So I took myself to see a matinee on Broadway, something I think I can do just any old time because I live in New York, but of course I can’t because I do my day to day living in New York.
So, since this was likely to be my last free Wednesday afternoon, because now that the Citywide FIRST Lego League Championship is over, that particular after school program will go down to once a week and that once a week is most likely to be Thursday. This was my daughters 3rd year on her elementary school’s FLL team. Every year I tell myself; after tourist season I will take myself on up to Times Square of a Wednesday afternoon and get myself a half-price ticket to a Broadway show. Every year I put it off week after week until I realize that this may be my very last Wednesday chance and then I do it, just the once. Even at half price the tickets are expensive and even if it’s just one afternoon there are lots of other things I could or should do with my Wednesday afternoons.
Last year, on my last “free” Wednesday afternoon, after meeting my husband for lunch in mid-town I took myself the two blocks to Times Square and got a ticket to the play Angela Lansbury was in at a theatre so close it could be seen from TKTS booth which was an important consideration, since it was already 1:55 pm. This year I did essentially the same thing, again choosing the show with Angela Lansbury in it; A Little Night Music also starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Leigh Ann Larkin (who played “Dainty June” in Gypsy) was also in it. She go to sing “The Miller’s Son”. Her “Petra” was a continuation of the same story of the young woman she played in Gypsy, who must acquiesce like a child in her day to day work, as a Vaudeville performer or as a ladies maid, when she is in reality a woman of passion and substance. That could be an interesting piece…
Several of the singers had colds. So does everyone else in New York City. I still enjoyed their performances.
But, what I really left the theatre with was Stephen Sondheim’s music and the story. I don’t know how much of what I saw and continue to think about was Sondheim and how much was the original inspiration for the musical, Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. (I’ll put it into my Netflix queue and find out.)
So…
Cirque du Soleil’s Banana Shpeel has again delayed its first performance at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The new vaudeville show, which had already postponed its start date from February 25 to March 17, will now begin performances on April 29. In the bar after the New York Downtown Clown Revue on Monday night, I was talking to another clown who was saying there had been a big audition for the show recently. The new opening night is six weeks away, that’s a whole rehearsal process. I wonder if they are starting over from scratch. I wonder if (as opposed to Bergman and Sondheim) they put the cart before the horse and tried to put up a show before they had a story.