Taking the Stage at Carnegie and Radio City Music Halls, Then a Dance Party at the Brooklyn Museum

ALL THE JOY today. I toured Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall this afternoon, then headed to the Brooklyn Museum’s “First Saturday” free admission party this evening. It was definitely a musical day!

First up was Carnegie Hall. The hall has a reputation as the premier home of classical music, but it presents a much wider range of events, from comedy to pops concerts. The sound is stellar because there are no right angles in the building, as well as no partitions between the opera boxes. A premier violinist who’d toured the world once said Carnegie Hall was the only venue in which she could hear every instrument in the orchestra as clearly as though they were sitting right next to her.

I got to pretend I was seeing a performance because the box office gave me my tour ticket in one of their Carnegie concert envelopes, so I felt pretty swanky for a minute there. :)

In a fun twist, the orchestra seating in Carnegie Hall is called the Parquet. The main auditorium seats 2,804 people on five levels — but didn’t have elevators until 1986! (The hall opened in 1891.)

Unlike the Met Opera stairs that are specifically designed to be easily ascended by ladies in evening gowns, the Carnegie steps are STEEP. I can’t imagine trying to walk all the way up to the balcony in heels and an evening gown — I'm pretty sure I’d fall flat on my face before I'd even reached the Dress Circle, 117 steps up (so named because that’s where you would sit in your fancy dress, to be seen as well as to see).

The Carnegie seats are the comfiest I’ve come across in New York. They’re made of gorgeous red velvet that’s thick and pillow-like (the armrests also get this luxurious treatment). No one owns a box at Carnegie Hall, so you could sit in a box on one side of the auditorium one night, then completely on the other side the next (assuming you have the cash).

The hall also provides complimentary cough drops at stations throughout the venue, and goes through a million per year! If I were sick, I wouldn’t come — that’d be so embarrassing to be coughing over a soloist, especially when every little sound travels so clearly!

Another fun fact: The suffragettes met here before women gained the right to vote. I came across many more tidbits of Carnegie history in the small museum at the end of the tour, including that Albert Einstein once spoke here, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.

The museum also has many artifacts, including Leonard Bernstein’s baton, Ella Fitzgerald’s glasses (she had so many pairs that when she left one behind she just told the hall to keep them), and a program from a Beatles show in which Paul McCartney is mistakenly identified as ‘John McCartney.’ Oops — I guess even Carnegie Hall faceplants every so often.

My next stop was a few streets down — Radio City Music Hall, home of the Tony Awards and the high-kicking Rockettes.

I bought a discounted NYC Explorer Pass last week through the New York Times employee benefits site, and this particular pass works well because I have 30 days to check off 10 experiences (this was #4 — the others were the Empire State Building, Lincoln Center tour, and Catacombs by Candlelight tour of “The Godfather” cathedral). My pass got me the stage door, a.k.a. backstage, tour.

Because it was a rare Saturday when Radio City wasn’t hosting a concert, I got to walk on the spectacular stage where James Corden hosted the Tonys (and the Kanye-Taylor incident went down).

The hall seats 6,015 people, but even the back row of the balcony is only 190 feet from the stage. The mezzanine is so shallow that it can be supported by just the wall at the back of the auditorium, eliminating the need for pesky poles that would diminish the sound quality.

But back to the stage itself, which is wickedly tricked-out. There’s a fog feature (think “Phantom of the Opera”), but the cool part is that it’s been there since 1932, and it was revolutionary when it debuted (people were like 'What is this madness?!'). Three lifts can ascend and descend a range of 40 feet above or below the stage, and the stage is as long as half a football field. In fact, when the 36 Rockettes first went on tour, only half of them could go because no other stage in the country could fit all of them in the kickline.

The hydraulic system is also state of the art, and is recognized as a historical mechanical engineering landmark (also original to when the hall opened in 1932).

Nearby is the area where the animals for the Christmas show are held. A fun fact about them: Hall employees walk them up and down the street every morning for exercise during the holiday season. Now I officially need to come back in December to see the Rockettes AND the animal parade.

After checking out the hall, I walked through the lounge with restrooms and concessions. An issue arose when the subway entrance that opened into the hall was spilling chatty people who were disturbing the performances on the stage above. So the hall consulted a psychologist, who recommended dim lighting, dark walls, and diamond shapes to keep people quiet. The result:

I also got to see the iconic “Spirit of Dance” sculpture.

My first impression of Radio City was that there were mirrors EVERYWHERE — in the hallways, on the columns, in the lobby. You can’t escape your reflection!

