Word: leonidoff
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...want all hell to break loose!" bellowed Impresario Leon Leonidoff one morning last week in the rehearsal gloom of Manhattan's cavernous Radio City Music Hall. By the time the Russian accent had floated up to the stage, about half a block away, things had begun...
...gaudy carousel spun itself down onto the stage floor and suddenly, over the combined voices of 30 singers, a 75-piece orchestra and the world's biggest organ, brilliant explosions banged across the stage sky. For two minutes, while Leonidoff flailed his arms like a man rooting home a winning horse, the sky erupted rockets, pinwheels and aerial bombs...
...minutes later, hundreds of customers waiting outside poured in to see a first-run movie and an extravaganza featuring the latest Music Hall wonder: electrical fireworks for its Fourth of July show. To shoot the works, Senior Producer Leonidoff, Lighting Director Eugene Braun and their technicians had spent $50,000 and almost two years on a dozen giant stage panels with 24,000 multicolored electric bulbs, 300,000 feet of wiring and a maze of machinery...
...keep them gawking, Leonidoff can pull such stunts as having an orchestra pit full of musicians swallowed up by the floor, to reappear a few moments later high at the rear of the stage. Lowered by elevator, the pit simply moves through the basement under its own power and gets on one of the three elevators that make up the sectional stage. (The stage revolves, too, elevators...
Director Leon Leonidoff rehearsed the glacial $200,000 spectacle in an overcoat and rubbers, while the pianist swathed himself in camel's hair. The huge cast that swirls and veers through Norman Bel Geddes' wintry landscapes was drawn from as far away as Austria and South Africa. Although Producer Sonja Henie, most famed skatress of them all, does not appear in her own production, she has a worthy substitute in Premiere Ballerina Stenuf, an engagingly plump Viennese who was runner-up to Henie in the 1936 Olympics. Skippy Baxter, a Massine of the runners, began his career, aged...