Extravaganza
Yesterday, after our family gathering at Morton’s in midtown Manhattan (the Cornell Club private rooms were not available on a Sunday), we took most of the assembled masses to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular Show extravaganza. We don’t go to the show there every year, but have gone many times over the years. This show, or a form of it, has been playing in Radio City Music Hall since 1933. They change it up a little bit at the edges every year, but one of the great and somewhat comforting things about it is that it remains largely the same as it has over the last 90 years. When I think about it, it began in the depths of the Great Depression while my mother was in college at Cornell. She talked about going to New York City in those days with great reverence. She explained that it was a time when a woman would always wear gloves to come into the City if she wanted to be properly attired. That’s one anachronism that does not continue on through today even though many of the elements of the show that people found entertaining back then are still wowing the crowd today. To begin with, over one million visitors attend these performances every holiday season. I guess that is why an impresario of the caliber of James Dolan of Madison Square Garden and The Sphere fame has taken a long-term lease on Radio City Music Hall. Since New York CIty real estate has a habit of breaking up its buildings into salable sub-pieces, it is not strange that Dolan, the scion of the Cablevision empire started by his father Charles, has decided to expand his network from the biggest NYC attraction venue, Madison Square Garden, to include such an iconic venue as Radio City Music Hall. The venue caries the nickname of “The Showplace of the Nation” and is an art deco masterpiece of some 6,000 square feet, that was originally destined to be the home of the Metropolitan Opera.
It was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s love of the opera that originally got him involved in this real estate project in the late 1920’s only to have the opera take a pass due to cost and Rockefeller deciding that he was all-in on the site, which became the iconic Rockefeller Center. So, in some ways, Radio City Music Hall was the heart of Rockefeller Center from the start and that makes it the heart of midtown Manhattan given the Center’s prominence in the landscape. The interior, like all of Rockefeller Center is done in classic roccoco style, seating 6,000 patrons (the largest theater in the world at the time) with the lobby adorned with a huge mural called “Quest for the Fountain of Eternal Youth”, which somehow seems fitting for a theater that hosts so many shows enjoyed by the young of many succeeding generations. The name of the theater comes from the complex’s lead corporate sponsor, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the company that was a sort of blend of Netflix, HBO, Disney and Amazon Prime of its era. The high-class entertainment that kicked-off the venue included a precision dance troupe which became known as the Rockettes, who still perform at the central act of these shows even today. The initial shows were not particularly well-reviewed though it was said that the venue was so spectacular that it made up for the lack of entertainment value. The Hall has had a rocky attendance and profitability history over the years, peaking at over 5 million visitors a year and often being the most popular NYC visitor venue, eclipsing even the Empire State Building in attendance. Like the City in which it lives, its history has had plenty of ups and downs.
Madison Square Garden under Dolan has controlled the Hall for about 25 years now, but even they had to deal with the problems of COVID. The Pandemic caused the Hall to close for almost a year, but since 2021, it has gradually come back into full operational mode. Judging by the throng of visitors we joined yesterday and the apparent full capacity of the humongous Hall, it is safe to say that Radio City and The Christmas Spectacular are back in full stride.
Kim and I reminded ourselves that the last time we were in Radio City Music Hall was in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of Easy Rider and a tribute to its star, Peter Fonda, who died that year. That means that the last time we attended the Christmas Spectacular was a few years before that. The Hall is every bit as magnificent as it was then with the plush velvet seats (which must be a bitch to maintain) and the ornate “clamshell” stage set-up. The show began with the historic dual organ recital, which added a nice remembrance of theater times long past to the start of the show. The show itself is a series of skits like any other variety show, with the exception that there is very little verbiage or narration compared to years gone by. The other thing that is very noticeable in the run-of-show line-up is that the ratio of commercial Santa Claus bits compared to religious Christian bits has shifted in favor of the commercial. Besides the general ubiquitous presence of the Rockettes in most of the skits, the two things that seemed virtually unchanged from the many times past we have seen the show were the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers and the Christ Child scenes. The Wooden Soldiers is when the Rockettes line up in wooden toy soldier suits of red and white with large British fur hats and take a cannon shot to the front of the line and proceed to take a slow-motion linked prat fall backward, landing ultimately on a big red velvet pillow. There are 80 Rockettes on staff, organized in two flights of 40 with only 36 on stage at a time (the other four being held in reserve as under-studies). They get paid about $22 per hour for their efforts, which is hardly star-studded pay, but the spots remain very competitive for both dancer resume credential purposes and general lifelong bragging rights.
The other familiar skit is the reenactment of the birth of Christ. It is, after all, a Christmas Spectacular, so the blessed event that took place 2,023 years ago should occupy a special place in the line-up. It used to be that the show would end on that religious note, with a dropping of a scrim that reminded us that despite his young age of 33 or that he never held public office, traveled more than 50 miles form his place of birth or accumulated great wealth, that Christ has done more to change the world than any other man who ever lived. They have done away with the religious scrim, but given the use of live sheep and camels for the processions of the Three Wise Men and other visitors to the manger in Bethlehem, the Star of Bethlehem (astronomers say it was neither the North Star Polaris, nor a comet like Haley’s Comet, but rather another anomalous astronomical event) shines brightly in the firmament for us all to remember the Christmas spirit. The one thing that Dolan has done in recent years is to add a great deal of visual projections on the overhead clamshell of the stage. These moving images are very much like the 270 degree experience one gets in the Sphere in Las Vegas, and it adds a lot to the spectacle of the overall event.
Everyone enjoyed the show and I was impressed by the technology that has been added to the show (including drone-like doves of peace that fly overhead at one point). I imagine that the Radio City Christmas Spectacular will go on for many years to come. It is one of those things that reminds you of the good things that New York City brings to our lives, and helps explain some of the ancient disciples’ added extravaganzas and spectacles to the Bible. We all need a little extravaganza in our lives, perhaps especially at Christmas.