Once Matilda

I saw two shows recently!

With Andy, Faye, Ian, Katie, Lara, Alyssa, and Alex I saw Once, which we rushed last week. Even the rushing part was pretty fun, since it was a nice day and there was so much company!

Here's your soundtrack for my review (skip ahead to about 1:30 - he talks a lot at the beginning):

The show was lovely. It opened - well, pre-opened - with an Irish folk jam session, most of it while audience members were onstage milling and drinking. So that was awesome. I mean, really, based on my response to Million Dollar Quartet and to One Man Two Guv’nors, I don’t really want to see musicals at all, I just want to see rockin’ concerts. Which is in keeping with my generally negative attitude toward musical theatre, so, you know, no surprise there.

As for the body of the show, everyone agreed that the music was beautiful. While we saw four understudies that night, one of them – the weakest – in for the lead “Guy,” overall the cast vocals and instrumentals (the cast is the orchestra, which I loved – definitely a better solution to the don’t-have-money-for-band problem than just replacing all the musicians with synths, anyway, and conceptually perfect for this show) were powerful, locked in together, and very moving. The “Guy” understudy was a little noncommittal both vocally and emotionally (of course, the two go hand in hand), particularly in the first act, but in the second act when he was featured in quieter songs and ditched the I’m-trying-but-can’t-quite-wail-like-Glen-Hansard thing, he shined a lot more. [Note: I wrote “shone” instead of “shined” there first, and it took me a while to figure out why it was wrong! No wonder non-native speakers have trouble, if we natives can’t even remember which tense patterns go where.]

Particularly, incredibly beautiful was the a cappella reprise of “Gold” in the second act, with all cast members standing simply singing on stage. It was breathtaking, and it was perfectly together, which is astonishing for a large-group a cappella number with no conductor (I looked and looked for their monitor), no formal music director (listed in the program are a cast music captain, a la the more standard dance captain, and a music supervisor, but no music director – I would love to have a peek into those rehearsals!), and no one even looking at each other on stage. Also brilliant was the more-instruments-than-in-the-movie rendition of “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” the song they record in the recording studio (which is in 5, which I find both distracting and wonderful – talk to me about “alternative” meters sometime).

As for the non-musical elements of the show, I’m afraid I disagreed with everyone I went with. They thought the script was weak, telling rather than showing, that the production didn’t add anything new and better to the story told in the movie, and that the result was on the whole less dramatic than the movie.

I, on the other hand, really liked the new choices they made with the script. I think in a play you have to tell more than you do in a movie, because you don’t get close-ups of faces, and I liked the way they wrote through the dramatic moments rather than letting the actors fall intensely silent (again, something that works a lot better in a movie than on stage; after all, that’s one of the things Alex and I both hated about Billy Elliot, was the laziness of the librettist in substituting dramatic pauses for difficult dialogue). I do think the emotional moments didn’t carry as well as they should have, but to me that was the result of the lack of 100% commitment on the part of the “Guy” understudy, which meant the chemistry between him and the “Girl” wasn’t quite there.  Any script is going to look weak if the actors aren’t pulling it off. I would love to see the show again with the regular “Guy” – although listening to the recording of him, he has the same vocal problem as the understudy, which is that he’s a musical theatre singer trying to sound raw, resulting in a vibrato-free but not particularly emotional belt.

And, you know, whatever they say about the storytelling in the production, I definitely heard some uneven breathing and saw some reddened eyes from the members of my party round about the last number of the show.

The other show I saw recently was Matilda, which I’ve been excited for for a year! While I didn’t utterly love it the way I’ve loved some recent shows,* I really enjoyed it. I’ll start with the flaws, so I can end with the strengths, which carried the show enough to make it easily worth your time and money.

Meanwhile, here’s your Matilda soundtrack!:

Flaws – Uneven pacing. Most of the time I was absorbed, but there were several five or ten minute chunks where I was bored.  The dialogue was a little prosaic and not very strong. Not all the songs flowed seamlessly from the script to heighten emotional moments or to allow characters to communicate openly – they were mostly fairly internal, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Miss Honey’s song in particular, “Good Enough for Me,” was almost beautiful but ended up not working at all for me. Some of the adults were a little weak – I think maybe they were focusing on their accents harder than on actually being clear. Miss Honey was the weakest I’ve ever seen her, and I wanted her to have more agency. Matilda’s relationship with the librarian was played for laughs without being actually very funny, and without successfully establishing Matilda’s internalized role as a parental figure in a way that justified her later relationship with Miss Honey, as it should have based. And while I respected that they made a strong choice with Trunchbull – casting a man in her role – and followed through on that choice fully, making use of the physical and vocal, and internalized-character-development implications of cross-dressing-man rather than big-strong-woman, I didn’t like the choice to begin with, which I’ll talk about more later.

Strengths – The lyrics! The lyrics were brilliant. The lyrics were clever and on point; the rhymes were smart, the phrasing was repetitive in a way that clarified and emphasized, the lyric content phrased over the meter (one of my favorite songwriting devices and one that I have yet to master) – basically, it was how I wish I wrote lyrics. Also, the set – equally clever and creative. The floor was in miscellaneously-sized squares that raised horizontally up and down to form platforms and desks or rose vertically to form 2-D facades; the alphabet/reading them was prevalent but unobtrusive; the whole concept was well-synced with the show concept and very well executed. The choreography! Basically, the trifecta of extremely clever, well-synced creativity in this show was the lyrics, the set, and the choreo. The choreography was detailed, precise, and new; well-tuned to the songs; and developed over the course of the show. Loved it! The addition and development of the acrobat/escapologist storyline worked really well – my trust in where they were going with it, when it initially looked tacked-in, was warranted.

Performer-wise, Miss Honey had a lovely soprano although her character was a big nothing aside from her first (great) song (“Knock on the Door”); the Wormwoods were effective and creative; the Latin number, “Loud,” with Mrs. Wormwood and her salsa partner was hysterical; Matilda was great, great, great, carried the show exactly the way she needed to despite being exhaustingly onstage almost nonstop and having a substantial amount of singing to do. But, more important, the children – oh my god, the kids were incredible. The kid choreography was specific, high-energy, and extremely extensive, and they nailed it, better than I’ve ever seen kids on Broadway before and better than a lot of adult dance choruses on Broadway. Plus, their British accents were so good that I assumed the kids were imported before I checked out the program and found them to home-grown! Seriously, if the lyrics/set/choreo don’t convince you, go see this show just for the children’s chorus.

[I was going to insert the link to "Miracle," the opening number, here, but it's giving me trouble, so you should just click through! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5y84mTBjA]

Cross-gender casting – I am all for cross-gender casting. But what bothers me is that the cross-gender casting trend on Broadway applies only to casting men in the roles of large or powerful or scary or over-the-top women. To me, it suggests that largeness/power/scariness/over-the-top-iness (haha) are traits that belong to men, that women who have them are therefore manly – are not like women. While I don’t want to accidentally reinforce the “strong but feminine” trope (which Katie and I got into extensively one night in a bar, and which I will happily talk about with you in person) with that last sentence, what I’m trying to say is that this kind of cross-gender casting actually reinforces the gender binary, by saying that some traits are womanly and some are manly, and that a woman with certain traits is appropriately played a man, particularly when other incidences of cross-gender casting are almost completely nonexistent on a professional stage. If we saw more women playing men, or men playing more “feminine” women; if we saw more gender-play in general; even better (in my feminist utopia), if we saw gender as not relevant to characters, such that we took ability to perform the role vocally and in terms of personality/acting ability as the only precursors for being cast in a role, not taking gender into account at all, I would be way more down with the cross-gender casting!

Back to this specific case, I actually thought that casting an man as Trunchbull and emphasizing effeminate gestures and mincing around actually make the character into a parody of womanhood, made her funny because she is someone who is trying to perform femininity and not doing it well rather than because she is just over-the-top scary, made her less actually scary-due-to-being-intimidating and made her more unstable/“crazy,” only scary because we’re told she’s scary through narrative, lights, music, etc. I don’t want to fall into comparing the musical to the movie – particularly since they’re both based on a book and a spectacular one at that – but the Trunchbull in the movie is perfect, and is also a great role for a woman who doesn’t look like the usual women who get cast, and while I liked a lot of the different approaches the musical took, they should have just left that one alone.

