Nicole schreibt...

Unlike the more recent chaotic trips to Montreal, Marseille or indeed the last one to New York in November this one had been planned quite a long time ahead and as before to match the Broadway Flea Market in September, my favourite nerd holiday in the Big Apple. And with so many new shows opening in a crammed season, I knew it would become a fairly big trip – a marathon rather than a sprint this time. So buckle up, it's gonna be a long ride. The trip was off to the mediocre start with a notification from American Airlines that my flight from London to JFK would be three hours late. An attempt to get onto an earlier flight with BA (through who I had booked) came to nothing, but ultimately it turned out for the best: Presumably because others with connection flights had been booked onto earlier flights, mine was pretty empty and I got to camp out across A-B-C for a nice little bed to sleep lying down. It also meant I was treated to a gorgeous full moon over Long Island and a view of New York Bay by night. JFK Airport had impressed me twice with efficiency so of course it couldn’t last. I wanted to try the new mobile passport thing that was meant to speed up immigration with a dedicated quicker line, but by the time I had completed that, only to be told it didn’t work for foreigners right now and I needed to head through regular immigration, a long line had built up there from my own flight and a flight from China that had arrived at the same time, so I had to waste a lot of time in the main queue. At least the rest had become a little routine by now, off to the AirTrain to Jamaica, the E to Manhattan and back to the Blakely Hotel which I had already enjoyed a lot the last time. They gave me an even bigger room this time, almost a suite with couch and armchair, kitchenette and bathtub with jacuzzi bubbles – who needs the Plaza, then? Thanks to AA’s epic delay and the further delay at JFK, all I could do now was to crash into my huge bed and try to get some sleep ahead of the big adventure. As I’ve moaned enough at great length in these trip reports recently, London right now is mostly a disappointment to me – mostly due to the lack of new big shows, but also due to overblown political correctness and questionable casting choices, none more so obvious as in my beloved Hadestown where no one at all in London came close to Broadway quality. So although I had been leery of returning to the Walter Kerr Theatre after saying goodbye to my beloved Orpheus last year, I decided that I couldn’t let the last disappointing show in London be my last live memory of Hadestown and should go out on a high. I bagged a great seat in the front mezzanine for the Wednesday matinee and thus started my marathon basically the way I ended the last NY Trip. And good thing I did, because once again, the show was just mind-blowingly good with a bunch of wonderful new performers. Needless to say I was mostly worried about the new Orpheus, Jordan Fisher, but that boy delivered in spades. I’m the first to admit that while I loved Reeve Carney to pieces, he couldn’t act to save his life and it was great to see someone actually ACT the part well on top of singing beautifully and looking boyishly adorbs. He was matched well by Maia Reficco’s Eurydice, a pretty waif-like thing with a surprisingly strong rock voice who reinforced that the lonesome lost stray dying of hunger really shouldn’t look as chunky as her counterpart in London did. Here’s the best pic I managed of them during the bows. Philip Boykin, whom I had already seen, was still a wonderful Hades, now even better matched by singer Yola’s voluminous hearty Persephone who didn’t tower over him as Betty Who had. The leads were completed by Stephanie Mills, who eons ago created the role of Dorothy in The Wiz, and was perhaps the only slightly weaker link as Hermes, being no match vocally or personality-wise for Lilias White. It was a joy to see three Fates who were matched for vocal harmonies and proper ethnic diversity rather than box-ticking too – Brit West, Belén Moyano and Jessie Shelton all being fabulous. While I feel that I’m a bit “done” with Hadestown after seeing it so often now, I was certainly glad to listen to my hunch and go out on a high with this wonderful cast and the enthusiastic vibe of the New York crowd. I had been a bit at a loss of what to do with the Wednesday evening after THAT concert mysteriously vanished (no I’m not over that, yet) and ended up settling for the transfer of the Encores production of Once Upon A Mattress, one of those beloved American classics that rarely make it across the Atlantic. The main draw for me, apart from being able to see a production of such a rarity, had been to see Michael Urie live, while the fact that Broadway star Sutton Foster starred in the lead had been more of a deterrent than an encouragement as she had thoroughly put me off with her lacklustre phoned-in performance at Anything Goes in London a few years ago. On the other hand I do believe people deserve a second chance, because you never know what they were dealing with and with digital rush being available at $45, I was willing to give things a go. I was dismayed at first, when I arrived at the Hudson Theatre in the evening and found that my rush seat was in the last row of the orchestra, but it turned out to be a great bargain. The row itself was only three chairs on an elevated dais behind a very good rake and since this had been a transfer from the concert version at NYCC, the whole plot