The annual Christmas Spectacular has danced into Radio City Music Hall for another holiday season, and it’s more or less—perhaps just a tad less—the same show that many people love to visit year in and year out.
Me, I first experienced this one-of-a-kind holiday attraction when I was a kid. Witnessing the vintage sequences of the Christmas Spectacular always turns me back into a 6-year-old.
Probably a similar phenomenon happens to adults in the audience who were taken to the event by their parents or grandparents way back whenever. The family memories of the Music Hall show that so many tristate spectators share are what makes the Christmas Spectacular a genuine tradition.
The world may be a mess and our nation at daggers over practically everything these days, but somehow The Rockettes cheerfully and precisely keep on kicking away.
The troupe remains in typically fine form this year, which is a good thing, too, since The Rockettes are the heart and soul of the event, to say nothing of its evidently tireless legs.
Sure, the jolly figure of Santa Claus makes several appearances, most notably in the 3-D movie short during which he flies over and through Manhattan. An adorable “Nutcracker” salute is performed by dancers costumed as various toy bears. And, of course, a perennial feature on the program is the (tactfully Christian) “Living Nativity” pageant with its herds of livestock and Biblical characters dressed up like extras in a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
Otherwise this event remains all about The Rockettes.
This edition gives the troupers nothing new to perform. Sporting illuminated antlers, they hoof away with Santa’s sleigh. They clatter about in an intricately choreographed “Twelve Days of Christmas.” They zoom around on a Grey Line double-decker bus tour of the city. Disguised in Santa drag, they romp through a bell-ringing exercise. Goofily dolled up as rag dolls, they tap all over Santa’s workshop.
Most of these numbers conclude with hitch or scissors-style kick lines, and the variations on this historic pattern that the dancers demonstrate is worth noting.
Speaking of historic, The Rockettes again march about in “The Parade of Wooden Soldiers,” a replication of a number performed in the very first Music Hall holiday show in 1933. Dressed in white and tomato red uniforms crowned by plumed shakos—designed by Vincente Minnelli back in his pre-Hollywood days—The Rockettes sharply step through Russell Markert’s complex military drill before ending in a mass toppling over.
Director-choreographer Julie Branam neatly and quickly paces The Rockettes and the ensemble in this intermission-free series of clever dance works that were mostly originally choreographed by others. Several sequences, notably “The Nutcracker,” appear to be trimmed back in length since previous editions.
Conversely, the Music Hall now strategically makes striking use of vast, moving projections splashed all over the enormous auditorium that extend practically every sequence into awesome proportions. Lighting effects and the sporadic appearance of the Music Hall orchestra enhance the performances.
Smarties have long dismissed the Radio City Christmas shows as traditional white-bread kitsch on legs, and to be sure the event makes scant reference to diverse cultures. But, truly living up to its name, the Christmas Spectacular offers family audiences something familiar and yet vastly entertaining, done with precision and pizzazz, smoothly presented in a beautiful Art Moderne theater that’s been all decked out for the holidays. There’s nothing else like it on Earth.