I also got to walk through the Rockette costume shop, Rockette rehearsal room (look how high that bar is — they don’t call them high-kickers for nothing!), and meet a veteran Rockette.

I learned that the dancers in the kickline don’t actually touch; it just looks like they do. Dancers have to be between 5’6” and 5’10.5” to join the squad, a requirement that’s strictly enforced. The tallest women stand in the center of the line to make them all appear the same height. They rehearse six hours per day Monday through Saturday leading up to the Christmas show, then do as many as six shows a day for six weeks (the show is 90 minutes long). Whew! I’d rather not be a Rockette (not that I have an ounce of the dancing skills required).

From Radio City, I took the D train across the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn Museum. This is officially my new favorite subway line, as the D train runs overground across the bridge, giving passengers a spectacular view of the East River, especially at night when the next-door Brooklyn Bridge is lit up and twinkling (snagged that view on the way home). This is the line that got those great fireworks views as it chugged across the bridge the other night — if I’m ever back in New York on the July 4 holiday, I’d love to do a fireworks viewing on the D train!

On to Brooklyn: Even though it was a “First Saturday” at the Brooklyn Museum, a.k.a. the first Saturday of the month when admission is free, it wasn’t packed like the Guggenheim was during the free Museum Mile Festival. Musicians filled the main lobby and upstairs rooms all night, in addition to DJ dance parties, poetry readings, and gallery talks. It was such a fun evening!

I spent about four hours at the museum exploring the five floors. Here are a few of my favorite finds:

-Etchings by Picasso and Goya (and look at this manuscript by Durer!).

-This Van Gogh drawing. He used an improvised reed pen, meaning he had to work fast (Does this design look familiar? It also shows up in Starry Night!).

-The “Infinite Blue” gallery. Such a neat idea — everything in the gallery dates from different eras, civilizations, and cultures, but it also incorporates some shade of blue.

-These Rodin sculptures (the Burghers of Calais).

-The Egyptian wing! I will spend forever in the Egyptian exhibits at pretty much any museum — I’m fascinated by the culture. The Brooklyn Museum had a special showcase called “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt” that focused on the role of women in Egyptian culture.

Prepare yourself: The Egyptians believed that to make rebirth possible for a woman, she had to briefly turn into a man in order to conceive the fetus of her reborn self (because only men could create fetuses, which they then transferred to women during intercourse, according to ancient Egyptian beliefs). So the women’s mummy was magically transformed into a man to create a fetus via a spell in the Book of the Dead, then changed back for perpetuity to enjoy the afterlife.

We should also talk about hippos, which the Egyptians viewed as demonic (they also hunted them). They would break the legs of hippo statuettes just before burial to ensure they posed no threat to the tomb owner (see below: Fierce demon hippo!).

Another fun Egyptian belief: Ground-up hedgehog spines mixed with fat or oil cured baldness. They also carved their burial organ jars in specific shapes so people would know what organ went in which jar, since most Egyptians couldn’t read.

This was a neat work examining standards of beauty. Five identical busts of Nefertiti are mounted on a wall; the only difference is the skin tone.

Also neat, but in a much different way. Umm, even for a fertility statue, this was pretty out there. It’s supposed to represent procreation between Isis and Osiris that led to the birth of Horus.

The museum also has some great stained glass in its holdings.

By this point I’d reached the fourth floor, and it was time for the highlight of my visit: “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago. I studied this piece extensively in the AP Art History class I took my senior year of high school, and could’ve stood in front of it all day soaking in the detail of each setting.

The premise is that 39 important female historical figures are seated around a dinner table, with place settings laid out for each. My favorites were those for Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Wollstonecraft.

I walked through the American art gallery on the fifth floor before coming to the museum’s ‘odds and ends’ storage area, which reminded me of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s decorative plate display in London. The area is called ‘Visible Storage’ and shows visitors works arranged in tall columns that recall the Hall of Prophecy in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. They’re so much fun to walk through!

Of course, no great day can be absolutely perfect, and I struck out on my food bet today. I ventured to Baba’s Pierogies in Brooklyn for pan-fried sauerkraut pierogies with a mushroom topping (they also came with sour cream on the side, but I’m not a fan of sour cream with pierogies — it masks the flavor of the ‘kraut).

The mushrooms were excellent, but the sauerkraut tasted straight from the can. Then again, my Polish grandma makes the best pierogies, so my standards are rather high in this department.

Up next tomorrow: A matinee performance of “Ink” on Broadway. I’m also going to try to pop over to the Trinity Church graveyard, where Alexander Hamilton is buried, afterward. Other surprises TBD (like maybe one of these unicorn taiyaki ice cream cones?).