Westward Ho!

Radio City Music Hall, the New York landmark concert hall, was returned to profitability last year after a 30-year string of losses. Now its owner, Radio City Music Hall Productions, is trying to build on its success with a West Coast operation that will produce special events and television programming.

The company, a unit of the Rockefeller Group, has opened a Century City office headed by Wayne Baruch, vice president for West Coast operations and former administrator of Carol Burnett Distribution Co. His primary interest will be television programming, while special events will be directed by Tommy Walker, whose company was acquired by Radio City last July.

Walker was in charge of the opening and closing entertainment at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the fireworks show put on for the 1986 Liberty Day observation in New York harbor and, recently, the entertainment that accompanied Harvard University’s 350th anniversary celebration.

Richard H. Evans, chief executive of Radio City, says he expects the company to become fully bi-coastal, although, he adds, “the Great Stage itself will have to stay where it is.”