Nicole schreibt...

Really? Yes, really. Back to New York just before Thanksgiving it was, because reasons. And because, when I oh so casually looked at flights, British Airways made me an offer I just couldn’t refuse with amazing prices at great times and from my very own backyard of Cologne Airport to boot. It all went swimmingly, first to Heathrow and then to JFK, where I breezed through immigration within ten minutes and must have set a new record of 90 mins from plane seat to hotel bed for New York. The hotel in question being the excellent little The Blakely just across the street from the New York City Center where I made happy memories four years ago, so I took it as another sign that this trip was meant to be. The room was amazingly spacious for Manhattan too with a mini kitchenette and bathroom with tub – into which I promptly flopped to chill after the long journey While I had often queued for Day Seats in London, I never had an opportunity in New York so far, mostly because I’m usually too nervous about seats and end up booking ahead (and regretting it). Now I trudged to the Nederlander Theatre in the morning and was rewarded for standing in the cold for 45 minutes with an excellent seat in the corner of the mezzanine front row for all of $40 to see “Shucked” in the afternoon. Mission accomplished, I went on another carrot harvest at the K-Pop-Store in Koreatown and to have a poke around Macy’s early Black Friday offerings, then back to the hotel to chill until it was time for the show. "Shucked" had surprised everyone last spring, coming seemingly out of nowhere and being that rare beast of a completely new musical with a very very funny book by Robert Horn and music and lyrics by Brandy Clark & Shane McAnally. Having heard so much about the many corny jokes and one-liners, I knew I’d really rather see it in New York with their ingenious caption boxes and the seat in the front row of the mezz was perfect for that. And it was definitely very worth it because I absolutely loved the show. The jokes veered between truly hilarious and cringey Dad jokes, the music (with a light country tinge) was wonderful and the cast more or less perfect. The amusing story is that of a hick town in “Cob County” where everything revolves around corn and said corn suddenly fails. Intrepid heroine Maizy sets out to the big city of Tampa to seek help and returns with smooth inept con man Gordy. Feeling that her town doesn’t reward her efforts, she ditches fiancee Beau for Gordy, who really hadn’t signed up to marry her and hijinks ensue. Apart from leading lady Isabelle McCalla, who stepped in as Maizy when Caroline Innerbichler dropped out pregnant, it was still the original cast, which also meant I got to see Alex Newell’s Tony-winning powerhouse performance as Maizy’s no-nonsense cousin Lulu, whose “Independently Owned” blows the roof off the theatre. Sure, Lulu is your cliche “big brassy black woman” but played with so much charm, huge voice and deadpan humour, that Tony was fully deserved. But everyone else was just as fabulous from sweet Isabelle as Maizy (and she’ll next lead “Water for Elephants” and I’m already looking forward to see her again), John Behlmann as goofy Gordy, Andrew Durand as jilted Beau and Kevin Cahoon as his cousin Peanut, who was also set up as the funny man and delivered his (a few too) many jokes with aplomb. The atmosphere in the seemingly sold out theatre was fabulous and I was really glad I could catch this, before it closes in January. It would sure have deserved a better run, but as an unknown entity stands little chance amid all the jukebox musicals, movie adaptations and tourist traps. At least they’re getting a tour out of it and a London run and I’m sure it will live on in countless amateur and school productions. If one thing has bothered me about new musicals in the last decade or so, it’s the quality of their writing – the bland pop music with forgettable melodies and trite, clunky lyrics. So when the digital cast recording of Barry Manilow’s “Harmony” dropped into my lap a while ago, I was immediately smitten. The great man has been working on his show about German group Comedian Harmonists for twenty years now and the music is a massive throwback to the mega musicals of the 90s with their big ballads. It opened only a week ago and I was sure that between the music, the story and Manilow’s name it would sell like hot cakes – but it didn’t and tepid reviews didn’t help, so I was rather annoyed I had forked out full price for a seat in the side stalls, when I could have picked up a better one at half price. But once the show got underway, I understood why it had failed to take off. Manilow and his collaborator Bruce Sussman opted for a Narrator device, letting Chip Zien as older Roman “Rabbi” Cycowski look back on the heady days of how the Comedian Harmonists got together in Berlin’s Roaring Twenties, only to be torn apart by the Nazi regime a few years later because three of them were Jewish. Bless Chip Zien, but my heart sank every time he stepped up for more narration instead of letting the story unfold organically. It also didn’t help that the six young band members remained mostly ciphers and their women tacked on so that there’d be some female parts and opportunity for big female ballads, capably delivered by Sierra Boggess and Julie Benko, who had last got everyone’s attention as Beanie Feldstein’s and later Lea Michele’s understudy in Funny Girl, and who really deserves a great leading part to shine in. The six guys – Sean Bell, Zal Owen, Eric Peters, Blake Roman, Steve Telsey and Danny Kornfeld as the younger Rabbi, to give them their due – were great, too, but it was hard to engage with them fully. Manilow and Sussman didn’t use any of the Comedian Harmonist’s original songs but wrote them new ones, of which the biting “Welcome to the Fatherland”, where they appeared as puppets on strings, dancing for the Nazis, was the strongest. The second act felt much better anyway, when the stakes were raised and the wonderful finale “Stars in the Night” did bring a tear to my eye, but on the whole I can’t believe it took twenty years to come up with THIS. Surely there’s a great story in there (we’ve had our own musical about the group and a successful movie) and great songs, but this was sadly not half as