A Rockette won’t fall in the middle of a kick line. That’s a given, a Christmas miracle you can rely on. But mid-kick one went down last month — boom! — in the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes,” before an audience of former Rockettes celebrating the group’s 100th anniversary.
Falls don’t bother me. I’d rather see a dancer move with abandon and topple onto the floor than play it safe and remain upright. But Rockettes, whose whole reason to be is precision dance, don’t fall. They move as one. Their accuracy is startling, their unison enlightening, and any break from such commitment feels wrong.
The more than 500 Rockettes in the audience that night didn’t react much to the slip. They were in celebration mode, even if many seemed distracted — the woman in front of me was livestreaming the show on a video call to what was quite likely a former Rockette watching from her kitchen.
What was more out of step was that a show called “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” didn’t showcase the Rockettes with conviction. The production started out strong — the first four dances in the show have long been the most satisfying — but as the night wore on, the Rockettes, an American institution, started to feel like Santa’s arm candy instead of the accomplished dancers they are. And, why, on the occasion of a milestone anniversary, was there no new Rockette dance to usher it in?
The joy of being with so many Rockettes, in their Radio City home, couldn’t mask the thought that they have regressed to being a legacy brand — good for merchandise but sad for the art of precision dance. For a few years beginning in 2006, under the leadership of the choreographer and director Linda Haberman, the Rockettes were starting to become a dance company that mattered, a venture where precision dance could grow and, through experimentation, flourish.
Today, the Rockette universe seems to have retreated, smack into the marketing wing of a holiday show anchored by a binding sense of sisterhood. True as that sisterhood may be, it’s not what the Rockettes should be most admired for. That should be dancing.
The visionary behind the Rockettes was the choreographer and director Russell Markert. Inspired by the Tiller Girls, a popular British group of precision dancers, he created an American version — the Missouri Rockets — in St. Louis in 1925. In the late 1920s, the dancers relocated to New York at the invitation of the impresario Samuel L. Rothafel (called Roxy), to perform at the Roxy Theater. There, they became the Roxyettes.
When Radio City Music Hall opened in December 1932, Rothafel was asked to oversee the first show. The Roxyettes performed — numbers like Markert’s “With a Feather in Your Cap” — on a program that also featured Ray Bolger, the Tuskegee Choir and Martha Graham’s dance company. Opening night was an overlong disaster; Rothafel collapsed and left the theater on a stretcher.
Soon after, the lavish Music Hall transitioned from a hall for stage shows — it was called a “palace of the people” — into a movie house with live performances between screenings by acts like the Rockettes, which were led by Markert until his retirement in 1971. Throughout their 100 years, the Rockettes have been a household name in American culture, but by the 1970s, the glamour of Radio City was wearing off as tastes started to change.
The family films that played so well at Radio City were increasingly less available as the film industry changed. (Screenings stopped in 1979.) With fewer movies, performing opportunities decreased for the Rockettes, too. During a 1967 labor strike at Radio City, The New York Times reported that “while the Rockettes were picketing, the theater offered music along with the movie instead of the traditional stage show.”
In 1975, New York City experienced a devastating fiscal crisis; in 1978, Radio City was nearly demolished. The Art Deco theater was saved and made a landmark, but the Rockettes weren’t so cool anymore. And the group’s overwhelming whiteness became an issue.
Markert’s ideas about uniformity involved not only choreography, but also skin color. The first dancer of color, Setsuko Maruhashi, was Japanese. It wasn’t until late 1987 that the first Black Rockette, Jennifer Jones, was hired. Her debut performance was at a Super Bowl halftime show in 1988.
Sisterhood, always important to the Rockettes, has become the organization’s safe crowning glory. Jessica Tuttle, executive vice president of productions at Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which manages the Rockettes, said in a speech before the anniversary performance: “It doesn’t matter when you danced on the line or for how long. As we all know, once a Rockette ——”
“——always a Rockette!” the statuesque crowd shouted back.
Tuttle introduced a video featuring different generations of dancers to highlight “the history and the future of the Rockettes line,” she said. But there were few signs of a future in either the short film or the show itself, a 90-minute production of music, dance and holiday-themed vignettes. This was a celebration of the past.
It was fun to hear the former Rockettes whoop it up during “New York at Christmas,” a radiant dance featuring dancers in red and green costumes riding on a Double Decker bus. But Haberman, the choreographer who created it, left the organization in 2014 after the abrupt cancellation of “Heart and Lights,” a spring show she conceived starring the Rockettes. In late 2016, the Rockettes made news again when some members balked at the prospect of dancing in the presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump in his first term. The Rockettes did perform, but it was not mandatory.
Apart from Markert’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” a 1933 masterpiece, the enduring choreography in “Christmas Spectacular” is by Haberman, another visionary. She didn’t want the Rockettes “to just become this kitschy-retro thing,” she once said; she wanted “to move them forward: to create a wonderful dance company that just happens to be the Rockettes.”
It was an era, however short-lived, of a new Rockettes. Haberman was thinking of ways to deconstruct the kick line as well as the Rockettes. Their glamour was more than skin deep, their dancing was never throwback. Now her modern sensibility, which appeared to light a spark under those dancing heels, seems to be disappearing. The Rockettes of 2025 are wholesome and athletic — and pretty retro.
Legacy and an impeccable kick line can’t turn this “Christmas Spectacular” into a great show. It’s never been a work of art, but it doesn’t take long for the current version to slide into dullness. My Christmas wish list included a desire for Santa to go away and for the non-Rockette dancers in the ensemble to stop hogging the stage. “Rag Dolls,” a number that Haberman had cut, is back. In it, the Rockettes look like adult versions of Pippi Longstocking as they spell “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” with blocks. It’s a little infantile. But then “Spectacular” has gone the way of Disney.
“Dance of the Frost Fairies,” formerly the elegant “Snow,” turns the Rockettes into life-size dolls with wings. (Originally choreographed by Haberman, it has additional choreography by Julie Branam, a former Rockette who is the director and choreographer of “Christmas Spectacular.”) “Snow” glowed with beauty and purpose: Each Rockette was a snowflake, individuals who one by one came together, united into a winter wonderland. (Was it always this purple?)
“Christmas Lights,” a finale added in 2018, gives you what you think you want: more Rockettes. As a dance, it has moments — hips sway with sassy abandon, arms reach with strength and force, tight walks pause in elongated bevel poses — but the choreography feels pasted together. On the night I saw the show, it wasn’t always in exact unison; for the Rockettes, exact unison is everything. At their best, the Rockettes are a testament to what the human body can achieve in a digital age.
That the art of precision dancing has endured this long is a testament to what is most valuable about the Rockettes: their meticulous care with details, their otherworldly teamwork, their humility in putting individuality on hold in the service of glittering synchronicity.
“Christmas Lights” ends with a kick line. It has to! But it showed that a kick line needs to build on momentum, that what makes a Rockette kick line work is the path that it takes to get there: laying a groundwork of steps and angles knitted into a greater whole.
Why did this final kick line of the show — 36 women flinging their legs into the air with eye-high accuracy — land in a place of been there, done that? It seemed tired, as though it had been inserted into the dance as a necessity rather than as a reward. A kick line is an exclamation point. A kick line, deconstructed or not, needs to have an inner life. And the Rockettes, once again, are in search of someone who can lead them to that.
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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