On this day in New York · December 27, 1932
Radio City Music Hall Opens (And Nearly Flops)
The world's largest indoor theater debuted at Rockefeller Center with an opening show so long that even John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave up and left before it ended.
The facts
- Date
- December 27, 1932
- Seating capacity
- 5,960
- Opening show runtime
- 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. the next day
- Top ticket price, first year
- 40 cents by day, 88 cents at night
On December 27, 1932, Radio City Music Hall opened at Rockefeller Center as the largest indoor theater on earth, seating 5,960 people under an Art Deco design by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey. Impresario Samuel Roxy Rothafel had promised a return to grand variety entertainment, and the opening bill crammed dancer Ray Bolger, comic Doc Rockwell, choreographer Martha Graham, the Tuskegee Choir, and more onto the enormous new stage. The show ran from 8 p.m. past 2 a.m. the next morning, and it bombed: acts got lost in all that space, and audience members, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself, waited it out in the lobby or left early. Within two weeks the hall dropped live variety for the movie-and-stage-show format that would define it for the next several decades.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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It has been said of the new Music Hall that it needs no performers; that its beauty and comforts alone are sufficient to gratify the greediest of playgoers.
An unnamed reviewer, quoted in coverage of the Music Hall's opening
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The opening night flop forced Radio City to reinvent itself within weeks as a movie-and-stage-show palace, the format that turned it into a New York institution and eventually the home of the Christmas Spectacular and the Rockettes.
Sources
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