Christmas songbook classics, tap shoes and the can-can — the elements of Radio City Music Hall’s “Christmas Spectacular” have become staple images of the holiday over the 90 years that the show has been running.
What is less familiar than the show and its cast of Rockette dancers are the backstage workers who have kept the show running for all these decades. Like the iconic dance troupe, the backstage workers also put on around 30 performances per week at the peak of the holiday season.
LaborPress interviewed two of these stage professionals to take its readers behind the curtain and spotlight the skill and dedication it takes to keep the spectacle running for an estimated millions of audience members each year.
Kenny McDonough, the technical director of the show, said he’s been working on the Christmas Spectacular since 1981. What sets the “Christmas Spectacular apart, he said, is the level of trust between the dancers and the crew and the level of care to make sure the stage is in pristine condition for the dancers who are performing on it sometimes for five shows in a row.
“We’re here from 7:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night. Four, five days a week,” McDonough said.
Trust is important when you’re handling props that include a 15,000-pound bus that is suspended backstage until it descends on stage and spins as part of the act.
McDonough said that by the time the show gets to the scene that features the bus, his crew are down 24 feet beneath the stage, setting up the ice and the next scene.
“We have less than a minute. People are screaming, ‘30 seconds, 20 seconds.’ It’s like Mario Andretti’s pit group, just to get this bus to look like it’s turned around,” he said.
The logistics of keeping dancers and stage workers safe from flying props and 30-foot drops backstage are where IATSE Local 1’s union training and work ethic really pay off, McDonough said. “We are the best in the world or else we wouldn’t be here.”
Tom Arrigoni, Radio City Music Hall’s head audio engineer, is working with a different set of obstacles with the Rockettes. He’s trying to make sure that the audience can clearly hear 250 different audio inputs each performance.
“Each Rockette has two transmitters on their [tap] shoes for two numbers. And there’s 36 girls, so that’s 72 transmitters,” Arrigoni said.
The other challenge is emotional. Arrigoni said it’s important to not get lost in the grind of the holiday schedule and remember the first time he saw it as a kid — to remember that “we’re making memories for millions of people.”
McDonough said that anytime he needs to be recharged he just takes a walk into the aisle to look at the audiences’ faces.
“How you get rejuvenated is by the look on kids’ faces and knowing that you have some little part of putting it there. That is what Christmas is all about. Because on Christmas Day, my wife and three daughters will be at my sister’s house while I’m working five shows here,” he said.
