Christmas Spectacular with the Radio City Rockettes (NBC-TV, 2007, with additional content added 2020, aired December 2, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a rather weird TV special on NBC that purported to show the annual Christmas performance with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Of course there isn’t a Christmas show going on at Radio City Music Hall this year -- under the Viral Dictatorship of SARS-CoV-2 such events remain verboten -- so NBC did the intriguing expedient of re-running the special they shot in 2007 (though that didn’t become clear until the very end, when the 2007 copyright date flashed on the screen) and added new interstitial “greetings” by celebrities like John Legend, Padme Lakshmi (I hope I got that name right!), Carla Hall (a tall, heavy-set woman who looked so butch I was startled when she mentioned having a husband -- “She’s married? To a man?” I thought incredulously), Jenna Devon, Whoopi Goldberg (who remembered her grandparents taking her to the Rockettes’ Christmas snow when she was just a kid) and Josh Groban.

The show was a series of overblown production numbers with the Rockettes in various costumes (apparently each Rockette wears no fewer than nine outfits during the performance), doing their famous high kicks to (mostly) instrumental medleys of pop Christmas favorites. Their first number was a piece apparently called “Christmas Time Is Here Again” (decidedly not the song from Vince Guaraldi’s great score for the 1964 animated TV show A Charlie Brown Christmas) that incorporated “Jingle Bells.” Then they did “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” (the latter featured the Rockettes clad as toy soldiers -- the first, but not the last, time during the show the Rockettes did FTM drag -- and had an interesting row-of-dominoes effect at the end when the soldiers were “shot” with a model cannon that had a sign that said “BANG!” coming out of it and all the soldiers fell “dead” in a disciplined straight line) and a medley of “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and “Jolly Old Kris Kringle.” For this number the Rockettes all donned Santa Claus suits -- their second exercise in FTM drag during the show, which given the way they were cavorting on stage and deliberately bumping into each other and doing pratfalls couldn’t help but remind me of the coverage of “SantaCon.”

This is an annual event consisting of hundreds of people dressed in Santa costumes descending on the streets, getting drunk and getting into fights with each other. According to Wikipedia, this began as a “performance art event” with multiple Santa Clauses in San Francisco but as it moved to New York and attracted more people it got some of that Big Apple edge. (Indeed, a Google search reveals that there’s a national and even international SantaCon movement, “but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently listing only locations and are not actively promoting events.”) I must say I’d never heard of SantaCon until Stephen Colbert did a story on it during one of his “Meanwhile … “ (or, as he’s renamed them in honor of the Viral Dictator, “Quarantinewhile … “) segments, complete with images of drunken Santas brawling in the streets and sometimes tearing off each other’s costumes in the process. While the Radio City Rockettes didn’t quite dramatize this dystopian vision of an ensemble of Santa Clauses, it came surprisingly (and, no doubt, unwittingly) close.

After the monster ensemble of Santas the next number up was something called “New York at Christmas,” which began with a song apparently bearing that title and also featured “Silver Bells,” “White Christmas” and then -- after an abrupt cut-off for a commercial and Carla Hall’s greeting (she looked like she could hold her own against any of the guys from SantaCon) it continued with “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “He’ll Be Coming Down the Chimney” (or whatever that song that led off Andy Williams’ Christmas album back in the 1960’s was called), “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (a winter song but not really a Christmas one) and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in a predictably bouncy version having little or nothing to do with the heartbreak Judy Garland, for whom that song was written, threw into it. The gimmick in this number was the replica of a Grey Line tour bus that drove around the Radio City Music Hall stage and disgorged the Rockettes for various dances interpreting the songs in the medley. Afterwards the Rockettes did an ensemble dance to a song I didn’t recognize, in which they carried around a number of those children’s blocks with letters on them that were moved in a scheme that didn’t seem to have a pattern to it until the very end, when the blocks spelled out “MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR.” (Let’s face it: 2021 won’t have to work hard to be better than 2020, though given the persistence of the pandemic I think it’s more than a bit optimistic for Radio City Music Hall already to be accepting reservations for the 2021 Rockettes Christmas spectacular.) It ended with the Rockettes doing a can-can, during which my husband Charles came home, got a load of the bizarre spectacle I was watching, and said, “Nothing says Christmas like a can-can.”

Ironically, the final number of the night was the only one with any spiritual content and it was the most moving: the Rockettes forming a Nativity tableau to the song “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” which in its own relatively quiet and subtle way was by far the most moving number in the show. I’ve noted in these pages recently that as a lifelong atheist (though I’ve mellowed considerably in my feelings about religion in general and Christianity in particular -- having three committed Christians in a row as partners will do that to you) I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Christian origin myth, especially the virgin birth (at least Judaism, Buddhism and Islam don’t outright deify their founding prophets!), but I can often respond when the Nativity is presented straightforwardly and simply as it was here. I could especially respond to it as an antidote to the over-the-top nature of the rest of the show! I also liked the fact that I was able to spot a Black Rockette in the chorus line, even though for the most part they were hiding her in the back of the chorus line. The recycled 2007 Christmas Spectacular with the Radio City Rockettes was fun in a monumentally over-the-top way and it would probably be a lot more fun to see it “live,” but the shots not only of a packed stage but audience members shown on screen sitting next to each other without masks or so-called “social distancing” (I’m O.K. with the concept but I can’t stand the name) really seemed dated and made me wonder if we will ever be able to experience entertainment in large rooms with great numbers of people we don’t know again!