Merry Christmas! Well, this week proves to be a busy one for a lot of us visiting relatives, shopping, and celebrating Christmas. For me, it’s a little busier because December 20^th is my birthday! For my birthday this year I was treated to tickets to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular featuring the Rockettes! But I didn’t have to go all the way to New York to see it (though I would have loved that). I was able to see them in my own backyard at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center is one of the nation’s premier arts organizations. It is a unique achievement of community vision, initiative, artistic achievement and generosity known for its stunning architecture and technical facilities, impeccable acoustics and the exceptional quality of the companies and artists who perform here. The Center offers the world’s leading dance companies, Broadway shows, award-winning classical, jazz and cabaret artists, family entertainment, special events and year-round education programs. It is also the home of four Arts Partners, the Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific and Pacific Chorale.

The Center encompasses the 3,000-seat opera house style Segerstrom Hall, the 2,000-seat Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the 500-seat multi-functional Samueli Theater, 250-seat Founders Hall and 46,000-square-foot community plaza. Other venues and patron amenities include a studio theater, the Boeing Education Lab, two private donor rooms, the elegant Leatherby’s Café Rouge and two informal cafes.

The vision of The Center’s founders became reality on September 29, 1986, when Segerstrom Hall – one of the nation’s most innovative and technically advanced homes for the performing arts – opened its doors to the public for the first time. Soprano Leontyne Price inaugurated the venue by singing the Star Spangled Banner with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Aside from the wonderful architecture and ambiance of the theater complex, the main reason I was there was to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and especially the Rockettes. As I took my seat and read my program before the show started I learned a great deal about the Rockettes.The Rockettes are a well-known precision dance company, stationed out of the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. During the Christmas season, the Rockettes women have performed 5 shows a day, 7 days a week, for 75 years.

The Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall and numerous other American and Canadian cities is the most-watched live show in the USA, with more than 2.1 million spectators annually, when they are performing.

Their famous kick line started with 16 women and now has 36. They are all between 5'6″ and 5'10 1/2″ and are arranged tallest in the middle and shortest on the ends giving the illusion they are all the same height! 

The Christmas show has grown and changed over the years. It began in 1933 as a show between movie screenings. This was just one year after the opening of the music hall in 1932. The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers and the living Nativity were the show's only acts.

The show is now presented throughout the United States in cities such as Chicago, IL, Des Moines, IA, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Tampa, FL, Phoenix, AZ and Costa Mesa, CA.

Not only was nice to get out and see the theater…it was especially nice to watch the Christmas show which put me in the holiday spirit!