I guess those sound like pretty mixed reviews, but the point is, I liked these two shows a lot, and you should go see them!

*Peter and the Starcatcher is the most absolutely beautiful show I’ve seen in the last two years (topped only by Scottsboro Boys, which I saw neither off-Broadway nor on Broadway but managed to catch during its brief San Francisco run, but I was also head over heels for Newsies, Book of Mormon, Venus in Fur, One Man Two Guv’nors, and Million Dollar Quartet; in the quite-liked category are American Idiot, Finian’s Rainbowl, Memphis, and the silly but delightful Lysistrata Jones, in the meh category is Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Everyday Rapture, and in the wasted-my-money-and-my-time category are Anything Goes and Billy Elliot, and there you have every Broadway show I can remember seeing since I moved to New York, and now I feel like I haven’t been taking advantage of my city of residence nearly enough.

If you're feeling like being transported... here's the "Gold" reprise:

IT HAS BEEN SO LONG SINCE I POSTED

But now here I am again! Hooray.

Here are the brief updates:

Hannah is subletting from us and she is great! She took Carla and me to see Vintage Trouble, her friend's band, on Tuesday night, and they were totally awesome blues-funk-soul sexiness. They usually play in LA, I think, and if you live in LA or they are ever in your area, you should go see them! They have an album out next week, I believe.

Carla and Alex and I also saw Of Montreal play at Webster Hall last week. It was the second time I'd seen them and they were also totally awesome! Their new album is very dissimilar to their old albums but equally wonderful - less bouncy and whimsical, more trippy - but their show either way has the same blend nutty intensity, attractive androgyny, and performance art.

They had two openers. The second opener, a duo from Sweden (I think) was super boring. But the first opener, a guy named Kishi Bashi, was - wait for it - totally awesome. He plays violin, sings, chants, and beatboxes, and it's all fed into pedals so it can be looped. When he's live, you can watch him build these complex layers of music until it grows beyond anything you expect. We bought his (first!) album after the show!

I love this song.

Hm, what else is up? Poor Alex is sick and has been for a couple days, but (cross fingers) no one else has gotten it, and hopefully he'll be feeling better tomorrow!

Y'all probably mostly know that I'm working at a cool theatre in New Jersey called Porch Light Productions; if you don't, well, now you do!

Faye turned me on to Avatar recently, and I watched all three (COMPLETELY AMAZING) seasons in about three weeks. I highly recommend it to all. Each episode is only about 23 minutes, so it's a quick watch, and the world, politics, and character development are so great. Zuko/Katara forever! I'm also excited that Mad Men is back on, although I haven't watched any of the new episodes yet.

I'm currently reading Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith, which (like most of her books) is in the same world as the Inda quartet, although 400 years later (and another 400 years before A Stranger to Command and Crown Duel). If you aren't reading her, you should! If you want something fun, quick, and classic, start with Crown Duel; if you want total fantasy immersion in a completely original, pro-feminist semi-medieval world and story, go with Inda. They are all worth your time. The only equally exciting book I've read this year is Middlemarch.

And that's all for now, although expect a followup post very soon about exciting things I've been cooking! Plus, we're hosting a seder tomorrow and expecting 12-15 people; it should be really fun, and I'll keep you updated after on how it went :)

P.S. I got a Pinterest account! I haven't done that much with it yet, but what I have done is pretty nerdy and (I happen to think) very fun. Here's the link: http://pinterest.com/shoshaname/ And on that note, if you know any fantasy worlds with really cool maps, send them to me, because as you can see, I'm collecting!

Many Things All In One Week!

We made Christmas last week; Carla came over and I made her eggnog french toast.

I soaked the bread in the giant eggnog pot

and fried it into delicious!

Then she and Alex and I opened the giant mound of presents that had appeared over the course of the previous week and a half.

giant mound of presents

Lots of exciting present-unwrapping happened, which you can see on the facebook album I will upload very soon!

After that, we made enchiladas from no recipe!

mixture of enchilada sauce and oil for frying corn tortillas:

messy but worth it

yay friends cooking!

I wore the pretty sweater Alex's parents got me, and also the bows from the presents.

It was also a night of Chanuka, so we made some Chanuka.

The candles got attached in a neat way!

Here is a closeup:

After that was some movie watching and general merriment.

Here are some other things I did this last week!

Alex and I went grocery shopping one day (for what? you will find out momentarily!). Filene's Basement was having an unlikely sale.

Actually, that might be the day that Alex accompanied me on a shopping trip! That was Dec. 26th, for the sales. The stores were not too crowded, and the sales were pretty good. I got two tops at Banana Republic for $21 each marked down from $50 each; a pair of cute grey wool flats half off from I store I hadn't heard of before and don't remember, on 5th Avenue maybe around 20th; and a cute plaid flannel button-down half off from Old Navy. It was a lot of shopping, but we got Dos Toros in the middle, so that was ok.

Anyway, groceries also happened this week, because here is why:

Ben and Tara got us an electric fondue pot for the holidays! Also two fondue cookbooks (along with a regular healthy cheap food delicious looking cookbook)! One of the fondue cookbooks is the Melting Pot cookbook! We had to make fondue right away! Well, the next day, anyway. We made a cheddar fondue from the Melting Pot cookbook, with beer and sour cream and cream cheese and green onions and I forget what else but it was totally great, and dipped cubes of break and steamed asparagus and broccoli, plus later apples. We've been using the leftover fondue as a sauce on all bland things, such as polenta.

In fact, we fondued again today, this time with meat!

We should have probably marinated the meat first, but we forgot. It was delicious anyway, once we figured out the timing of cooking it just enough so it was tender. We made two sauces: a cocktail sauce from a recipe in the cookbook, which was ok, and a mustard-horseradish-mayo sauce with a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, which was awesome.

Next up we should make a broth fondue for meat, and also batter some veggies to fry in oil, and also make a chocolate fondue! The problem with chocolate fondue is that most things that you put in it suck (mainly because I hate fruit), but maybe I could make some shortbread or pound cake, and maybe also use banana. Any other good ideas?

So here is another thing from Christmas that has long-term awesome implications:

This is a great book! It has lists of many things I didn't know about! Now, the museums and when they are free or dirt cheap I mainly knew about already, but there are other things to do (many of them in the summer, sadly) about which I did not already know. Also, there are pretty darn good looking cheap-and-delicious restaurant listings, although they do not go north of the park, which is a damn shame. There are probably other locations they're missing for restaurants, but I haven't looked through the whole book yet, so I can't tell you where. However, the listings are so cool that Alex and I agreed to do at least 25 things in the book over the course of the next year! This includes all things listed -restaurants, museums, parades, staying in hostels (not actually likely), etc. We have already done two.

One thing we did was on the last night of Chanuka. The book tells about the world's largest menorah, which dwells during Chanuka on 5th and 59th and which is lit each of the nights. We went! It was pouring rain, and it turned out (unsurprisingly, I guess), to be run by the Lubavitchers, who are hilarious, and also the mayor was there. I am no fan of the mayor, but it was pretty cool still to be so close to him, as I had never had that chance and he is an important personage. The mayor and one of the Chabad guys (who kept offering me menorahs and reminding me to light my candles that night - "all 8!") went up in the ConEd lift (I know it was ConEd because the Chabad guy whenever he wanted something to happen with the lift would cry, "Mr. ConEdison!") and lit the candles (which sat in lanterns for protections) after some very fast praying. The Chabad guy kept cracking jokes about the mayor coming out in the rain, plus also at one point turned it into a bad political statement about how NYC doesn't negotiate with terrorists and neither does Israel. It was a very weird and also fun experience.

This is the best picture I got.

For a moment when I looked at it, I thought that the sky was a

Really Cool Color.

But that turned to be my umbrella.

The sky is brown with clouds and city lights.

It matches the buildings, more or less.

That is the mayor and the Chabad guy up in the lift,

plus some assistants.

On that very 8th night, Amanda lit the candles for our own menorah, and was cute!

Speaking of Amanda, she totally had two tickets to see the Merce Cunningham show that was here for three days at the end of the month, which he had been working on when he died, I believe, at an armory-turned-theatre at maybe 67th and Park. So I went to the show with her!