unfolded on the main stage, which I could see perfectly despite the overhang. Sadly they didn’t have caption boxes yet and so a lot of the witty one-liners went over my head, but it was still very entertaining fun – a silly adaptation of the “Princess and the Pea” fairy tale in which bossy Queen Aggravain (played wonderfully by SNL comedienne Ana Gasteyer) forces her wimpy son Prince Dauntless to pick a bride and he falls for the uncouth chaotic Winnifred the Woebegone from the Marshlands, whose big introduction song “Shy” is one of the most popular comedy songs in the Broadway songbook. Another draw of this production was that no one less than Amy Sherman-Palladino, whose TV show about the smart-talking sassy “Marvelous Mrs Maisel” I absolutely loved, had given the book from 1959 a slight and mercifully respectful update, which worked well. And Sutton Foster indeed proved to me why she is so popular on Broadway, delivering a fantastic performance full of physical comedy as Princess Fred, ably supported by an all-around great cast, so I’m glad I took a punt on this fun show. With more and more shows doing Thursday matinees, I could do another double bill on Thursday, which meant booking one show ahead and standing in line for in-person Rush for another one in the morning. After that I returned to the hotel to chill in my large room and bathtub until it was time to head out for lunch and the matinee: The Great Gatsby at the Broadway Theatre. The last year or so had turned into a strange “Battle of the Gatsbys” with this seemingly inferior version debuting at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey ahead of the supposedly superior version with music by Florence Welsh and directed by Rachel Chavkin at Boston’s ART. Although the “Paper Mill Gatsby” got lukewarm reviews, Korean head producer Chunsoo Shin rushed to get onto Broadway (presumably to get there before the ART Gatsby) while the latter ultimately didn’t set the MT world on fire as expected (and is now due to head to London first with a new creative team). And while the MT nerds slagged off the Paper Mill Gatsby, it had already turned into a popular hit and when I got my hands on the cast recording, I could easily see why: This was the kind of big bold musical that’s been in such seriously short supply more recently – big dance numbers evoking the Roaring Twenties and gorgeous songs like the overwrought ballad “My Green Light”. And so I was only too happy to go and see it. For me this version ticked all my boxes and I enjoyed myself very much. And unlike others I do think it stays true to the spirit of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about class and the vapidity of the American Dream. It is made abundantly clear to Jay Gatsby that he will never belong to the “Old Money” set and whether Daisy loved him or not, she, too, would choose money and security over him. What stood out even more to me was how well the show painted the women and the way they were trapped in those days, perfectly encapsulated in Daisy’s final big song when she explains how it would be best for her daughter Pammy to just be a “beautiful little fool” as she herself was forced to be. Lavish stage sets and gorgeous costumes evocated the Jazz Age perfectly and Gatsby’s famous parties and time more or less flew by. The cast was great, too, though this being my first live encounter with Jeremy Jordan, who has a strange and massive fan following in London, I can’t say I can see what’s special about him. Having sat through her crybaby Eurydice so often, I wasn’t surprised that Eva Noblezada played Daisy with a similar crybaby approach especially in the last big song, but all the same, Eva being who she is, I did enjoy seeing her live again and she sure knows how to knock a song out of the park. Stand outs for me though were the charismatic Noah J Ricketts as Daisy’s cousin Nick, who's also the Narrator, and Samantha Pauly as cynic Jordan. While the musical does construct a love affair for them that wasn’t in the book, which gave them both gay vibes, it still worked for me, especially with Jordan’s bitter assessment that she’d have to get married sooner or later anyway, so Nick might just do. The leads were completed by Chilina Kennedy’s brash Myrtle, understudy Austin Colby’s creepy Tom and Eric Anderson’s criminal goon Meyer Wolfsheim, whose fairly large part made it abundantly clear that Jay Gatsby’s fabled riches had come from bootlegging during prohibition. Is the other Gatsby better? Perhaps. But I had a great time with this one and really won’t mind it coming to London and/or Germany as seems to be the current plan. After the wonderful afternoon I took a break at the hotel, since it was so close, then headed out for perhaps the most oddball show of the trip, the play Stereophonic, which scooped up major Tonys this year. Almost by coincidence I had got into an online chat with a friend while waiting for my flight to JFK on Tuesday and he came to the Golden Theatre ahead of the show to say hello and have a quick chat – sadly no more was possible between him working full time and the play beginning at 7pm already, but it was still great to see him and have a quick update on all the MT gossip, before I had to go inside. Loosely inspired by the Fleetwood Mac saga, Stereophonic depicts the travails of a 70’s folk rock band in California consisting of two girls and three guys and it all takes place inside a record studio where they work with two engineers. Not least since winning the Tony for