00:09Hello, I'm Nicola Taylor, Production Stage Manager for Concerts and Events here at Radio City Music Hall, New York.
00:16Radio City Music Hall is a fabulous venue with four moving elevators unlike any other theatre in the world.
00:23New York City, like so many places, is a union facility. We're very proud of our union here.
00:28Local One, best stagehands, fabulous guys. See them hard at work, they can get shows in, get them out within
00:33a day, fabulous guys.
00:35Behind me here, upstage, we have three moving elevators that have the ability to go up nearly 12 feet and
00:41down nearly 27 feet.
00:43So if an act is actually happening downstage, we can lower an elevator upstage, send it further down to the
00:49basement,
00:49load it up with the next piece of scenery or talent, bring it up and out of nowhere, there's a
00:53whole other scene arrived.
00:54This is normally where our orchestra pit is. We're taking it down to the seating area of the orchestra seats
01:00for our audience.
01:01We're taking the plug out, they're going to roll these large cabinets out, and then we'll bring the pit elevator
01:06back up to the stage.
01:08We also have a very large turntable in the middle of the stage. We're not using it in this show,
01:11but we do have a huge turntable.
01:14Again, unlike any other theatre in the world, having that in the middle of a stage is really quite phenomenal.
01:19You're also seeing down here, right in front of us, this is the footlights, which we're not currently using.
01:23The footlights that we have the ability to open up or close down if we want a flat stage.
01:28Fabulous, having that ability to have them open or not. Not many theatres have that.
01:33The gold curtain, which you'll see later on, that's up above us here. This is the third, maybe the fourth
01:39curtain replacement since 1932.
01:41It weighs over a ton in weight. And why it's peculiar is we have 13 motorized lines, so rather than
01:48just having to lift the curtain up or bring it down all in one go,
01:51so we can actually bring up individual points as the creative director sees fit for the appropriate performance.
01:59We are now underneath the stage, two levels below the stage, and up here we have the underneath side of
02:06the orchestra pit.
02:07You can actually see the curved shape there. What you're seeing behind me here is the underneath of all of
02:12our three onstage elevators.
02:14This is elevator one with two pistons. In the middle is elevator two, and then all the way upstage, elevator
02:20three.
02:21And we are on the sub-basement level, and if we were to lower these elevators down, they'd actually go
02:27a little bit lower than where we're standing,
02:29and they would be 27 feet, nearly 27 feet down from the stage, 26 feet 9 to be exact.
02:35So the music hall was built in the late 20s for an opening in 1932, and legend has it that
02:40when they were building this,
02:42our hydraulic apparatus here, which is used for the elevators, was top secret, and the US government put security in
02:4924-7, supposedly,
02:51to make sure there was no stealing of ideas, any espionage, because it's the same concept that's used for aircraft
02:57carriers.
02:59And noise travel is pretty loud when these elevators come down, but any of the music that's being played on
03:04stage certainly drowns that out,
03:06so the audience doesn't hear any of it. I don't think we'll have any issues with that tonight.
03:09For two reasons. One, we're not moving the elevators, but we've also heard how loud this concert is going to
03:14be tonight.
03:14So Radio City we use is probably best known for the Christmas Spectacular and for the home of the world
03:20-famous Radio City Rockettes,
03:22but what we absolutely love about here is that it's such a versatile building that we can do a whole
03:28mixture of events in here,
03:30from pop concerts to award shows such as the MTV Awards, Tony Awards, GQ Awards, Essence Awards, we've had them
03:37here.
03:37And a couple of years ago, we even made this into a mini-sports arena.
03:42We had the NBA was in here, the women's basketball was in here, and we actually put a full-size
03:47court on the great stage here at Radio City.
03:49Certainly when they built it, they didn't build it for large rock concerts, but we've had a lot of concerts
03:53here that have been very loud,
03:54and looking forward to tonight's show.
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