Now, I am often not a Merce Cunningham fan; he explicitly is trying to strip dance of story and emotion so that we are just appreciating and engaged by the shapes and movements of the bodies. This often is a failure for me; I like story. I tend to think that the purpose of all art is to tell stories and/or engage us emotionally. But then sometimes I totally get into what he's doing, just because the ways that the human body can move is really amazing. Then there's the part where I have a major love-hate relationship with postmodernism, and he is all postmodern: there's the super-postmodern music, naturally, and the costumes that may or may not have anything to do with the performance; then in this show the dancers were on three separate stages that we could walk around (not very well, because it was crowded), and you really couldn't watch it all at once, so you got some and you missed some and it was pretty disjointed. But then, because it's not telling a story, it's ok if you miss some of it, right? That's how I felt at this show, anyway, which I really really enjoyed. I enjoyed the music, I was totally into the movements of the dancers, I didn't mind the feeling that I was missing something while watching something else, and also the costumes (unitards that mostly sort of looked like they sort of had city scapes on them, with an overall sort of blue and green color scheme) were great. It's very interesting to me to watch how Cunningham's stuff, while it still has a current feel, is actually old fashioned in some ways. It is completely rooted in ballet, for one thing; while you can see how he tweaks the vocabulary to expand its range, and you can see the classical modern techniques he uses (filling the negative space, for example), the steps are still essentially ballet steps: sissonnes, pirouettes, developpes, glissades, promenades, blah blah, all the stuff I know. Also, while the movements he uses for partner work is modern, the essence of the partner work is very traditional: The man supports the woman. Even when it's not a lift - when it's, for example, someone holding an arabesque and resting a hand on the partner's shoulder (so essentially involving very little actual strength for the person with the shoulder) - it was still the man supporting the woman. I actually think it's a bit of a shame for someone who broke out of the mold in so many ways to still be trapped in that old gender binary, but, you know, so it goes.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the show, which was a perfect length at 45 minutes. But I still liked the woman who smiled and looked like she was enjoying herself more than I liked everyone else (she was the only one! At a professional level! Dancers really really don't pay attention to their faces! I knew that as a student, but assumed that dancers in the professional world knew how to, like, smile! I was wrong!). And I still liked the partnering best when the two partners seemed to connect. So I may have enjoyed the plain movement, but the emotional aspect clearly draws me in significantly and immediately even then.

Here is another thing I did this week:

Hung out with Denver, a friend from school whom I hadn't talk to since before graduation! Denver is great. She and Carla and I got coffee at Mud, which is the shop in the East Village that sends out a bright orange truck around the Astor Place stop sometimes, which is where I get off when I go work at NYU.

After that, her family - they were visiting her sister in Yonkers for the holidays - treated us to dinner at a delicious pizza place, the name and exact location of which I forget. How delightful!

Next up: New Year's! Carla came over for that, too, and I made chocolate peanut butter pie. I accidentally put in too much cream cheese, so it is a little over-the-top rich, and I am not a fan of the fudge sauce even though I put in a whole extra ounce of unsweetened chocolate (it called for two), but it is highly enjoyable nonetheless, because after all what can be bad about a peanut butter cheesecake-like pie in a chocolate crust with fudge sauce?

The crust was actually made out of cocoa wafers that I made from another of Alice Medrich's recipes. T'hey were fine in the crust, but I like the chocolate mousse pie crust better so will use that in the future, especially as the cocoa wafers aren't that good for anything else. So far Alice is about 1 for 4 on the recipes I bothered to copy from her book. (The 1 is a delectable honey ice cream I have made a couple times in the last few years.) Oh, well.

New Year's was fun aside from the pie, too. Basically Carla and Alex and I watched Spirited Away (we were going to watch Stand By Me, which I was dead certain I owned but which is not to be found - maybe it's with my parents? - but when we couldn't find it we watched Spirited Away instead, which is not at all the same but which we had from Netflix) and listened to music and drank about a bottle of champagne each, and went outside to watch some illegal fireworks, and generally stayed up until Carla had to leave for Newark at 3:45 am to fly home.

Then yesterday Alex and I watched football all day, which was great. I especially enjoy that the 49ers kicker threw a touchdown pass.

Last! Today! Alex and I did some errands, and we also did 25 Things Number Two by stopping for late lunch at a little restaurant called Sullivan Street Bakery on 47th between 10th and 11th! It was mainly bread things. Alex got a giant breadstick with olives; I had a giant square bread thing with pecorino inside; and we shared a brioche bun with gruyere and prosciutto (sweet and savory! amazing!) and also a sweet pastry with vanilla cream. Yum!

That is all for now (and gee! it was plenty!). The full photo album will be on facebook I hope tomorrow; we'll see!

In Which I Eat A Lot

So it has been a while since I posted! This is mainly because I have been so busy actually doing the things I should be posting about! Also, because I type for a living, so sometimes I don't really want to type for fun also. But since I just submitted a guest post for Ya'el's awesome new blog (be sure to read her first post, which is both insightful and fun!) and she graciously included a link in it to this blog right here, I thought I ought to have some recent activity so as to look like an interesting person!

So here I am.

Anyway, one of the things that I have been doing since I last posted is hanging out with Cheryl! She came to visit for several days, which was very fun. Her visit included such delightful activities as eating at Pam Real Thai at 49th and 9th, eating at Chocolate By the Bald Man; and eating at Alice's Tea Cup!

We like to eat, I guess.

We ate a lot of delicious tea food at Alice's Tea Cup!

Also, drank a lot of tea!

We also saw shows! We saw Wonderland, which was, not to go into too much detail, terrible.* We also, to make up for it, saw The Book of Mormon, which was freaking awesome in every way, to the point that I did not even mind standing for two hours (we - Cheryl, Alex, our friend Shawn, and I - got the last four standing room only tickets for that night). It was riotously funny, shockingly truthful, inspiring, moving, catchy, fun, serious, and, whatever anyone tells you, actually a pretty biting look at religion, especially Mormonism. Although apparently Mormons like it too, so who knows. I downloaded the first song for free by "liking" it on facebook, and I highly recommend that you do the same. You will be instantly in love.

Anyway, another thing I have been doing since I last posted is hanging out with Alex's brother and sister-in-law, Ben and Tara. They live and work in Australia, but were able to come visit the States for two weeks in April, during which time they spent a day and a half in New York with Alex and me! This was also a very fun time. Their visit included such delightful activities as eating at a Persian place on the Upper East Side, eating at some diner-y place in Times Square, eating at Chocolate By the Bald Man, and eating at an empanada place in Hell's Kitchen. Also drinking at Blockheads and at Vynl, a martini bar also in Hell's Kitchen.

We like to eat and drink, I guess.

Also, we saw Anything Goes! It was not very good, except for the big dance numbers. I mean, it's not a very good show to begin with, and because the plot 100% depends on this ridiculous racist twist at the end it is impossible to make it acceptable for contemporary audiences, so actually I'm not sure why it has been revived in the first place, since there isn't anything in it that is so good that it outweighs what you are saying by putting up this corny, dated, racist schtick of a musical. The only complex character is Reno Sweeney, and Sutton Foster, while very talented, is completely wrong for her, so that didn't work out either. She is great at plucky and sincere; she is less great at bawdy, over-the-top, and yet secretly more-or-less genuine. Also Sutton Foster, while a very good dancer, was the weakest part of the dance numbers, because she one hundred percent drops character to think really hard when she dances, which is not what I am paying to see (not that I personally paid to see this show. But it is the principle of the thing). That said, the dance numbers were great! The title number and "Blow Gabriel Blow," which are the best songs in the show to begin with (the music this show is not, shall we say, Cole Porter's best work), blew me away with the dancing, including the tap dancing, which is hard to do these days! I am not easily blown away by contemporary tap dancing! But this was great. Also, our seats were really really really good.

Anyway, the point is, probably they should put up reviews that include the best numbers, and not actually do this show. But I do not regret seeing it, which means it was better than Wonderland. Also, maybe they should produce original shows/plots. I would appreciate that. See: The Book of Mormon.

