Tag: Vaudeville

Wednesday Matinee

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.

Kid’s Clowns

The New York Downtown Clown Revue, a monthly late night venue for edgy stage clowns, produced and early evening show for children.  So I took My Kid and a Classmate Neighbor Boy to see the fun.

As familiar as My Kid is with the clown genre, she and the boy-she’s-known-since-they-were-in-diapers-but-who-is-not-a-friend-because-he-is-a-boy chose seats for us in the very back row right under the light booth from which there was no chance of getting squirted with water, hit with a pie or being pulled onto the stage.  Other peoples children chose to sit right on stage at the feet of the performers.

Joel Jeske and Christopher Lueck opened the show as a couple of brothers releasing the pent-up energy of patter clowns born to play three shows a day six days a week but they can’t because Vaudeville is dead.

Silly Billy, who was My Kid’s favorite clown last year, failed to impress this time with his kazoo and color changing scarf magic.  But then, My Kid and that-boy-she-was-sitting-next-to are in fourth grade this year, an upper grade in elementary school.  They have experience and standards.  On the way home, My Kid told me that as a 4th grader she knows the difference between real magic and fake magic.

Lulu the clown, aka Juliette Jeske, introduced as a woman who will perform anywhere for money, appeared in a tailored jacket, crinoline skirt and stripped tights.  Her suitcase of props was set up on a stand covered with a handmade quilt demonstrating the Midwestern crafty aspect of  the American children’s party clown style.   She works A LOT, much of it costumed character work at corporate events.  She also writes and produces short films for the internet, hosts variety and burlesque shows and wrote and performed the stage show Princess Sunshine’s Bitter Pill of Truth Funhouse.  Her performance was filled with the kind of visual puns, like a banana phone, that are popular with the preschool and kindergarten demographic.

Rounding out the evening were “Bucky and Gigi”, Chris Allison and his wife Gina, longtime Ringling circus clowns, she’s also a dancer.  They wore bright neat costumes.  We watched him get panned as “Coney Island Chris” on America’s Got Talent.  But, with a red nose on, he is as appealing as a cartoon character like SpongeBob SquarePants.  It was a goal at clown college to become a human cartoon.  Normal was called “pedestrian,” something to be avoided at all costs.

My kids didn’t seem impressed, but they were inspired.  On the way to the subway they sang;  “My Little Pony.  She’s thin and boney.  She went to the circus and farted on purpose.”  

And then on the train, The Neighbor Boy demonstrated a perfect three point prat-fall.  Hanging from the hand rail he: 1) dropped to the seat on his knees, 2) fell forward onto his face, then 3) rolled off the seat onto the floor and jumped up smiling!

Ta Da!!!