A Shrine of Showbigness Goes Down

By Frank Trippett

The prognosis was bleak: "There is no hope for survival."

The diagnostician was authoritative: Alton G. Marshall, president of Rockefeller Center Inc. The patient was his ward: Manhattan's grand old Radio City Music Hall, which, said Marshall last week, will close for good in April.

The Music Hall is not officially a historic monument, but it surely is something of a national shrine. As soon as it opened in 1932 as Rockefeller Center's "Showplace of the Nation," the theater became proof positive for millions of Americans that there was no bigness like show bigness. Something preposterously grand about the Music Hall raised it above its nearby (and now nearly forgotten) movie-palace rivals, like the Roxy or the Paramount: its scale, its colossal adornments, its dizzying spaciousness. Its founding impresario, the late S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, loved to boast that it was the largest indoor theater in the world.

The Music Hall was, in effect, a world within itself, a tour de force of art deco dazzle and soaring ceilings that provoked awe and vertigo among the customers. The sheer quantitative excess of its palatial pretensions infected professional journalists with an even greater than normal addiction to statistical literature. Thus the tales of the Music Hall's Boswells are almost uniformly impacted with numbers purporting to measure every major, minor, relevant and irrelevant aspect of the plant. The printed record aches with such data as the number of miles of film projected yearly (5,000). the quantity of gum once scraped nightly from underneath 6,200 velvet-covered seats (20 Ibs.); the number of stops on the thundering Mighty Wurlitzer (375); the number of light bulbs (25,000); the weight of the chandeliers (two tons); and, naturally, the improbable dimensions of the stage (144 ft. wide, 67 ft. deep). But no statistic could quite translate the spectator's impression that the Music Hall could easily have accommodated a re-enactment of World War II. It was left to a latter-day comedian, David Steinberg, to hint at a performer's sense of the institution: "An intimate place," said he, "about the size of Ethiopia."

There was never anything small about the feast of entertainment offered either. For a ticket that never got higher than $5, the hall offered its customer not merely a movie but performances by a 75-member symphony orchestra, a resident corps de ballet, visiting vocalists and instrumentalists, and zealous sing-alongs with the booming organ. And, always, the machine-perfect, fail-proof routines of the pert-figured, high-kicking Rockettes. On seasonal holidays there were, in addition, lavishly staged extravaganzas during which the mammoth stage might be transformed into a cathedral, or a racecourse for chariots drawn by live horses, or a harbor bearing the illusion of full-size ships--all glorified by the pizazz of lighting trickery quite beyond the capability of other theaters.

All over America the Music Hall became one of the best reasons for visiting New York City. But homefolks as well as outlanders were among the 250 million people who have been its paying customers. Even New Yorkers who never went inside were regularly impressed by the enormously long lines of pilgrims waiting to get through the doors at 50th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. The Music Hall developed such drawing power that it seemed, as one bemused visitor put it. "unavoid able, like the Grand Canyon."

Unavoidable, perhaps -- but not nearly as durable. Last week Rockefeller Center's Marshall sadly admitted that the proud landmark now faces the same pathetic destiny that has over taken hundreds of other moviehouses, big and small, in recent years. By present plans it will shut down this week, reopen in March to offer its traditional Easter pageant, and then close for ever the following month. The reason, naturally, is money. The theater lost $2.2 million in 1977, and officials figure it would lose $3.5 million this year if it stayed open. The Music Hall needs to take in $176,000 a week just to cover operating over head, including the salaries of 440 employees. "It simply is not possible for us to continue," said Marshall.

How could such an institution abruptly die? The truth is, the demise was not so sudden. In recent years the Music Hall, like every U.S. business, has been caught in the spiral of rising costs. But its revenues have not risen accordingly. Attendance has dropped from 5 million in 1967 to less than 2 million last year. Those figures, how ever, only half explain the attendance problem.

Equally relevant is an evolution of popular taste in entertainment.

Niceness, to put it baldly, is not as popular as it used to be. Catering to more sophisticated filmgoers, Hollywood each year produced fewer and fewer movies that suited the Music Hall's strict policy of offering only films and stage shows that were suitable for family viewing. It was no great surprise that the featured film last week was a treacly Walt Disney production called Pete's Dragon.

Marshall concedes that television also hurt by nightly providing child-oriented family Pablum for free. So did fears about the prowling dangers of the big city. The Music Hall has recently done two-thirds of its business before 6 p.m. because, as Marshall sees it, families in the metropolitan area were wary of riding the subway at night. Meanwhile, countermeasures such as budget trimming (the Music Hall dropped its ballet troupe three years ago) and trying to draw new audiences with mid night rock concerts failed to turn things around.

It is tempting to see the closing as the end of an era. Yet it may be more realistic to see the Music Hall as a relic of an era that ended long ago -- an era when Americans were far more innocent in their passion for moving pictures, an era when the public was more easily beguiled by the kind of shimmer and big ness that the Music Hall embodied.

Customers, employees and nostalgia buffs alike protested the closing announcement, many of them noting that in recent years the Music Hall had more than once threatened to shut down but nonetheless stayed open. New York's new mayor, Ed Koch, vowed that the city would try its best to keep it alive, and other ranking state political leaders also pledged to join in rescue efforts. Thus it was possible that somebody, somehow, would manage to extend the deadline. Yet it was inconceivable that the Music Hall could ever be revived to persist as what it once was. Nobody around can bring back the times and the taste on which its success relied.

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