Another thing that I have been doing since I last posted is hanging out with Alex's dad! He came into town for a day because he had business in Jersey, and we hung out, and it was very fun! We ate at the Tick Tock Diner, which is the best diner I know, and is on 34th and 8th, and I highly recommend it. Also, we ate at Puttanesca, an Italian restaurant in Hell's Kitchen (I appear to hang out in Hell's Kitchen a lot), and it was very very good. Also, we ate empanadas at Mama's Empanadas around the corner on Greenpoint. Mama's Empanadas are delicious and very cheap. Also, we walked all across town! We gazed at the U.N. building and sat in a park near the Ford Foundation building. P.S. The Ford Foundation building lobby is open on weekdays to the public, and it is enormous and beautiful! It is basically a rain forest, with a wishing pond in the middle at the bottom. Remind me to take you when you come visit, which I assume you are all planning to do any day now!

Mama makes delicious cheap empanadas!

Anyway, I have been doing other things also besides eating, seeing shows, and hanging out with visitors. I have been going down to D.C. to hang out with my father at an educational leadership conference, I have been subbing for Drew's Triple Threat class at Broadway Dance Center, I have been with Alex shopping and cooking delicious food, I have been also with Alex working on our subway stop project, I have been typing interesting interviews, I have attended Drew and Greg's excellent housewarming party, I have been hanging out with Edlyn, I have been thinking about how to be a better citizen, and I have been preparing for Alex's birthday! Also I play a lot of Boggle and cribbage with Alex and Jamie. Also I have been getting ready to go to Toronto and for Alex to leave for Connecticut and for Carla to get here and then later for me to leave for camp. But I will tell about all those things in another post, because this one is getting long! Ok, bye.

*Ok, I can go into detail. You have convinced me. Basically, it was a bunch of bad pageantry, wasted acting talent, uninspiring costume and set design, plotting that completely did not suspend my disbelief, and stupid, derivative music. With a dollop of racism for good measure. We actually left before the curtain call, which I have never done at a Broadway show, even Billy Elliot, which is the only other Broadway show I can think of that I probably would have been better off not seeing.

American Idiot

Well, Alex and Ilan and I saw American Idiot a few weeks ago. It's closing this month; Billie Joe is actually coming back in to play St. Jimmy (the main character's sexyfine yet frightening drug dealer, basically) a bunch this month, and if Alex and I turn out to have any money anytime soon, we'll try to student rush it again one of those days.

Because it was wonderful! I've talked to a lot of musical theatre folk who said things like "I didn't understand what was going on," "It didn't make any sense," and "I just didn't get it." Their problem, though, is that they have a narrow-minded view of what musical theatre should be, and their brain basically shuts down in protest when a show doesn't lined up with their definition, and then it doesn't make sense to them because their brain isn't working.*

Because the plot of American Idiot was not difficult to understand. And I really really mean that. The plot is super basic: three guy friends are in a band. They are disaffected with the state of the world and also the state of their lives. This is a very pomo 20th Century story. You have all read it and seen it probably 247 times. Two of them go to the big city (the third doesn't come because his girlfriend is pregnant). One of those two is unhappy in the big city and joins the army, thus "betraying" his friends and his previously professed socio-political beliefs. The third (our main character) remains disaffected, gets hooked on drugs, falls in love with a woman, and is basically confused. Eventually their lives deteriorate; eventually later they pick up the pieces and get to hang out together again, if not happy at least making lives for themselves. Easy easy shit to follow. Really!

And I don't mean that as criticism of the show, because the basic plot of the show is not the point. This is a rock musical. It's not about what happens to a few guys. It's about coping with the modern world; it's about becoming an adult; it's about living with disaffection. And there are a lot of ways to interpret these messages and the ways they are presented. I was actually afraid of disliking the show for the first 15 or 20 minutes: I was afraid it would not have legitimately human female characters; I was afraid it would fully embrace postmodernism and the fracturing of communities as a result of identity politics; I was afraid it would position the poor disaffected American white guy and his pain as the center of the universe. I should have given Green Day more credit, it turned out. Although it unfortunately remained a musical about guys, I was impressed by the well-rounded humanity of the gal side characters. It embraced community without conservatively leaning on the "standard" hetero nuclear family (the way neo-liberals in the media, and also Judd Apatow, habitually do). It recognized that the most sympathetic disaffection is about stuff going on that is bigger than your poor little while American male self - while reminding us that everyone's pain is real, whether or not it's worse than someone else's.

And there was more to think about and deconstruct, although I can't remember most of the details now because it's been three weeks or so since I saw it. But basically, it was great! And no, the songs don't always further communication among the characters and serve the linear development of the plot, the way we generally ask songs to do in contemporary musicals. The songs explore the inner lives of the characters and the greater themes of the show, in a frequently nonlinear, nonliteral fashion - which doesn't mean that they are stuck in without relevance to the plot or characters, or that they are not necessary to the telling of this story. What it means is that they are unfamiliar and confusing to people who take musical theatre seriously (which I do) but who in the process end up defining it in a highly focused and limiting way. (You know, I love Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel and Kerrigan and Lowdermilk too, and I'm excited about The Book of Mormon too, but I also recognize that they are not the be-all and end-all of contemporary musical theatre!) So American Idiot gets dismissed as fluffy or nonsensical or irrelevant or pretentious because it's ROCK music and it's ANGRY and it's NOT ABOUT THE PLOT (basically for the same reasons that Passing Strange was also dismissed among the gospel musical theatre crowd).

But, I will have you know, what it also is - is GREAT.

*Disclaimer: I adore many members of the gospel musical theatre crowd. I agree with many of their opinions about musical theatre. Many of them are dear friends of mine, and people whose opinions I often respect greatly. I just happen to absolutely passionately think that they have a disastrously limited vision in respect to well-crafted rock musicals.

Also, I believe that there are reasonable reasons a person might not like this show. They might not like the music, and that's fine. They might think that the plot doesn't support the message, and that's fine. They might dislike the characters, and that's fine. They might morally disagree with some or all of what they or I interpret as the messages of the show, and that's fine (well, it might mean that they are conservatives and therefore morally bankrupt, which is not really fine, but I would accept it as a legitimate reason not to like the show) (also, a person could probably politically dislike the show for non-conservative reasons, but I don't know anyone who does so I don't know what those reasons might be). There are, in fact, a lot of reasons a person might not like this show, and I am completely willing to talk about it. I am just not willing to talk about how the show "just doesn't make sense."

my favorite excerpt*

from the maine Edge's review of Forever Plaid:

"....And work it does. This is a show about the songs. Four-part harmony is a beautiful thing, when it's done right, and these guys can make it happen. The music is toe-tappingly mesmerizing. Each number is pure and engaging. Sure, the bits between songs - the comedy and earnestness - they're important (and very well done), but all in all, the music is the thing.

"This quartet has brought Forever Plaid to life. They are as real a musical group as you'll ever see - aided in no small part by the exceptional band, with Caleb Sweet on bass, Chris Viner on drums and led by piano player Shoshana Seid-Green. The band is tight, the vocals are spot-on - it's one of the better concerts you're likely to see."

Hell, yeah!

*Here is the rest.

Soulmate Visit!

Here are the awesome amazing exciting things I did with Meredith!:

When she arrived on Saturday night:

take the bus and the train from La Guardia back to Hotel CA;

eat Thai food and wander around midtown late at night;

go to bed!

Sunday:

go down to Battery Park and look at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (we did not go on a boat there because that takes forever and also I have done it like four times);

head up to Union Square and eat delicious delicious food at Chocolate by the Bald Man (Meredith had a turkey burger; Alex had a cheeseburger; I had chocolate chip pancakes; they all sound mundane and yet transcended, as expected! also there were dark chocolate truffle hazelnut milkshakes) and wander around Union Square Park sticking our heads in the abstract sculptures and taking exciting pictures;

go all the way up to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park at like 200th St., wander the paths up the hill by the river to the museum proper, enter, wander through 10-16th C. halls and rooms and artwork and courtyards and fountains and flowers and warm drizzly rain and look out at the soothing soothing river in the gleeful sweat of the day until our feet throbbed and our hair drooped;

travel down to the Hungarian bakery near Columbia and buy not very good pastries and eat them in a little courtyard outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and consider painting ourselves oxidized copper green and posing for hours on top of the statue in the middle of the courtyard and frightening people;

explore said cathedral, including the funnest playground ever and also the Biblical Garden, which is home to a peacock we spent 20 minutes stalking and photographing;

head back to Sunnyside, eat at the Turkish Grill on Queens Blvd., which Alex and Meredith loved but I didn't, but I think I just don't like Turkish food that much;

go to bed!