Best Play and great word of mouth spreading it’s generally sold out with seats regularly retailing at no less than $200, but they do release the front row as rush seats for only $35 as they are pretty restricted view. But for me it was perfect as my main wish had been to see it with Broadway’s ingenious caption box, so I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to catch a captioned performance in London. The other main draw were the wonderful songs, written by Will Butler of Arcade Fire, which the band records in the studio and which had been released as full versions on a cast recording that frankly blew most musical theatre cast recordings of the season out of the water. Stereophonic is a LONG play at nearly three and a half hours, but time flew by as the interactions between the band members and the engineers unfolded and I couldn’t help being impressed how realistically Seventies everything felt and looked, with the male cast members having gone to great lengths with their godawful moustaches, sideburns and straggly hair. I was very happy to still get to see the celebrated original cast consisting of Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield, Tom Pecinka, Chris Stack and Tony Winner Will Brill as the band members and Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler as the sound engineers, who were so universally great I can’t pick out anyone individually. Really glad I went to stand in line for this! Friday was the first day with a break in schedule, but it also meant moving from the fancy Blakely to a cheaper hotel closer to Times Square as I had been unwilling to spend so much money on a hotel for the entire six days. The BeHome is tucked beside the much fancier Riu on 8th Avenue, but while the room was small, I’ve had much worse in London and everything I could have wanted was there, including a little fridge, a safe and a powerful shower, so I’d probably choose this again for another quick trip. Friday also meant my friend’s arrival from Boston and meeting at least for a drink and dinner, before heading to separate shows – in my case a date with Robert Downey Jr, indisputably one of the biggest Hollywood stars of our times, moving with ease between the superhero nonsense of Marvel where he played Iron Man for years and critically acclaimed work like Oppenheimer which won him an Oscar. I’ve always had a bit of a crush on the man, so when it was announced he’d be starring in a new play at Lincoln Center, I was willing to fork out to see him from up close in the stalls. The play by Ayad Akhtar is about a famous writer called Jacob McNeal, who’s wrestling with all of sorts of issues, not least that of Artificial Intelligence and what it means for the creative arts. Being a writer affected by AI myself, it was a subject close to my heart, but I wish they had done more with it, rather than let McNeal run the gamut of various other “middle aged male writer” problems. All the same, as I had suspected, I was just happy to see Downey Jr in the flesh (who was far weedier than I had suspected, but isn’t it always thus with the stars) along with other familiar faces and names like Ruthie Ann Miles and Andrea Martin and overall had a decent enough time with the play that ran movie length for about 100 mins without an intermission. As a strange additional bonus it was also nice to be back in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, which way way back had been the very first Broadway Theatre I had been in (for Carousel) but never again since. Saturday meant more leisure, meeting my friend in the Meatpacking District to first visit the Great Migration Project Art Installation along Gansevoort Street, a project from India using the weeds of a highly invasive plant to create elephants whose habitat is threatened by said plant. From there it was only a hop to Little Island in the Hudson River, a creative bit of architecture I had been curious about anyway and which turned out to be really lovely on this sunny late summer day – and bigger than I had expected. The leisurely amble along the High Line back to Midtown turned into quite a power walk to make it to the matinee in time, which started at 1pm. “Water for Elephants” had seemed like a great book/movie adaption for the stage, combining circus elements with musical theatre, but it has really struggled at the box office and won’t be long for this world I’m sure. It’s a pity because I couldn’t help thinking that this is what Cirque du Soleil had hoped to create with their lacklustre box office bomb Paramour some years ago. Unlike in that one, the circus numbers here actually furthered the story and were a really lovely sight to behold. Original leading man Grant Gustin had already jumped ship a few weeks ago, replaced by Kyle Selig, one of these cookie cutter pretty American boys, who, not surprisingly, was one of the Elder Prices in Book of Mormon before. He plays Jacob Jankowksi, who hops a freight train in Depression-era America and accidentally ends up with a circus that keeps him on because he has some minor skills as a vet. There he falls in love with Marlena, played by gorgeous Isabelle McCalla, when they bond over the arrival of elephant Rosie at the circus. Sadly Marlena is married to evil circus owner August (Paul Alexander Nolan) and drama has to ensue for the inevitable happy end to happen. The story is narrated in flashback by older Jacob and just as with Harmony last year, these annoying narrations just serve to kill the momentum of the story stone