Even on TV, the Rockettes are Radio City stars

Even on TV, the Rockettes are Radio City stars
The Radio City Christmas Spectacular: 8 p.m. Saturday on KNTV (Channel 11). It's hard to believe that in its 75-year reign as the most famous Christmas show in the United States, the Radio City Music Hall's annual blowout has never been filmed for television.

Well, that's all changed, thanks to producer Don Hewitt, perhaps best known as the creator of a little news show called "60 Minutes" over at CBS. This time out, Hewitt's working at NBC, whose "Today" show co-anchors, Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer, will host the broadcast of the Radio City show Saturday night.

Many Americans get a taste of the annual Radio City show when the Music Hall's famed precision dance team, the Rockettes, appear at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year, the ladies danced to an otherwise forgettable song called "New York at Christmas," from this year's anniversary holiday show. But watching the dancers high-kick in front of Macy's isn't quite the same as seeing them do their thing on the huge Music Hall stage.

The Rockettes are not only the heart of the Christmas show, but they're also pretty much the entire show, although there are some cameo appearances by the likes of Santa Claus and the missus, a couple of cute little boys in search of a Christmas gift for their sister, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, a trio of kings, shepherds and assorted guests in the Nativity scene at the end of the show. No, the Rockettes don't do the chorus-line thing at the manger, but they kick up a storm through the rest of the old-fashioned and pretty irresistible hourlong broadcast.

After an animated Santa makes a landing outside Radio City, the actual show inside opens with the Rockettes dressed as reindeer and tapping away to a medley of holiday songs. It's a great beginning, but the best numbers in the show come later: a terrific wooden-soldier routine, which ends with the girls getting "shot" by a fake cannon and falling backward in perfect formation; a thrilling dancing Santas routine, with the vast Music Hall stage overflowing with clogging Clauses; and the dancers as Raggedy Ann-like dolls in a Santa's workshop sequence.

The full number that was excerpted on the Macy's parade, "New York at Christmas," is nicely produced, with the dancers gamboling around on a Gray Line tour bus, while a projection of New York sites flashes behind them. On the downside, you could hear this song 100 times and still not hum two bars of it.

Filming the spectacular couldn't have been all that easy. The same spectacle that causes both adult and kid mouths to drop open in the cavernous Music Hall tends to look a bit flat on the small screen. But Hewitt and his team manage the near-impossible by giving you both the wide-shot perspective of the stage along with close-ups of the dancers and those famous legs. And while they may be unnecessary to what's happening onstage, the occasional shots of wide-eyed kids in the audience remind you of what all the music, the spangles, the special effects and that perfect line of high-kicking gams is really all about.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/01/DDVHTLB8H.DTL