Monday:

head into town to go shopping, which involved walking around 5th Ave., which involved Meredith buying a $95 watch, and which shopping also involved an expedition into H&M during which Meredith bought a stylish black and white striped top and I bought a flowy red halter and some denim shorts for camp and also a detour to Aerosoles, where Alex was hard at work and where I tried on purple strappy heels and then Alex bought them for me because he is super great and also a trip down to Nordstrom Rack in Union Square, where we did not buy anything;

but before Union Square, sandwiches at Toasties, which is near Rock Center, and Meredith's was delicious and mine was ok;

walk out to Veniero's, a bakery recommended to Meredith by Imran, where we bought a fruit tart and a slice of chocolate cake and a slice of New York cheesecake layered with chocolate mousse, the last of which was incredibly delicious and well plotted (the mousse! and the cheesecake! go so well together! amazing!) and the first of which was also apparently delicious, which I only know second hand because I do not like fruit, and the second of which was ok;

travel to St. Mark's place and pick the cleanest, cutest, non-threatening-est piercing place for Meredith to get a second hole in her I think left lobe, during which time I was almost talked into getting another piercing also, which I ultimately decided against because I did not want to spend the money;

go back home to change into our fun semiformal attire, which involved a cute cream and black dress and black leggings and heels for Meredith and my cream halter chiffon-y graduation dress and flip flops soon to be replaced by my new purple for me;

pick up Alex and also my shoes at Aerosoles;

go up to Harlem for some Manna's Soul Food Buffet and Salad Bar, which charges by the pound and is so delicious and which happens to be the exact place Carla and I stumbled across when we were here on Satellite! and eat macaroni and cheese and Jamaican jerk chicken and fried plantains and bread pudding and other mouthwatering delicacies;

head towards Swing 46, where we were planning to dance the night away in our fun semiformal attire, only to decide that as drinks will be expensive there we should buy our own across the street beforehand, only to take a detour to the Blockheads plaza and sit outside drinking gin and ginger ale for several hours and never make it to Swing 46 but have a thoroughly enjoyable evening anyway and then go home at like 1 in the morning and go to bed!

Tuesday:

visit the World Trade Center site, which is a lot of rubble and some construction, as it was when I visited it five years ago;

walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which I never tire of;

not eat at Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn, because it is closed on Tuesdays, lackaday, but instead;

eat at Lombardi's in Little Italy at Spring and Mott Streets, which is not transcendent the way Di Fara is but which is nevertheless a very fine specimen of a pizza joint, and at which we enjoyed an excellent large pizza with sweet Italian sausage, wild mushrooms, and dollops of ricotta on top;

ride our foodly comatose selves up to Central Park, the northerly half, which I had not previously explored, beginning with looking at the Met for about five seconds and not going in, followed by walking around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir, going to the bathroom at the North Meadow Rec Center, and wandering through the beautiful, wild North Woods until Meredith's feet got too tired and we made our way east out of the park, but not buying any concessions from any vendors anywhere along the way, because the Central Park Conservancy makes money from that and the Central Park Conservancy is basically the devil;

walk through a theatrical festival in East Harlem near the Conservatory Garden, and proceed to wander through the neighborhood looking for frozen yogurt because that was all Meredith wanted for dinner, until we finally found a Tasti D Lite down at like 94th St. (two miles and we end up at a chain!), which was indeed tasti and dliteful;

show up at UCB 10 minutes before the doors opened and still manage to get in to see I think five improv groups do heralds (a form of longform improv), some of them kind of awkward and unfunny but some of them a riot and generally quite impressive, during which show we gradually moved ourselves from standing room to sitting in front of a bunch of seats to sitting in vacated seats, which we regarded as quite a coup;

go to bed!

Saturday morning:

go to the 42nd St. Port Authority and hug goodbye! She was headed to D.C. to hang out with her other great friend Michelle, who is great but whom I must admit to resenting this week because I fully do not support Meredith splitting her time evenly between us because I would have preferred to have the whole week with her! But that is ok, because this way I at least got some work done this week and caught up on the news, and Meredith is getting to see D.C., where she has never been! And also I saw Concrete Blonde last night and holy shit they blew my mind and also Alex's, even though he didn't even want to be there at first, even though he bought a ticket in a fit of wanting the night before, even though he didn't really know their music! Anyway, Johnette is a god! Also, I miss Meredith already. But also, I have a radio and on Saturday I will listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me for the second week in a row! My life is great.

As you can see, we did many many things. Meredith told me ahead of time that she was a very efficient tourist, and she was proved correct! And yet there are so many things we did not get done! She will just have to visit again, I guess :p

She took many many pictures. When she gets home and posts them on facebook, I will post select highlights on this here glob! Oh boy.

The End

Maternal Escapades

My mother visited!

Yay!

Here is how it went down.

Alex and I picked her up at JFK on Tuesday and brought her back to Hotel California :)

After the tour (which took hours, god, our place is so ginormous) we walked up Greenpoint looking for food and after a few busts found a lovely little Thai place! Pad Thai, fried rice, soup... delicious! Well, anyway, good. I wouldn't go back, but I enjoyed it while I was there. And we talked about many fun things, including the story of Alex's parents getting together, which is a very cute story and I recommend that you ask him about it.

We stayed up late; we got a slow but pleasing start on Wednesday. Alex had the day off, so he came too! Oh boy.

....

Ok, I started this post like a week ago and did not finish it, and now I no longer remember all the details of my mother's visit. So the rest of the post will be sort of here and there recollections, instead of a chronological story! Oh, well. I am a lazy blogger.

She took me grocery shopping! That was great. That was so great. I have so much food now. I made lasagna last week! I will make homemade mac and cheese soon! I made halvah with the tahini she bought me! I am stocked up on peanut butter and pasta and pasta sauce and bagels! I was stocked up on eggs but I have already used them all, because I made brioche! At one point this last week, we had halvah, brioche, leftover chocolate cake, and chocolate chip cookies in the house, all homemade. I love my apartment. Also I love free food.

Also, Debby and Alex and I ate at a delicious little maybe-Greek-I-don't-remember restaurant. We came in sort of between lunch and dinner, and they weren't really ready, so they let us choose between the lunch and dinner menus, and we picked lunch because we were not super hungry. I had a toasted sandwich with cream cheese and lox and capers and some other stuff; it was exactly what and how much I wanted. That evening, we also wandered over to where I had lived on the Satellite Program, and also we saw Everyday Rapture, which is Sherie Renee Scott's brilliantly titled but somewhat mediocre, if highly entertaining, one woman musical, currently on Broadway. I liked it better than Alex and Debby did, but I was not, like, emotionally moved or intellectually provoked, or anything. But I did enjoy it a lot.

Also, Debby saw Rock Center and almost bought some shoes at Aerosoles, but didn't in the end, because she had to think about it and then someone else bought them first. Always leap to the punch! is the lesson of that story. Although I guess that strategy probably does an equal or greater amount of harm, in the long run.

As an aside, in between Debby and Meredith's visits, Alex and I encountered Johnny Utah's, which is a big, beautiful rodeo bar at Rock Center down dark stairs from the sidewalk, and I have never been that excited about a bar before! I can't wait to go some evening! Or afternoon, as it appears to be very crowded in the evenings. Also, the bartender gave me a glass of milk for free. This was after Alex and I spent several hours wandering through an Avenue of the Americas street fair, and I bought several pairs of earrings for myself and others and Alex bought me a necklace and a pair of sunglasses that make me look super hot and I bought him lunch, and anyway the point is we were tired and worn out and that bartender was very nice and I am in love with Johnny Utah's, even though all I have had there is a glass of milk in the empty afternoon.

Back to the story. Debby and I stopped one morning for lunch at a bagel place at maybe 23rd and 7th or somewhere thereabouts, and it was delicious. When I am rich, I will eat a toasted bagel with cream cheese and lox and capers and onions at least once a week. I'm pretty sure I've said that before on this blog, but it always bears saying again. After that, we walked through four (I think) used bookstores, not a single one of which had a single trashy romance or good fantasy novel, because they are all stuck up and I hate them. It drives me crazy that used bookstores carry all kinds of trashy shit in male-dominated fiction genres and also some truly terrible "nonfiction," but can't bring themselves to stock in fantasy or romances (romances outsell every other genre of literature in the U.S., by far! I mean, come on, it's not like they won't be able to turn a profit off of them!). But we bought six or seven books anyway, for me to take to camp this summer, and I just had Daddy send me a bunch of fantasies and romances from home to fill that gap. I'm going to be working probably 70 hour weeks! I need some easy reading!

