener to the Rockettes was not likely the original group that had introduced “Biding My Time” in “Girl Crazy” and had appeared with Eleanor Powell in “Born to Dance,” but it quite possibly revived the latter’s style in the ‘50s. In ’57 their sort of pop music was still holding sway after more than a quarter-century of dominance. Then, within a couple of years, it would suddenly seem horribly anachronistic to most tastes.

Georgie Kaye was a stand-up comedian who appeared regularly on the Ed Sullivan TV show. He offered a nice balance to the Ponchielli ballet. You could always predict that the RCMH stage show would build to a jazzy climax when the overture was by Gershwin and the opening segment featured a classical ballet such as “The Dance of the Hours.” The latter, elegant and refined and sumptuously staged as it was, seemed extravagant barrier to get through in completing the trajectory from Gershwin to the Rockettes. In a way, RCMH spoiled me for ballet. The company was super disciplined and super precise (a bit in the manner of the precision of the Rockettes) and super large. When, a few years later, I found myself attending Sadler’s Wells and Bolshoi, I thought them smaller and less pointedly in-synch than Margaret Sande’s and Florence Rogge’s dancers. For all its exaggeration, RCMH’s Corps de Ballet introduced serious dance to hundreds of thousands of us who otherwise would not have bothered to seek it out.

The notice for “Sayonara” as an up-coming attraction does not indicate that it would be the Christmas show. I wonder whether the management had planned it for an earlier release, perhaps as the Thanksgiving show. Its length and brooding content had always struck me as inappropriate for the holiday season. Heaven knows that the hold-over runs of musicals such as “The Pajama Game” that year would have pushed back its opening in any event.

Wow!

What I don’t understand is they only do two months. What are they asking for that Cablevision won’t give them?
What does a virtual orchestra consist of? Are these musicians scabs on tape? Or is it done with synthesizers? What about the organists? Are they a different union? Will they play? Are they then crossing the picket line if they do? Is then every performer then crossing that line?

I can only hope there will be solidarity with all the unions and they shut down the show. Local 802 will hold a rally today at 5pm

I remember a class trip in 1976 to see this at Christmas time.
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Ginger Rogers. Richard Rodgers. Either spelling, still obscure.

1938
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