Designed by Donald Deskey with a soaring Art Deco interior, the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall opened during the depths of the Great Depression as a beacon of glamour and spectacle. Its opening night vaudeville-style program flopped with critics, prompting a swift shift to the movie-and-stage-show format, featuring the precision dance troupe later known as the Rockettes, that would define it for decades.
Samuel 'Roxy' Rothafel, the impresario behind the venture, envisioned Radio City Music Hall as the last word in theatrical grandeur, a temple of Art Deco design with a 60-foot proscenium arch resembling a setting sun and a color scheme evoking a sunset over the sea. Built as part of the new Rockefeller Center complex, it was an audacious bet on entertainment at a moment when a quarter of America was unemployed.
The opening night program on September 5 ran nearly four hours and mixed opera singers, dancers, and comedians in a format critics found bloated and old-fashioned. Rothafel, humiliated, retooled the formula within weeks into the movie-palace model, pairing first-run films with elaborate stage shows.
That pivot saved the hall and made stars of the precision dance line originally called the Roxyettes, soon renamed the Rockettes. The building itself, with its glittering Great Stage and cavernous auditorium, became a New York landmark, hosting everything from film premieres to the Grammy Awards in the decades that followed.
Key people: Samuel Rothafel, Donald Deskey