Radio City Music Hall
The big movie attraction of the week was the Easter Show at Radio City Music Hall. With wartime travel restriction lifted, the tourists were back in the city and many of them were lining up at Radio City where the Easter ticket sales were keeping pace with the record set the previous Christmas. THE GREEN YEARS was the movie but the traditional Radio City Easter Pageant was at least as much of a draw as the film. According to that Sunday's Herald Tribune, more than 4.5-million people had seen "The Glory of Easter" since its debut at Radio City, and the production actually was older than the Music Hall. Its origins could be traced to the similar Easter show Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel presented at the Roxy, the former crown jewel of New York movie theaters.
The Radio City Music Hall, which billed itself as the Showplace of the Nation, departed from the rococo norm of its predecessors. It was a deco extravaganza, in keeping with the look of its Rockefeller Center location. Rockefeller Center was a monument to affluence and business that opened in the depths of the Depression. It was a bigger draw to visitors than the Statue of Liberty, and Radio City Music Hall was a must stop if you had the price of admission. For 70 cents to $1.20 a moviegoer could lift the blues and experience cutting-edge design. The ushers, often aspiring actors, were chosen for their looks. The young Gregory Peck had worked at Rockefeller Center before he went to Hollywood.
When the theater opened in December 1932, it was supposed to house musical variety revues, sort of a classier update of vaudeville mixing baggy pants comedians with modern dance, pop singers and choral ensembles. David Sarnoff of RCA and RKO lured Rothafel, who had been the impresario behind several of the earlier movie palaces, along with his creative team, including the Hungarian-born Erno Rapee, a composer as well as a highly-regarded conductor, and producer Leon Leonidoff, a former ballet dancer from Bessarabia, to Radio City. Rothafel also brought over Russell Markert’s precision dancers, the Roxyettes, rechristened as the Rockettes in honor of their new home. Rockefeller Center had a second theater, known as the New RKO Roxy until the original Roxy theater objected, that was supposed to be the movie theater for the complex. In January 1933 the roles were reversed after the Music Hall’s mammoth stage swallowed up the opening-night performances of Martha Graham, Ray Bolger et al, leaving critics and audience members cold. It was such a flop that Rothafel was forced out of his management role. The smaller theater in the complex, renamed Center Theatre, became home to live performances--in 1946 it housed an ice show produced by Sonja Henie--while the Music Hall added a movie and shortened its stage show to an hour with an emphasis on visual spectacle. With this new format, the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall became the largest and most prestigious motion picture theater in the city and arguably the nation. The studios vied to book pictures here. Going to Radio City was a total experience, and it was the last of the grand movie palaces to be built in New York.
The week of April 14 was the week before Easter and the Music Hall was presenting its traditional holiday show. It opened with the lavish “cathedral pageant,” the “Glory of Easter” featuring the Radio City Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Charles Previn with inspirational songs performed by contralto Lucile Cummings and the chorale ensemble. Previn had returned to Radio City from Hollywood, where he had been musical director at Universal, in 1945 after Rapee, his former boss, died of a heart attack. It was a team of Jewish men who created “The Glory of Easter” as well as the Music Hall’s other famous celebration of Christian religiosity, "The Living Nativity."
Since it hardly would be fitting for the Rockettes to high-kick through the Resurrection, there was a second part to the Easter show, “On the Avenue,” a “gay springtime revue,” featuring glamorous dancing in precision by the Rockettes, who were dressed as daffodils, and a dance fantasy by the Corps de Ballet and ten soloists in which the company was costumed as vegetables. The show also starred the Music Hall’s amazing hydraulics which transported audiences from the Easter Parade in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where soprano Marion Carter and the choral ensemble sang a seasonal medley as the cast spilled through the cathedral doors dressed in Easter finery, to a recreation of the plaza and promenade of Rockefeller Plaza, where Myrtill and Pecaud performed an adagio dance followed by the comic roller skating of the Four Macks.
Performing at Radio City was grueling. Leonidoff, who had taken over control of the shows when Rothafel was pushed out, was a diminutive tyrant. His rages spilled over from theater rehearsals to the streets of New York, where he had been arrested for assaulting a cab driver. He also hit the gossip columns from time to time for his amorous misadventures. The Music Hall performers worked 12-13 hours a day, five shows a week, and Easter week, with the kids out of school, meant an early morning show as well. They had dormitories and a cafeteria for breaks between shows. An extended run for a movie was a blessing to the dancers because every new movie meant a new stage show which in turn meant ten days of rehearsal in addition to performances. If a movie was booked for only a week, it was hell.