Also, we ate at a Dominican (I think? I don't remember, really) place way up Greenpoint, and it was delicious, and we had this nice but totally clueless waiter, and they gave us bottled water in cups instead of just tap water, but I had seafood soup and it was so delicious, and I took it home and ate it with some of the sourdough Debby had brought me from California, and I felt as if I was sitting on a pier in San Francisco, and it was a great day.

Also I made French toast with the sourdough Debby brought me, and later the sourdough Ilan brought me at CSJO. I almost never make French toast these days, because it is just not as good when it is not with sourdough, and sourdough French toast is exactly what I want, it just hits the spot, and anyway the point is, yum it made me sooooo happy.

And now I am hungry and I can't remember anything else we did off the top of my head, so I will sign off and go eat, and Debby and Alex can let you know what I missed, if they feel like it! The end.

4@15

Last night Alex and I went and saw 4@15, the four fifteen-minute original musicals produced by the UCI New York Satellite Program and the York Theatre Company. They were great! I knew almost everyone in the cast, which surprised me and also made it more fun. But also I was surprised and impressed by the quality of all four of the musicals! In the last few years, usually one or two have been very good and the others have been lackluster or weird and confusing, but this year they were all four engaging, understandable, creative, and - perhaps most importantly - made good use of almost all of the actors, which has also not always been the case.

Anyway, the first one was about couples shopping in IKEA. Despite this, it was surprisingly dramatically compelling and very fun, with lyrics and book by Amanda Yesnowitz, whom Alex and I saw at Birdland a few months ago! She is for real. We chatted with her after the show, and it was very exciting! I gave her my card - also very exciting!

The second was about a clown entertaining people on the 2 train uptown - but it took a surprising turn for the sad about halfway through, as we learned why one person wouldn't smile and how lonely everyone else actually was. Which makes it sound kind of pathetic and downer-y, but I promise it wasn't. My only regret is that they didn't make better use of the talented, cute, pseudo-Jamaican train conductor.

The third was odd and depressing and oddly, depressingly hilarious, about two lonely people who almost meet 1,000 times, during which time they decide to do their own dental work for their own bizarre reasons and to similarly unhappy results.

And the fourth was about the new, suave gentlemen in the Beth Shalom Retirement Home! That was probably my favorite, if only because of all the Jew jokes.

And then we had pizza, and went with Kelly and Kat and Kaitlin and many of the other Satellite people to a bar near their apartment at Lex and maybe 32nd, and I didn't drink because I was tired and hay feverish and also a pauper, but it was fun anyway, and then we bid them farewell and trained away home!

Next up: Flushing Meadow Park!

#3: Angry Box Office Denizens

This is about when Cheryl and I were waiting in line for the student rush tickets of Promises, Promises.

Student Rush tickets are available for many Broadway shows. They're usually $20-30, and you get them by standing in line before the box office opens in the morning and, when you get to the window (if there are still tickets left - you usually have to get there pretty early so as not to be too far back in line), showing your student ID, which allows you to buy up to two tickets (you get what seat you get).

So Cheryl and I decided to do this for Promises, Promises. The box office opened at 10; we planned to arrive at 8 but due to a slightly late start and then a mix-up transferring at 45th Road to a train that turned out not to be working at the time, which I would have known if I had checked HopStop, and then having to walk all the way back to the 7 and wait for another train and then have a slightly longer walk though (a delightfully empty due to it being the morning) Times Square, we did not arrive until 8:45. We were about the 15th people in line.

This concerned us. How many tickets were available? we wondered. I've done student rush a few times, but not enough to know what the standard number of available tickets is. Plus, everyone could theoretically be buying two; I was there myself to buy two, as Alex wanted to come but had to work at 10. But people kept filtering in behind us and seeming confident enough - and we remembered that there were two shows that day, a matinee and an evening show, and a lot of people seemed to be buying matinee tickets (we were headed for the evening show), so we stayed in line.

Then Cheryl realized that although she'd thought she had her UCI student ID, she actually had only her Arundel ID, which doesn't say specifically on it that she is a teacher, but we were not convinced that even little Cheryl could pass as an elementary school student. However, her Arundel ID conveniently (although for no reason either of us could guess) has an "S" on the bottom under her picture, which we figured could stand for "student teacher" in a pinch, right? But I texted Alex anyway, asking him to bring his student ID by on his way to work if possible.

We fretted for an hour, and then Alex arrived with a surprising amount of time to spare and his ID, which he gave to Cheryl. We all assumed that this would be fine, because as long as there is one person standing in line and one seemingly-current student ID, who cares if they match? It's not like any extra tickets are being gotten out of the deal.

Tell that to the angry ticket seller in the box office window! He was middle-aged and astonishingly angry. Here is how our interaction proceeded.

Cheryl: Are there still three tickets left for the evening show?

Angry Box Office Denizen: (growling) Yes. Where are your IDs??

(Cheryl and I produce IDs)

ABOD: (to Cheryl, after looking at Alex's ID) Who is that?

Cheryl: Um, that's my friend?

ABOD: (extremely sarcastically) Where is he?

Cheryl: (in a small voice) He had to be at work....

ABOD: (impatient and furious) Well, where's YOUR ID??

Cheryl: (in a very small voice, pulling out Arundel ID) Um, I have my student teacher ID, although it's not a proper college ID....

(ABOD grunts and turns away for about 30 confusing and nerve-wracking seconds, then turns back around)

ABOD: (growling) Sixty dollars.

(The website and also the sign said that student rush tickets were $30 each, so we are confused and concerned at this pronouncement.)

Me and Cheryl: (as politely as possible) Wait, how much?

ABOD: SIXTY. DOLLARS.

(I hand over sixty dollars. ABOD again grunts and turns away without saying anything for a nervewracking thirty seconds, then turns back around with 3 tickets, which he pushes to us.)

Me and Cheryl: Thank you, sir.

(ABOD does not respond, and we scurry away)

(End scene)

So that was astonishing and intimidating, but we got three tickets for less than we expected! All was well (despite our being somewhat shell-shocked), and I bought a grilled cheese sandwich from a cart and used the bathroom in a hotel and we headed for Battery Park! The end.

#2: Burt Bacharach

So Cheryl and Alex and I saw Promises, Promises, which is an oldish (70s, I think) musical revived on Broadway, still in previews.

The book to the show is by Neil Simon, who (very unoriginally on my part, I admit) very well might be my favorite playwright; naturally, it is brilliant. The dialogue is both hilarious and incredibly dramatically compelling.

The actors are delightful.* The leading man, whose name I have forgotten, has a lovely voice and a nice enthusiasm; Kristin Chenowith as the other lead is as predictably brilliant as the book. I never get tired of her and that weird-but-so-gorgeous voice.

The problem with the show, of course, is that the music is by Burt Bacharach.** There's just no getting around that, is there? The opening number, "Half as Big as Life," is fun and well put together but a little repetitive and a little anticlimactic. Fine, I can live with one dud song - until I discover that every song in the show is the same dud song! What was going on? The orchestration always had this identical laid-back dun DUH... duh dun DUH going on; every song was the same tempo, had the same melodic background, might very well have been in the same key! (On that note, I'm not sure I heard a single internal key change. I mean, come on, I might complain about the kind of clumsy modulations both musical theatre and pop composers so frequently use as a substitute for creating genuine drama in a song, but at least they've got something going on! And for god's sake, the answer isn't just to leave out not only drama but key changes as well!) Even the tango was super-chill! I didn't know it was possible for a tango to be so boring. "Say a Little Prayer for You" had nothing to do with its context in the show*** -- but at least it didn't ruin the moment it inhabited, unlike virtually every other song (have I mentioned yet that Kristin Chenowith had three identical solo ballads about the same thing, none of which had any dramatic arc whatsoever? She gave 'em everything she had, but I swear, even Carol frickin' Channing couldn't have given those songs any personality. At least they sounded pretty. Not that Chenowith's astonishing range was used at all in this show. I don't think any of the songs encompassed more than about half an octave). The show got to be very predictable: The script would seize me and build me up to a peak of either hilarity or tragic suspense, and then the orchestra would come in and I would plummet back down (or, by the end, sideways into the entirely wrong kind of hilarity. Laughing doesn't count if you're laughing at the music). If I were Neil Simon, I would have knocked Bacharach a good one for ruining my work. This is one of the few musicals I have ever wished was a straight play.

