Rockettes

No, this isn’t about some twelve year old’s fever dream of pretty older girls high kicking and dancing on stage. Sure, it could be, but it is not.

I didn’t think of them that way. Sure they were pretty, but they were ROCKETTES for God’s sake. Even though we all lived in the same city, it might as well have been different universes. Truth be told, they were all young and probably struggling performers, but landing a Rockette job must have been a nice boost. They got to inhabit the world we could only visit in brief snippets.

We were all New Yorkers, but there were many different worlds in New York. There was the world of Knickerbockers, and the Upper West Side, and the Rainbow Room. The world of the Hamptons and Forest Hills and Westchester County. We lived in another world. A world of small apartments over butcher shops and drug stores. A world of waiting thirty minutes between buses in the cold or taking multiple subway trains to get anywhere. A world where a kid had to have his wits about him on the street.

So for me, The Rockettes and their home, Radio City Music Hall, were both icons and symbols of that other world. But they were approachable. They weren’t playing for tourists on grand holidays during the Christmas Season. They played every day, for everybody. Admission was the price of a movie. And for that you got to watch the movie and see The Rockettes perform in that grand, lush, enormous art deco palace. It was an early morning bus and subway ride away, but for us, it was our home movie house.

For some reason we’d always get up before it was light out and spend a couple of hours getting there on the bus and subway. I can imagine my mother, wanting to catch the earliest show possible. The show wasn’t expensive but the all day outing would have been a stretch, and so we’d go to an early, less expensive show.

We’d take the “E” Train to the 50th street station. That’s the Rockefeller Center station. To get to the Music Hall you’d take the exit up to 6th Avenue, also called “The Avenue of The Americas”, and as soon as you hit the street you were in a different world. There was all the teeming bustle of midtown Manhattan, but the setting was luxuriant. It was Art Deco everywhere.

A note on the train. Today it is the ‘F’ train that stops at the 50th Street Rockefeller Center station. But I am sure at the time it was the ‘E’. The E line was served at the time by R1-R9 cars, which were themselves a product of the Art Deco era, and it shows. With the design of the roof vents they always looked a bit pre-historic to me, especially when the classification lights on either side of the roof were lit. The interiors had bare bulb incandescent lighting, ceiling fans, and rattan-like seats. The traction motors had a very distinctive whine to them, almost like one of those friction motors in a toy car that you pull back and release. They were first introduced in 1930 and served until 1976. 

Once on the street, we would walk under the canopy of the huge Radio City marquee…the one you always see on television, perhaps because it’s right across from “30 Rock” another Art Deco palace, which has been NBC headquarters for decades. On the underside of the marquee there were large square tiles with soft incandescent lights that continued into the ticket booth area. There were a couple of ticket booths, and after you bought your ticket you’d go inside. To your left was a huge, sweeping stair case. If you went up you would go to the balcony levels. If you went down you would go to the restrooms. Everything was black, brass and gold. If Rockefeller Center was the Art Deco cathedral, Radio City was the inner sanctum.

Don’t ask me too much about where we sat. I can remember climbing stairs up to balcony seats and I also remember sitting on the main floor. The experience wasn’t much different either way. You would sit in that enormous hall, with the arched ceiling seemingly miles above your head. While the stage show was going on you could see the glow of the stage lights from the light coves, but you never actually saw any of the lights. When the movie started, all the lights in the house would switch over to a dark blue light…just enough light to navigate to a restroom or the snack bar. The screen was so big, you felt like you were part of the action of the movie.

When the stage show started, complete with Rockettes, the orchestra would rise up on a lift from below the stage. Sometimes the lift would drop down and roll back and come up behind the performers. That lift, with the entire large orchestra in place could do a full circuit: drop down, roll to the back, come up behind, roll to the front and then do it all again. When all the platforms were locked in place, there was a turntable in the middle on which the performers could act like they were ice skating.

At some point during the stage show one of the two gigantic organ consoles would come sliding out of a cove either on stage left or right. Then the Wurlitzer organ would fill that 6000 seat hall like it was someone speaking to you across a table. It didn’t echo, it wasn’t too loud, it was just the right volume. Velvety, only loud when it needed to make a point.

The last time I saw a movie there was in 1976. I was 19 and I went by myself. I had just started studying theatre and I wanted to see the greatest movie theater in the world and catch the stage show, which I watched twice. The crowd was small so I was able to get right down front and sit through the unmemorable movie twice so I could sit through the stage show twice. I could have reached out and shook hands with the orchestra members. They showed the last movie in 1979. It was too big of a house to fill for days on end, especially when you have to pay the orchestra, care for the animals (yes, there are stables and other animal facilities backstage) and pay all the performers, ushers, etc.

The last show of any type I saw there was something called “Manhattan Showboat”. It reminded me of one of those old time Ziegfeld shows. Short on plot long on lavish production numbers, but still, I just read a review in a back issue of the Times and apparently it was well received by critics. In my mind though, the real show was put on by the theater itself as they used every trick that great stage was capable of…short of making it rain, which they can also do. Also, there was a baby elephant.

Radio City Music Hall lives on. Concerts, awards shows, and of course, the Rockettes continue to do their thing, drawing tens of thousands during each Christmas season. It is not going away anytime soon. But for all of the lavish spectaculars and big awards shows that go on there, I will always remember it as our movie house. And my mother holding my hand, keeping me from getting lost, as we sit down to watch Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in “Father Goose” and the Rockettes do their famous “Parade of The Wooden Soldiers”; the same one they’ve done since 1933; the same one you can see today.

Footnote: The great theatre nearly closed in the late 1970s, a victim of changing tastes and a city in decline. The Rockettes themselves led the charge to save it, but you need someone that lives in the circles of power to move that kind of mountain. They found that champion in the deputy mayor of New York City, who was herself, a former Rockette.

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