dead. Enough with them already. Theatre company PigPen who created the musical seemed to have put all their heart in the big circus numbers, because these truly worked well, but they forgot to write a few banging songs for their lead characters as well. And I think that’s probably one of the main reasons why the show failed to took off, as the characters don’t evolve much beyond bland clichés. That said, being so starved of big shows, I still had a great time with this one and thought, it deserved to do better than it has been doing. The matinee was followed by dinner at the original Joe Allen’s with its famous wall of Broadway flops and quite sensibly they had grouped the dismal vampire flops together in their own corner of shame. The place itself was really nice too, more down to earth than it’s somewhat posh London equivalent which I hadn’t enjoyed much (and kept me from giving this one a chance for so long) with decently priced delicious food. Afterwards it was time to say goodbye to my friend again and head on for the show that had been the reason for this whole trip, the one thing that’s the “must-see” that makes me haul my ass across the Atlantic. In this case it was The Outsiders, based on the beloved book by S.E. Hinton, which had a double, if not triple special meaning for me: Just like Susie Hinton wrote her book about troubled teen boys as a school girl at the age of sixteen, I wrote similar books at the same age, albeit ones that never saw the light of day in book form. So when I first read The Outsiders around the time, this really felt like what I would have written too. Secondly, it’s set in Tulsa, the first US-American town I ever knew and stayed in when we visited American relatives in the 80s. And thirdly, of course, there isn’t an 80s teen girl who didn’t know the movie version for which Francis Ford Coppola assembled a host of good-looking newcomers who would all move on to become superstars: Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez, though strangely enough, C. Thomas Howell who played the nominal lead, Ponyboy Curtis, never achieved a similar level of fame. Ponyboy (yes, his real name) is the youngest of three brothers whose parents have died in a train crash and who run with a gang of “Greasers” in the poor East side of Tulsa, that is constantly at war with the richer “Socs” from the better-off West side. In a departure from the book and movie, the role of Cherry, the rich Socs girl who befriends Ponyboy, has been beefed up to have a female lead, and probably unavoidably so, the entirely “male white trash” cast of the original had to be diversified in that pointless box-ticking manner. There was now a female Greaser who served no purpose whatsoever (much like female Anybodys in West Side Story, the show’s spiritual predecessor) and of all roles, Dallas – played by Matt Dillon in the movie – was now a black guy from a rough hood in New York. I’m sure the black community must be thrilled that the one character who’s a proper all-out criminal with a record and time in juvvie is now black, while all the white characters are just innocent victims of circumstance. That aside though, the stage adaption delivered all that I hoped it would. The folk-rock music by the band Jamestown Revival might not be overwrought musical theatre, but fits perfectly with these young characters and what they would have listened to in “Tulsa, 1967”. Intimate scenes mixed with big numbers, culminating in a real fire when the church burned down and the epic rumble in the rain and there are still some gorgeous musical numbers to die for, like Ponyboy’s anthem “Great Expectations” and Dallas’ big song “Little Brother” when he comes undone after Johnny's death. And there can’t have been a dry eye in the house when Ponyboy reads Johnny’s final letter and Johnny himself appears to sing “Stay Gold” (not the Stevie Wonder hit from the movie, but a new one) and reminds him that life is worth living. The cast was universally great too, with Josh Strobl (above, with an uncanny resemblance to a young Jake Gyllenhaal) subbing for Brody Grant as Ponyboy and all first casts otherwise. Stand-outs were probably Sky Lakota-Lynch as a hapless and oh so vulnerable Johnny you wanted to take home and feed and hug, Joshua Boone as volatile Dallas and, perhaps to my surprise Brent Comer as Darrel, the oldest Curtis brother. In the movie Patrick Swayze had seemed too far removed from the others age- and looks-wise, but Brent looked so young it hit much harder to realize what he has been sacrificing in order to keep the family together. Another stand-out was Daryl Tofa as Two-Bit based on sheer charisma alone, given that he’s more of a minor character in the gang. Give the man a better part, pronto. Overall it’s easy to see why The Outsiders has become such a hit with both critics and audiences this season – everything just fits together perfectly here and the story is just as moving now as when it came out so long ago. While it’s unlikely that I will see it again in New York, I do hope it will come to London and I can do a few repeat watches. While The Outsiders should have (and in many ways was) the icing on the cake, I still had the big day ahead of me: The Sunday with the Broadway Flea Market. I hadn’t enjoyed the last one as much as I had hoped to, so I was keen to go back anyway and also hoped to add a signed poster of The Outsiders to my growing collection of signed wall decoration back home. But that was my first disappointment: At a ludicrous $400 for