NEW YORK — With LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley looking on, more than 2,400 young Latter-day Saints took the stage of Radio City Music Hall Saturday, blending song, dance and videotape as a celebration of their faith in God and a nod to Broadway.
Dubbed "A Standard for the Nations," the jubilee celebration was organized as a tribute to the completion of the Manhattan LDS Temple, which is to be dedicated today in several sessions beginning with a cornerstone ceremony at 9 a.m.
Speaking to some 6,000 youths and guests assembled in the famed performance venue following the jubilee, President Hinckley said he had come to New York to make good on a promise he gave two years ago that a temple would be built here "while I'm still alive."
Reading from his personal journal of 2002, he recalled how he came to the decision that a temple would be built in midtown Manhattan. During a visit in March 2002, he visited property owned by the church in Harrison, N.Y. — about 25 miles to the north — which had been designated as the site for a new temple in 1995.
"For six years we have tried to get permission to build a temple but thus far have failed in our attempts," he wrote. "The neighbors simply do not want us."
Continual litigation and a series of expensive studies had ground the project virtually to a halt. The same day he visited the church's major facility near the Lincoln Center in midtown Manhattan, thinking to himself that it may be possible to reconfigure the six-story building into a temple.
The idea to reconfigure an existing building for temple worship had first come to him years before while searching unsuccessfully for a site in Hong Kong, he said. "It's was much like real estate in New York City — you pay $10 million for a piece of land the size of a postage stamp," he quipped.
After "much prayer" about what to do, he recalled waking in the middle of the night and sketching a plan to reconfigure an existing building in that city which housed the LDS mission home and administrative offices into a temple.
During a meeting with Manhattan members in the building near Lincoln Center the following day, he announced that the church would build a temple for them, though the location itself wasn't disclosed for some time afterward. He promised it would be completed in roughly two years, "while I'm still alive.
"Well, I'm still alive but barely so," he smiled, adding, "I've come back to fulfill that promise." He made no mention of whether the temple in Harrison would be built, but the church is moving forward with expensive infrastructure improvements there.
President Hinckley said his wife — who died April 6 after experiencing health problems while returning home from a January temple dedication trip with him to Ghana — would like to have been present on Saturday. He recalled the last time she had been in Manhattan with him, when they spoke together to LDS members.
"Who would ever have dreamed that a little girl from Nephi, Utah, would ever dance on the stage of Radio City Music Hall," she quipped then. "Well, I've done a little dance for her tonight," he said, adding for the young people assembled, "I've seen you dance."
The church leader, who will celebrate his 94th birthday this month, remarked how much he enjoyed seeing the name of the church on Radio City's famed marquee on his way into the performance. The jubilee featured "the largest cast to ever appear in any show in the history of Radio City," according to master of ceremonies Dave Checketts, the venue's former CEO and a member of the Yorktown LDS stake presidency.
LDS teens and their local leaders worked for months in practices and choreography for a highly orchestrated series of musical and dance numbers, complete with music, costuming and video clips featuring youths and three members of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve — Elders Robert D. Hales, L. Tom Perry and Henry B. Eyring, each of whom lived in New York for a significant time.
Elder Hales, who regularly attended Radio City productions as a child, told the Deseret Morning News the event was an emotional one for him, particularly when President Hinckley leaned over to him during their flight and said, "I'm taking you home."
The event was professionally produced by church members, many of whom make their living as entertainers, directors, performers or producers on Broadway.
Executive producer Claudia Bushman, an adjunct professor of history at Columbia University, said she was doing volunteer work with community relations as a member of the temple committee when she was tapped to head up the performance.
"I was given the assignment to start thinking about it, but it got called off, then started again. As we began to put together some of figures, they were so high in Manhattan it looked like we just couldn't do it."
As they began to work various strategies, Checketts' connection with Radio City came into play. "I've seen him do some pretty amazing things. It doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. He's just a supreme negotiator. And we really have had remarkable people to work with right down the line."
One of those people was Don Gilmore, who served as production manager for the Jubilee and "has a Broadway show opening this summer." He was one of "so many people of that sort who don't generally get to use their skills for church purposes" that volunteered to do so for the Jubilee, she said.
Broadcast director Andy Rosenberg, who serves in an LDS bishopric in Connecticut, has won "many Emmys doing sports broadcasting, and just recently finished the French Open. Documentary film-maker Scott Tiffany, whose History Channel production on the ship "Brooklyn" has won awards, served as the Jubilee's video director.
No one associated with the production was willing to discuss the cost to produce it, but Bushman said there are many "very successful people who have made it possible to say along the way that even if we don't get church funds for this, we'll raise the money to pay for it. Those of us of a certain age have lived through times when (such a production) simply wasn't possible."
Such public activities raise the awareness of the church in immeasurable but concrete ways, she said. After former Brigham Young University football coach Lavell Edwards set up a youth football league as part of his service as a public affairs missionary two years ago, "he managed to get grants from the NFL" and remains active in helping the program continue, Bushman said.
The league, the Jubilee, and the faith's community outreach "has raised the church's profile with area politicians dramatically."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com