Backstage Tour

Kim's boyfriend Bill is a theater stagehand in New York. He mostly works on Broadway shows, plus the occasional concert or special event, and for the last couple of years he has worked on the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall over the holidays. During its run between early November and New Years this show maintains a pretty insane schedule, with six or more performances a day at times. When you work the same show over and over again, day after day, eventually you get pretty sick of it. Bill says this happens on every job, but it's worse than normal on the Christmas Spectacular because there are so many shows in a relatively short amount of time. To break up the hectic monotony, if there is such a thing (and to show off a bit), he's always eager to give special all-access backstage tours of the theater between performances, and we were more than willing to take him up on his offer. You can get tickets for a guided tour of Radio City, and they probably tell you more historical tidbits and such, but you won't get to see nearly as much cool stuff. Ha ha!

Bill works on the fly floor, which in the case of the Radio City Music Hall is essentially a huge catwalk in the wings a couple of stories above the stage floor. From there they operate all the ropes that bring the different pieces of scenery on and off the stage for the various acts of the show, as well as work some of the lighting. Here are Steph, Bill, and Evan standing in front of a few of those ropes:

I'm going to guess there was at least 5 if not 10 times as much rigging in total as you can see in this picture... hundreds of lines in all, each of them attached to a piece of scenery on one end and a counterweight (a really big counterweight in some cases) on the other.

As a quick aside, you can see in the picture that Bill was carrying Evan. I don't mean that Bill was carrying Evan when that picture was taken, I mean that Bill was carrying Evan during the entire 1-hour tour. We brought the BabyBjörn with us since the stroller had to be stashed just inside the stage door - too bulky to be easily maneuvered around back stage, and too many stairs. After walking around wearing an empty baby carrier for the first few minutes of the tour and feeling like an idiot doing it (trust me, wearing an empty BabyBjörn does not make you look like Super Dad - "Now where did I put my baby, again?") I decided to take it off and stow it in the stroller when we walked by its parking spot. It was quite evident that I wouldn't be needing it, anway. We went over to Kim & Bill's apartment for dinner Tuesday night, and by the time Bill got home from work Evan was well into the meltdown phase of the evening. When they were out visiting us a few months ago you could walk him around when he got fussy and he would calm down. Those halcyon days are long gone now, but that didn't stop Bill from trying. Unfortunately all he got for his trouble was a loudly crying baby. Anyway, Bill was... I think "in need" is overstating the situation, but we'll say "in want"... of some non-crying time with Evan, and it still being daytime Evan was more than happy to oblige.

All right, back to the tour. Another thing we saw that's well off the path of the public tour was where the camels and sheep that are part of the show live. There are a bunch of animal "actors" that are part of the nativity scene who live in one of the basements of Radio City during the run of the show (they live on a farm somewhere upstate the rest of the year), including several sheep, a donkey, and two camels! My picture of the camels didn't come out too well, but this shot of the sheep is pretty good, and very representative of how they live (this isn't the animal Hilton we're talking about):

One last neat thing we got to see, which isn't even a part of Bill's normal backstage tour (they're technically not "backstage"), was the old school spotlights they use. We got a bit lost rambling around the front of the theater since Bill doesn't normally go there, but luckily we ran into a friend of his who works the spotlights and was kind enough to give us a demonstration. They were made back in the 30's, and they're still pretty much the same now as the were 80 years ago - they have to make their own parts for them when they break! Here is Hilary being shown one of the color filters they use:

At this point it was getting pretty close to when the crew has to start getting ready for the next show - some of the early arrivers were already starting to filter into the theater and take their seats - so we had to hustle backstage again and end our tour. We had a great time, though - if you happen to know a stage hand at Radio City Music Hall I highly recommend it!