Actually, I take it back. "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" is a great song and is totally appropriate for its moment in the show, and the way the leads sang it together, sort of awkwardly, reminds me of when Ellen Page and Michael Cera sing "Anyone Else But You" at the end of Juno, which is my favorite part of the movie, and anyway I love it. It arrived about three quarters of the way through the second act, and I thought to myself, "Aha! The second song in the show!"

The choreography was good, in that it was fully appropriate for the music and the time period; I can't say much more. The dancers were talented but clearly still working hard at sticking together; I fully expect, however, that they'll be on top of it by the time they get out of previews. The set was period-appropriate. Basically, the production as a whole was great.

The show is based on an old movie, The Apartment, which I enjoyed a couple years ago and which I'm kind of proud of myself for figuring out. Unfortunately, it turns into an attempt at a sort of conglomeration of The Apartment, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and Mad Men, and just falls so sadly short of all of them.

And that's about it!

P.S. I perhaps have not yet mentioned the song "Turkey Lurkey Time," which I would suggest was the pinnacle of the show's absurdity, and not in a good way. The title - and my snarky aside to Alex that it was the worst version of "Steam Heat" ever - I believe sufficiently explain the entire number, so I will leave it at that.

*I should mention that Katie Finneran as Marge MacDougall was the most hilarious thing I have seen in years, and absolutely stole the show, despite being in only one and a half scenes, and I hope to see her in everything from now on.****

**Here's what the New York Times said about the show when it first appeared: "Though the work featured memorable dance sequences by a choreographer on the rise named Michael Bennett, what really set it apart was its score, written by the solid-gold pop composer Burt Bacharach with lyrics by Hal David. Mr. Bacharach introduced to Broadway not only the insistently rhythmic, commercial-jingle buoyancy of 1960's soft-core radio fare, but also a cinematic use of Teflon-smooth, offstage backup vocals." No wonder I hated it. Those are for sure the last musical characteristics I would have asked anyone to introduce to Broadway. Just sayin'.

***I just learned via Wikipedia after writing this review that "Say a Little Prayer" and also one of Chenowith's innumerable ballads, "A House is Not a Home," were added for this revival so that Chenowith would have more to sing. While I appreciate anything she sings, I have to say that that was a TERRIBLE CHOICE. Were two big boring anticlimactic attention-losing ballads not enough? And if they were putting in "Say a Little Prayer" (maybe as at attempt at something upbeat? Given that both the ballads and the upbeat songs were actually all the same tempo?), couldn't they at least have added a key change or two? I'm afraid I have to subtract production points for this, which I previously had production quality/casting/directing/etc. in a relatively top notch on Shoshana's Broadway Ladder of Approval. Too bad.

****Oh shit! She was Sally Bowles in the Cabaret revival not too long ago! I bet she was wonderful and I wish I had seen it! And she was in My Favorite Year! I think she's my favorite actor ever.

Things That Will Soon Be Covered On This Glob

Gendered words;

Burt Bacharach;

Angry box office denizens;

Bald chefs;

Kosher champagne;

My New Favorite Pastime, as compared to my Old Favorite Pastime;

Regrettable culinary coastal disparities;

Emma Lazarus.

In the meantime, I am busy hanging out with Cheryl!

Jamie is Back!

Yay!

She got back on Saturday late afternoon! I am so pleased! I met Alex in the city that evening so we could give her and Tom the apartment to themselves for a while, and we went to the Upper East Side and got pizza and saw Shutter Island, which was terrifying but very good. (Alex didn't think it was scary really at all, just interesting and suspenseful, and that it doesn't even really count as a "scary movie," which I guess just means that I have a very low tolerance for scary, which I knew already, seeing as The Butterfly Effect scared the living hell out of me. But Shutter Island really was very good, very well put together, interesting, even though the premise/solution, when you figure it out, is basically exactly the same as the premise/solution of a different very good movie that came out some years ago. I was hoping it wouldn't be, when it started to occur to me about 2/3 of the way through, but the time it turned out to be, it was done well enough that I didn't object. But anyway, if you have any tolerance for scary at all, I really do recommend it.)

When we got home, Jamie and Tom and Alex and I ate chocolate cream pie and talked until late, and then went to bed. And then on Sunday we pretty much just hung out in the apartment all day, talked, ate pizza, watched the Olympics, and so on and so on... and Jamie's friend Amanda came over in the evening, which was super fun, and Tom made noodles in a slightly cheesy sauce for dinner, which was delicious. Yay! I like having Jamie back! Yay!

Tap Dancing and Making It!

For the purpose of this post, those are two separate things ;).

On Wednesday, Alex and I rented a small room at Ripley Grier for an hour and tap danced! It was super awesome. I have from time to time in my past carried my tap shoes about and found empty rooms with wooden floors to practice in, but I often run out of ideas of what to practice before I run out of time. Tapping with someone else means that sometimes we can just do our own things, but then we can also teach each other combinations and exercises and steps that we know, which means that not only do we have more stuff to do to fill the time, but we are practicing picking up new things, which can be a tricky endeavor outside of a class! Plus, I found my folder full of tap notes - mostly dances and exercises from Berle, plus some really old stuff from Sue B., plus some stuff from Bob Boross and some from Ray Hesselink (whom, p.s., Alex and I saw while we were there! We ran out of the room and said hello, and he remembered that we'd been on the UCI Satellite program, and congratulated us on moving here, and we said we'd come take class from him soon! So exciting!) - so when we run out of our own stuff to do, we can work on the stuff in there! The room was $24 for an hour, which was $12 each, which is about 2/3 of the cost of a class - plus we got to dance the whole time, instead of waiting while everyone else goes across the floor or practices stuff I've figured out already, or while the teacher figures out what to teach next, or any of the enormous number of other things that slow down dance classes.*

So that was great. The plan is to go three times a month, which is as often as I can afford.

And on Wednesday evening we went to see Making It! It was wonderful. It was so wonderful. It was Stew on guitar and vocals (and I think he wrote most of the music), and Heidi Rodewald on bass, and a guy on tuba and a guy on trombone and a guy on clarinet and bass clarinet and flute and sax and a guy on drums and a guy on keyboards, and I think that's everyone. It was music about the end of relationships, and it was music about the end of Stew and Heidi's stint on Broadway, and it was "Black Men Ski," about the many things black men do (I wonder if black women do them) that white people think only white people do because white people have a very ridiculous restricted view of black people, and it was music about touring, "there is an intimacy in motion that transcends the stationary," and it was music about drugs - speed, "the kingdom of drink," another person, and about the real, still, because that's how he relates to music, uses it to find truth and uses truth to find it and is always searching, or anyway, that's how his interaction with music appears to me, always searching for something deeper, and anyway it's what I think music should be, if I were to think of a single way that music should be, which I don't - and I loved it loved it loved it loved it loved it. If you ever have the chance to see Stew, do it.

And then as we emerged at the end of the show, a group of people were talking about Passing Strange, not the part it plays in Stew's musical curriculum vitae (I feel like there is a better phrase for that, but it is not coming to mind), not how his music has gone around it and through it and changed or not changed, not about theatre and music, not about the differences and the similarities and the overlaps and the divergences, not about anything across or around or through or among or between, but just about the content and quality of Passing Strange, and I was like, boy, did they miss the point or what.

*This is not to say that I don't absolutely love taking good tap classes. I love it. I would love to take some. I would love to be able to afford to take tap class twice a day five or six days a week. But that is not an option.

In Defense

So I saw Making It, Stew's concert, last week, and I'll give an incredibly positive review of it momentarily. First, however, I want to get off my chest the aspect of it that has been upsetting me more and more since the concert.

Stew in this show was very critical of theatre - theatre as an art form, theatre as a whole. According to Stew, theatre doesn't carry the truth, the simplicity, the truth that rock accesses - it infantilizes the audience - it's deliberate - it's artificial - it tells you what to think and how to think it.

