Mark Daly’s Radio City Music Hall, First Snow
With the holidays just around the corner, I figured this week we’d talk about one of the more festive places in the city – Radio City Music Hall, which is featured in Mark Daly’s Radio City Music Hall, First Snow. Every winter it is completely decked out with lights and a Christmas tree, not to mention it hosts the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes… we’ll get back to that later.
The iconic Radio City Music Hall was part of an urban renewal project of the 1920s – Rockefeller Center. Initially, the plot of land where the hall sits (50th Street and 6th Avenue) was intended for the Metropolitan Opera, but the stock market crash of 1929 put an end to that. Instead, Rockefeller teamed up with RCA Electronics to create a “mass-media” complex for shows and performances.
Radio City Music Hall, 1941
It was the world’s largest music hall when it first opened in 1932, and originally hosted stage performances. Unfortunately, it was not very successful and the following year it converted to showing feature films – several prominent films made their debut there… King Kong (1933), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and Mary Poppins (1964) along with more than 600 others.
By the 1970s, film distribution made it difficult to secure exclusive viewings and the end of the decade saw its all-time lowest annual attendance. In 1978 following bankruptcy, it was announced the hall would close… but a committee of performers, the media, and politicians teamed up and successfully had it designated as a city landmark by the end of the year.
Radio City Music Hall, present day
Radio City was then renovated to its original condition and reopened in 1980 with a diverse mix of performances including concerts, TV shows, and live televised events. Concerts over the years ranged from the Grateful Dead to Lady Gaga; it’s been the set for Hollywood Squares, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy; and has hosted The Grammy Awards, The Tony Awards, the MTV VMAs, as well as the NFL draft from 2006-2014.
As mentioned earlier, it’s also the home of the world-famous Rockettes… the dance team has been around for nearly a century! And while I try not to get into anything too controversial in these posts, as with lots of things in American history, when you start reading about it there’s usually some racist stuff that comes up. For more than 60 years, the dance team was white-only… yup, even 20 years after the Civil Rights Movement, the group included no women of color. The director maintained that “blacks would ‘distract’ from the ‘look of precision’” – I don’t even know what to do with that statement. Through the 80s, increasing social pressure led to the first black Rockette in 1987, but something still wasn’t right… she would only be called up if there was a vacancy in the line; essentially, she was a backup.
skvidal, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
To this day, the group is mostly white, and they use lighting effects and makeup to create a “homogenous group” – to say it simply, they make non-white people appear more white. While the company has stated they are “taking a number of steps to showcase greater diversity,” they still have a lot of work to do in that regard. Perhaps “spectacular” is a questionable word to be using when it comes to this annual performance… at least until the act is more inclusive.
If you’ve made it this far, happy holidays! Hopefully next week will be a bit lighter reading.