So, Shorty wanted to go see this particular band that was playing at Radio City Music hall last week, which wasn’t really a band so much as a music act, which is fine but I just wanted to be clear.  There were also two were opening acts. To be clear, this was for the kids. Boys, girls and all manner of combinations of the two that the imagination will allow. I could write a whole other article about how the reason Gen Z seems so pissed off all the time might be because well, their music sucks. 

The first guy came out and sang to recorded music into a microphone that was hidden somewhere in a bouquet of flowers. I mean, whatever. A few very enthusiastic women in the front were having fun.

It was the fact that he was singing along to recorded music from somewhere that was another first tip-off that I was a stranger in a strange land. I refuse to play the grumpy old man and I came to party, and we had a good time. However, the headliner was actually and unfortunately pretty terrible – she was no dancer which is fine, but she needn’t have bothered with dancing. The best moments in the show were when she just sang. Pity, her back up dancers were all off as well. They were never together, even when tasked with whipping their hair around a whole bunch of times (the choreographers go-to) they even failed to do that in sync. 

I just assumed that I was an old Broadway guy and was being too critical of the dancing, but my girlfriend said it first as soon as the lights came up – the dancers were terrible. 

My grumpy guy persona came out again though during the second act when these fools right here decided to just stand up like maybe there weren’t hundreds of people behind them…

Perhaps I was put on the Earth in this lifetime to learn to let these things go. But, I personally would be incapable of just deciding to stand up in the middle of Radio City Music Hall as a means of expressing my enthusiasm for what is happening on stage. There are other people around you! That is the thing I find myself saying under my breath all day. I say it regarding the lady on the bus just watching a video on her phone full volume. I say it regarding a guy brought who brought one of those portable speakers playing music into a dentist office waiting room! No one else seemed to notice. I told him to turn it off. 

And look at this asshole with this umbrella…

Somebody taze this guy. “So what if you’re behind me, I’m hot!”

So these fuckin’ guys just stood there for the whole set. It was one of the opening acts, I don’t remember which – those double gin and tonics go down like nothing. (Got a total contact high also – and those vape pens are a wonder! No more skunky weed concert smell – the whole place smelled like Trans-Strawberry and Me too Mango!) Maybe that contact high was what got me to looking around at the insane architectural achievement that is Radio-Fucking-City Music Hall and remembering the story of the guy who built it.

Radio City Music hall, the largest indoor theatre in the United States, is one of the crowning achievements of the industrial age that sculpted the old New York, and is the city’s definitive display of art deco design. It was built as part of Rockefeller Center on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street in 1927 just three years before the Empire State Building. One could go on and on about the design of the grand lobby and the architectural flourishes throughout including the unnecessarily cool bathrooms in the lower level.

That was when they built shit.

It was so named because as you might have guessed, those few blocks were where all the radio stations were. RKO hired the one and only Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel to oversee the design and construction. Roxy was a consummate old-timey showman who had become rich and successful producing radio shows for RKO, stage shows and for the opulent and infamous Roxy vaudeville theatre that bore his name. Radio City was meant to be his crowning achievement – The Roxy on steroids. 

The Rockettes were first named the “Roxyettes,” which was clunky for sure.

But opening night of Radio City was plagued with bad weather causing tie ups with audience and acts alike, and the entire show was a disaster. Roxy Rothafel was already in bad health and suffered a heart attack during the performance. 

Check out these reviews:

“The opening performance lasted from 8:30 until 2:30 the next morning, and neither Roxy nor vaudeville ever recovered from that brutal avalanche of fun.” – Brooks Atkinson.

The Toronto Daily Star called Radio City a “gigantic” failure saying, “Nothing quite so blasting to the show business in any country equals the supreme flop of the new Radio City enterprise.”

Damn. 

This was meant to revive vaudeville and instead it was a nail in its coffin. Radio Music Hall became a movie theatre that showed stage shows part of the time.

Of course, the theatre prevailed and also survived a proposal to demolish it during New York’s darkest days in the seventies when the city was bankrupt and the Bronx was burning. Today the theatre hosts music acts year round, as well as the Tony awards and of course the Easter and Christmas spectaculars.