Well, yes, bad theatre does all those things. And bad rock music is solipsistic and narrow and shallow and annoying, and bad paintings are ugly and meaningless and pompous and condescending, and bad classical music lacks heart, and, ok, fine, so what?

Either Stew has only seen bad theatre, or theatre's mode of approaching and seeking and exploring the truth doesn't click with him, and that's fine, everyone has different tastes and ways of being and seeing, but this was more than a it doesn't work for me, it was a it doesn't work, and that's not fair, and it's not true. Theatre - straight and musical and in-between and otherwise - can be organic and genuine and puzzling and difficult and gutteral and true, on many levels.

I love theatre in a different way than I love music, and I have frequently been heard to say things to the effect of "I always think I love musical theatre, and then I listen to rock," meaning that rock clicks with me at maybe a different and deeper and more fundamental level than theatre, but that's not entirely true. The different part, yes. And maybe the deeper part, but if that is so it is because I am more willing to give myself over to rock music than to theatre, which may or may not be true, and even if it is, it is a thing in me and not a thing in theatre. Maybe theatre is usually more intellectual for me, maybe because it usually tells a more precise story than rock, but that doesn't mean it doesn't reach the same honesty and fundamental meaning and it definitely doesn't mean the audience doesn't have to work for it, and it really definitely doesn't mean it doesn't present itself for a myriad interpretations. The point is, good theatre is not didactic, and good theatre is not fake, and good theatre is challenging and moving and astonishing and even transcendent. Just like any other art form.

Obviously, I have no idea what Stew actually thinks or means - and of course, Making It is about emerging from the world of theatre (i.e. producing Passing Strange), which was not comfortable for him and did not feel like home, which is a wonderful thing to ponder and discuss and sing about - but I can only react to what he presents. And what he presented went beyond the personal (the personal was perfect) and into the personal of others, made the personal objective, which can be perfect, maybe, if you are fair about it, but he wasn't.

That's all. Forgive this post, please, for being a little brainstorm-y and run-on and scattered and unilaterally critical. In the next post, I'll give Stew the praise he is due - and he is due a great deal.

Shows

1. I saw Billy Elliot a couple months ago. That movie was destined to become a musical from its inception. What a great dance show it could have been! But whose moronic idea was it to have Elton John write the music? And where was the choreographer for three quarters of the numbers? What dancing there was I enjoyed, but for a show about dancing, the choreo was awfully sparse. Also, did the book even exist?

I'm not a fan of Elton John anyway - schmaltzy bombast is not super exactly my style - but it was so so so so so wrong for this show. For Lion King, fine, I can deal. For Aida, who cared in the first place? (Ok, maybe I just didn't care. Reasonable people could probably love that story. I have never yet found myself in a discussion about it.) But for a serious, down to earth drama about a devastating strike, tied together with the so-genuine story of a boy learning to dance? I was laughing my head off through the second act.

2. Alex's parents took us to see Next to Normal last week! I really enjoyed the first act - until at intermission Alex enumerated all the things about it he found frustrating, and I realized to my dismay that part of my enjoyment came from my uncritical nature. (Actually, I have not had an uncritical nature regarding theatre for some years now, but I usually enjoy whatever I'm watching in the moment and then spend the next two weeks taking it apart. It is a bummer to be pushed into criticism in the middle of everything!) Anyway, the biggest problem with the first act was that the music was sort of all the same - dramatic musical theatre rock - because the tone of the first act was uniformly dramatic. Basically, the whole act was a climax, which sort of eliminated any real drama. This could reasonably have been the intentions of the writers; the show is about a woman who is bipolar and has hallucinations, and about the way she and her family deals with this. In the first act, she and her family are constantly constantly constantly plummeting off the edge, or at least feel that way. So it makes sense, in a way, for the music to reflect that. But it isn't very effective; it didn't quite take us over the edge with them, because there was never tension, only release. (I did, however, love the song "Super Boy and Invisible Girl." That was my favorite!)

That said, the second act was a vast improvement. The music got a lot more subtle; the high points were distinguishable from the rest. Alice Ripley is a brilliant actor; I totally see why she won the Tony. The woman who plays her daughter, and the actors who play her son and her psychiatrist, are also very strong.

Here is what I think about Tony-winning musicals in the last twenty years or so, although I have not yet looked up what they all are in order to support my conclusions: There are so few musicals released every year in the last couple decades, and so few of them have original plots and original music, that whenever one of those exciting new stories comes around, it is pretty much a shoo-in if it is at all good. In order to discern which shows are really great, you would probably have to look at about five years' worth of Tony-winners and pick the best of those; I'm thinking that every few years a musical actually worthy of "Best Musical" comes around. Maybe sometime soon I'll look up the last couple decades of winners and spout some opinions :)

3. Birdland! Birdland Birdland Birdland! For those who are not familiar with it, Birdland is a historic, renowned jazz club in Midtown. Look it up if you don't know about it! I've wanted to go there since I was on the Satellite program, but I never did. But Alex's parents took us there when they were in town (Alex's parents are great! :p), and it was as glorious as I imagined. We saw the 7:00 show on a Monday night, which featured the work of (musical theatre) lyricist Amanda Yesnowitz. I didn't expect musical theatre, Birdland being a jazz club, but it was a delight nonetheless. Yesnowitz is a little heavy on her rhymes, but she's very clever, and some of her songs are great - and they were sung by a wide variety of talented (and occasionally famous/successful on Broadway/other professional venues) performers.

But that was not the high point of the evening! Oh, no! Little did we know (until it was announced after the show) that open mic night is every Monday at 9:30! After a brief conference, we decided to stay; it's $10 for the night plus $10 minimum order each, which is a bargain if I ever saw one. Alex and I got pressured (and pressured ourselves) into seeing if we could go up and sing; Jim Caruso, the manager, instructed us to consult with the pianist and see if we and the band had any "upbeat and fun" jazz standards in common. Upon said consultation, Alex planned to sing "Once in Love with Amy" and I prepared for "It's Only a Paper Moon." Naturally, after I had already talked to the pianist (Tedd Firth, who possesses the kind of sightreading, improvising, sight-transposing, bad ass skill that makes me wonder why I even try to play the piano) and after the show had started, I began thinking of all the other upbeat jazz standards I knew, which had not been so kind as to rise to my mind at a more appropriate moment.

My nervousness grew. I have never sung "Paper Moon" full out! What was I thinking? And then someone sat down to play the piano and sing. I remembered that I know by heart exactly one of the songs I have written, and it is upbeat and fun. So when my turn came (about two and half hours in!), I asked (doing this sort of set of silly, cute mannerisms that I don when I am on stage and nervous and trying to be fun) if I was allowed to change my mind - I was, Jim Caruso, who P.S. is a riot as an MC, informed me - and I sat myself right down at that piano!* I played "Fifth Wheel" - like I said, the only song I've written that I've memorized (I need to get on that!) - and was shaking so hard that I missed some notes when my hands shook right off the correct keys. Also, I forgot the words and had to stop and wiggle my tongue around and go, "I promise I know these words!" which everyone assures me was very cute (I just felt super awkward!), and rearranged the verses accidentally, but I think I pulled it off! Jim Caruso said he liked it, anyway, and so did the very sweet (and talented) woman sitting behind me. (Have I mentioned that everyone who performed at Open Mic Night was super super talented, and a number of them have been on Broadway/Australian Broadway, whatever they call it/The West End? Anyway, it is true. And intimidating. But great.) And then Alex went up and changed his mind and sang a cappella: "A Change in My Life" by Rockapella, which is a great song and which you should look up if you don't know it. Anyway, he was also super nervous but great, and Jim came up and shook his hand when he finished because he was surprised at how great he was.

And that was Birdland! I already have a list of probably 12 songs I want to sing there. Must go back! Many times! It is heaven. Everyone should come to New York and visit me and come sing at Birdland!

4. That is all for now, actually, but next up is Stew and Heidi Rodewald! February 17, Making It. I will post about it after I see it, if I haven't expired yet from the Glory That Is Stew.

*Was that a complex sentence or what? I did warn y'all that I am overfond of parentheses. I probably should have mentioned my barely restrained passion for m-dashes while I was at it....