great as I had hoped based on the cast recording alone. I took it easy on Sunday morning with a leisurely walk in sunny Central Park (like half of Manhattan clearly) and breakfast, but essentially just killing time until the main event for which I had come to New York. Once in a while a performance just grabs you and impacts you beyond the general pleasure of seeing good shows and artists. It was like that for me with Andrew Polec’s unrivalled rock star performance in "Bat out of Hell" a few years ago, which re-ignited my love for good rock musicals (and where I had zero regrets dashing to London for his final performance either) and now similarly with Reeve Carney’s Orpheus in Hadestown. Reeve got a lot of stick from people who didn’t like his non-MT rock singer voice and/or his portrayal of Orpheus as a not-quite-there neurodivergent dreamer (as if this had been his own idea and wasn’t developed with director Rachel Chavkin and composer Anais Mitchell over a long time), but for me as a fellow neurodivergent dreamer often at odds with the real world, it made me feel seen on stage like nothing else ever and came to mean the world to me. So when he finally announced leaving and British Airways lured me with a great ticket price, I knew I had to be there to wave him off after a record-breaking run of over 1200 performances. And how lucky for me that I did! It made another wish come true, namely seeing him with another Eurydice instead of whiny Eva, the wonderful Solea Pfeiffer, who played her exactly as I had always envisioned Eurydice to be, a tough, solitary wanderer, making bad but understandable choices. It also got a chance to see the excellent new Hades Philip Boykin with a bass to rival Patrick Page’s, and pop star and queer icon Betty Who as Persephone. Much like Reeve himself, Betty was another totally left-field casting and while they couldn’t really convince me either singing- nor acting-wise (and Persephone is for me a black lady, not a platinum-blonde soap star), they bowled me over with charisma alone and I was glad to catch this fairly unusual portrayal of the Goddess of the Flowers. The atmosphere in the Walter Kerr was absolutely electric with fans out in full force as well as former cast members and I was thrilled to spot Andre De Shields, original Hermes, sitting right behind me across the aisle. You gotta hand it to the Americans, they know how to throw a goodbye party, with a huge standing ovation the moment the cast all came onto the stage and no less than four more standing ovations throughout the show after each of Orpheus’ big numbers. And oh the speeches. Director Rachel Chavkin and all the leads of the original cast were there to do speeches (with Amber Gray rushing in half-way through them from her own matinee and it made my heart jump with joy just to see her) before the most perfect ending they could have thought of: Both Hermeses, Andre and Lillias, giving Orpheus and Eurydice a happy end at last, as Reeve and Eva walked up the stairs and out of hell together at last (although he did turn around once more for a final wave). I swear there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and that moment alone was worth the ridiculous money shelled out on this weekend trip. By all means this should have been the perfect end of the trip, too, but a fortunate schedule meant I could add the Sunday evening performance of “Here Lies Love”, a show that had taken me entirely by surprise in London years ago. Conceived by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, it’s a musical about the rise and fall of the Philippines’ mad dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos (her of the thousand shoes) set up like a disco with the orchestra turned into a dance floor. The huge Broadway Theatre was turned inside out to recreate the earlier Off-Broadway setting and my front mezzanine seat proved to be excellent with a prime view over the dance floor and the action everywhere including on the mezzanine right in front of me. The original cast was back except for Imelda herself, who was now played by the excellent Arielle Jacobs, supported by Jose Llana as creepy and yet strangely alluring dictator Ferdinand Marcos (proving how easy it can be to seduce the masses) and Conrad Ricamora as their nemesis Ninoy Aquino. The whole thing flashes by in 90 very loud minutes, the disco noise dying with the Marcoses final exile when the DJ turns into a man of the people strumming an acoustic guitar. The show itself was as brilliant as I remembered it and here the people moving around the floor didn’t feel silly and contrived as with the recent "Guys and Dolls" in London, but made sense, when they acted as a crowd listening to Marcos’ speeches, partying with Imelda while the country went to hell or formed the silent spectators along Aquino’s funeral route. I even had a brief brush with celebrity when Oscar-winner Hilary Swank and a companion who I also thought I knew from somewhere sat down in front of me in the unsold premium seats, but strangely they bolted again after just ten minutes. Sadly “Here Lies Love” didn’t do well on Broadway and I was really lucky that I could still catch it before it would be closing a week later. A lot has been written about why it didn’t succeed, but at the end of the day I think it’s just one of these shows that simply do better as small Off-Broadway shows for a rather small target group rather than try to get the tourist masses that form the mainstay of Broadway (and the West End) these days, opting for forever the same endlessly running shows and general lack of interest in stories from other parts of the world on top of the rather confused marketing that didn't really make the concept of the "disco musical" clear. What a whirlwind tour it was with four shows in two days and at least three of them were excellent experiences. The New York Hadestown chapter has ended for me now, but when the Fates close one door they open a tiny new window in London I might just be able to wiggle through and Broadway will certainly see me again next year for a whole host of new exciting productions already announced. I don’t want to upload the full video I filmed of the speeches at Hadestown which will forever live in my heart and memory anyway, so here’s the upbeat disco finale of Here Lies Love instead: