Radio City Music Hall

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Image:Radio City Hall Xmas 05.jpg Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue located in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Known as the Showplace of the Nation, the Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932, and now is home to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, a New York Christmas tradition since 1933, and to the women's precision dance team known as The Rockettes. The theater is also used for a variety of concerts and special events.

Designed by Donald Deskey, the interior of the theater incorporates glass, aluminum, chrome, and geometric ornamentation. Deskey rejected the Rococo embellishment generally used for theaters at that time in favor of a contemporary Art Deco style. Radio City has 5,933 seats for spectators; it became the largest indoor theater in the world at the time of its opening.

The Great Stage, measuring 66.5 feet (20 m) deep and 144 feet (44 m) wide, resembles a setting sun. Its system of elevators was so advanced that the U.S. Navy incorporated identical hydraulics in constructing World War II aircraft carriers. According to Radio City lore, during the war, government agents guarded the basement to assure the Navy's technological advantage.

The Music Hall's Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ is the largest theater pipe organ built for a movie theater. Twin identical consoles flank both sides of the Great Stage, 144 feet apart. As it was installed in 1932, the instrument, the largest produced by the Rudolph Wurliter Manufacturing Company of North Tonawanda, New York, was not built to accompany silent movies, but rather to be a concert instrument, capable of playing many styles of music, including classical organ lilterature. Its 4,410 pipes are installed in chambers on either side of the proscenium's arch. A restoration of the historic organ was undertaken that was completed in time for the theater's restoration in 1999. A smaller Wurlitzer organ was installed in the theater's Plaza Sound Studios, but was put into storage when the studio was converted into office space.

The 12 acre (49,000 m²) complex in midtown Manhattan known as Rockefeller Center was developed between 1929 and 1940 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on land leased from Columbia University. Rockefeller initially planned an opera house on the site, but changed his mind after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. One of the complex's first tenants was The Radio Corporation of America, hence the names Radio City and Radio City Music Hall.

For much of the theater's history, it presented both a movie and a stage show as part of the same program. By the 1970s, changes in film distribution made it difficult for Radio City to secure exclusive bookings of many films; furthermore, the theater preferred to show only G-rated movies, which became less common as the decade wore on. Regular film showings at Radio City ended in 1979, although movies have occasionally been shown there in succeeding years.

The Music Hall is the regular home of the Daytime Emmy Award ceremony (though the 2006 show will be held in Los Angeles) and the Tony Awards, is the frequent site of the annual MTV Video Music Awards (although the ceremony has occasionally been held since the 1990s in Los Angeles and Miami), and has often been the venue for the Grammy Awards on years when New York has won the bid to host the show, although Madison Square Garden, also owned by Cablevision, hosted the most recent Grammys in 2003. In addition, Radio City Music Hall is also the regular home of commencement ceremonies for Pace University's New York City campus.

The theater also hosted the New York Liberty of the WNBA in the summer of 2004, since Madison Square Garden was closed due to the 2004 Republican National Convention; the basketball court was laid out on the stage with a scoreboard hanging from the rafters. The 2006 NFL Draft will be held there on April 29 and 30, 2006.

Barney Live! was the fastest sellout kids show in Radio City's history.

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