signed posters, I just had to nope out and even the signed playbills at $100 were ridiculous, even for a good cause. Another hope quickly destroyed was getting the lovely 5th anniversary playbill of Hadestown, though at least Moulin Rouge made up for that by not only having the 5th anniversary playbill available to buy but even the limited edition poster, that was never officially on sale, at an actually great price. Other highlights included finding a signed Here Lies Love playbill for only $10, an opening night goodie from The Outsiders, some very cheap CDs and accidentally being at the Hadestown table at the right time to see Jordan Fisher and Maia Reficco in the flesh. Overall though I feel that a) prices have got out of hand for special stuff like signed posters/playbills and props from the show and b) it’s just too crowded and chaotic these days. I may go again some day, when I have another show I truly obsess over, but for now I think I’m giving it a break for a while. With some shows I had hoped to see already closed again (RIP, Lempicka and Jellicle Ball) and not wanting to waste the last slot of the trip, I decided to go and see The Notebook as I had heard so much praise for the cast and the music by singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson contained some nice albeit unexciting tunes. It’s a rather small show ultimately and one that might be better suited to a smaller fringe/off-Broadway theatre where the intimate environment works better. Based on the sappy novel by Nicholas Sparks, that already spawned a movie, it’s the story of Noah and Allie, who we meet first as old people with Allie now suffering Alzheimer’s and Noah reading her the “notebook” of a young couple and how they got together. It’s not very exciting really – we then meet Young Allie and Young Noah and later Middle Allie and Middle Noah (frankly, one younger version had been enough) and how her rich parents didn’t want her to marry the poor boy, but how she met him again ten years later and then decided to follow her heart, giving Joy Woods the chance to belt out the gorgeous banger “My Days”, finally a song of female self-determination rather than epic whining how much everything sucks and how she needs a man to save her. But the show really only comes together at the end when Old Allie has a lucid moment and recognizes Noah and the story transcends the sappy love story to encompass humanity in general and the pain of forgetting loved ones and how they will live on in our hearts and memories. The six leads were universally fantastic in their parts and yet it was another one of weird casting decisions. Much has already been made of the fact that Younger and Middle Allie are black and Younger and Middle Noah white, whereas Old Allie is suddenly white and Old Noah black – but even the Young and Middle versions didn’t look alike at all. Maybe it was a conscious decision to let the characters stand for “everyone” rather than just Noah and Allie, but it was hard to keep thinking of them as the same characters. And furthermore, this didn’t feel like inclusivity to me, but a weird attempt of “black-washing” history. The story is set in the 40s and 50s, when you’d be hard-pressed to find interracial couples and those that existed would have had a host of other problems to deal with rather than the rich parents of a black girl nixing her affair with a poor white boy. To me it almost feels as if this kind of casting wants to make younger audiences, not alive during those days, forget the bitter racial diversions and discrimination by pretending rich black families were perfectly normal (sure, they did exist in their own communities, but not like today’s proper intermingling of all races and creeds). If it’s really become such a no-go to cast a show entirely white, even if it was a perfect reflection of society (and a sad reminder of how things were not too long ago), why pick these stories to adapt in the first place? Anyway, overall, The Notebook wasn’t bad, but I can see, just as with Water for Elephants, why it just isn’t great shakes that sets the box office on fire. At least it will have provided big breaks for lovely Jordan Tyson and hunky John Cardoza (the young versions) and for Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez (the middle versions, although Ryan was off when I saw it), while giving veteran performers Dorian Harewood and Maryann Plunkett a wonderful late big role to shine. Funny enough my trip ended like the last one for the Broadway Flea Market – at the Green Room 42 with a concert by my beloved Orpheus Reeve Carney, bringing me full circle with these last crazy two years of Hadestown hyperfixation and after he all but ruined the Broadway Cruise for me with his idiotic snotstopper, it was good to see him again looking his usual cute and mildly dorky self, singing his own songs and some rock classics for a good 80 mins with Eva in the audience as well. A lovely way to finish this epic trip which was just a tiny bit too exhausting overall, but still I have no regrets about doing it in general or of any of shows I had chosen, especially when everything else still looks so dire. It was an ironic and bitter footnote that just as I was getting ready to leave New York, the news broke that Vienna is casting a musical about Empress Maria Theresa to open there next year – how many more “Historical Person – the Musical” can we have in this completely uncreative tedious backwater? I might just be back in New York earlier than I thought...