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MAGAZINE - OCTOBER 2013
R
adio City Music Hall, lo-
cated in the Rockefeller Center complex,
is the largest indoor theater in the world.
Most famous as the home of the legendary
Rockettes, Radio City Music Hall has also
hosted some of the world’s most legend-
ary entertainers on its Great Stage. More
than 300 million people have come to the
Music Hall to enjoy stage shows, movies,
concerts and special events.
Radio City Music Hall got its name be-
cause Rockefeller Center’s first tenant was
the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
and the complex was known as “Radio
City” in its early years. Radio City Music
Hall was designed to be a “palace for the
people,” offering spectacular entertain-
ment at a price the average New Yorker
could afford. The “Mighty Wurlitzer” or-
gan, with pipes housed in eleven separate
rooms, was built especially for the theatre.
Original special effects mechanisms, still
in use today, can produce rain, fog and
clouds through a system that draws steam
directly from a Con Edison generating
plant nearby.
Take a Tour. Highlights of the guided
tour include the Great Stage, the stage’s
hydraulic system, the renowned private
suite with 12-foot gold leaf ceilings, and
Not just the Rockettes, it’s m
an audience with a famous Radio City
Rockette.
Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spec-
tacular
Every year, more than a million visitors
attend the Radio City Christmas Spectacu-
lar. The eight-week show has been a sell-
out success since its debut in 1933. The
show includes favorites like”The Parade
of the Wooden Soldiers” and “The Living
Nativity.”
It snowed last week inside Radio City Mu-
sic Hall. Not for the first time, and not for
the last; the theater seats were draped in
protective plastic. Elves lounged around,
text-messaging. Upstairs someone was
primping a bear head; the dressing rooms
were lined with boxes and boxes of bobby
pins and false eyelashes. And then, on cue,
36 pairs of legs tapped their way onto the
scene. You could hear it coming from the
warren of hallways backstage: clickclick-
clickclickclickclick.
“I have been asking Radio City Music
Hall for 10 years to get familiar with the
material we used in the past and go into
the future by new-and-improving it,” Ms.
Jaust said this week. Outside her small of-
fice, dug out of a corner of the warehouse
and stacked with scrapbooks and memen-
tos, sat the entire history of Radio City:
more than 5,000 boxes of photographs,
production notes, programs and newspaper
clippings dating from its opening night,
Dec. 27, 1932, to today. In her shawl,
tweed skirt and sensible shoes, Ms. Jaust
is more librarian than leggy lady, but her
devotion to this theater — born when she
first visited at age 6 — is contagious. She
still talks about it like a besotted fangirl,
even referring to the hall as “we,” as
in: “We had a feverish first decade. We
opened a show a week.”
Ms. Haberman, it turns out, shared her
vintage-Rockette mania. To create this
milestone show, which runs through Jan.
30, she dived into archival photos and
film clips, researching the look and feel of
“Spectaculars” past.
“Back in the ’30s and ’40s they really
went for scale,” she said. “There would
be crazy sets where there were these giant
Wedgwood dishes and the dancers were
the designs on the plates. They used the
scale and the size of the music hall, so I
tried to bring a sense of that.”
For a show already known for its extrava-