"I want all hell to break loose!" bellowed Impresario Leon Leonidoff one morning last week in the rehearsal gloom of Manhattan's cavernous Radio City Music Hall. By the time the Russian accent had floated up to the stage, about half a block away, things had begun to pop.
A gaudy carousel spun itself down onto the stage floor and suddenly, over the combined voices of 30 singers, a 75-piece orchestra and the world's biggest organ, brilliant explosions banged across the stage sky. For two minutes, while Leonidoff flailed his arms like a man rooting home a winning horse, the sky erupted rockets, pinwheels and aerial bombs.
A few minutes later, hundreds of customers waiting outside poured in to see a first-run movie and an extravaganza featuring the latest Music Hall wonder: electrical fireworks for its Fourth of July show. To shoot the works, Senior Producer Leonidoff, Lighting Director Eugene Braun and their technicians had spent $50,000 and almost two years on a dozen giant stage panels with 24,000 multicolored electric bulbs, 300,000 feet of wiring and a maze of machinery.
Don't Spare the Horses. Grandiose spectacles, and the sumptuous grandeur of its own size and trappings, have made the $4,600,000 Music Hall a show business nonpareil and a major tourist magnet. Last year, at prices from 80¢ to $2.40, it drew 16 times as many visitors as the Statue of Liberty. Of its 8,000,000 annual customers, half are out-of-towners.
To keep them gawking, Leonidoff can pull such stunts as having an orchestra pit full of musicians swallowed up by the floor, to reappear a few moments later high at the rear of the stage. Lowered by elevator, the pit simply moves through the basement under its own power and gets on one of the three elevators that make up the sectional stage. (The stage revolves, too, elevators and all.)
Among the Music Hall's scenic effects: rainfall (from pipes high above the stage); Niagara Falls (out of tanks of an agitated soap solution); a full-sized train that can disappear into the hills; a steam curtain that fills the stage with billowing clouds; an ocean freighter that is torpedoed, splits in two and sinks from sight. The stage has also held a swimming pool, a helicopter and 30 trained horses.
Rockettes & Forest Fire. Slight, bustling Leonidoff, 52, a onetime ballet dancer, dreams up most of the shows (300 in the Music Hall's 16 years), with Producers Russell Markert and Florence Rogge taking turns at others. They must keep their dreams expansive enough for the stage's electrical and mechanical powers, plus the talents of guest headliners and a "stock company": the famed precision-kicking Rockettes, the Glee Club, Alexander Smallens' symphony orchestra, and the only resident ballet troupe in the U.S.
For full-blown splendor, the average hour-long revue rivals Hollywood and dwarfs Broadway. In less prosperous times, the Music Hall turned out a new show every week. In 1948, twelve shows spanned the year. But against a Broadway musical's two months of rehearsal and tryout, Leonidoff & Co. rehearse a new show just ten days—while playing the old one.