September 8 - Day 3: They Don’t Write ‘em Like That Anymore …

First, my apologies for not updating this on Saturday night. By the time I was ready to start writing, it was after 2:00 am (much like tonight) and I knew I had to get up by 10:00, which meant either getting a good seven or eight hours, or writing for three hours and getting only five hours sleep. I opted for the former, figuring I could catch up on the blog tonight—which I’m doing!

Most importantly for the day, the heat and humidity finally broke. When I got up, it was around 60, with relatively low humidity of 55%. (I slept intermittently, in seeming two-hour bursts. As it got later and later, there was more traffic out on the street, especially what is becoming a ubiquitous fire truck stopping at the church across the street. There are never sirens or lights; they just stop and visit, as far as I can tell.)


I decided to take the subway to my matinee, figuring I’d be walking around between and after shows. Part of my ingenious plan involved stopping at Tompkins Square Bagels and getting something to go, but the store had been utterly invaded by obnoxiously well-scrubbed and wholesome teenagers. (Note to high school teachers: please do not bring your students to New York. Thank you.) The line stretched from the register to the back of the store back out the entrance. Since it would have taken at least 30 minutes to get anything, I decided to look for something closer to midtown. Fortunately, on my way to the subway, I came across a place that had a sign indicating they sold pastries and “cream cheese rethought.”


Well, that sounded intriguing! I went in and was met by a woman behind the counter who seemed so intent on that rethinking, that she was really kind of unfamiliar with everything else in the store. I thought about getting the pumpkin muffin in the display case, but she indicated that those were the display models (?) and that they were out otherwise. (Why, the question occurs, display them then?) I said, okay then, I’ll have a bagel. “We only have the mini-bagels.” “Well, I’ll have one of those with cream cheese.” “What kind?” “Um, peanut butter.” While the concept of peanut butter cream cheese may seem a little odd, it was even odder in practice, being just slightly too sweet and not really taking advantage of the best qualities of either foodstuff. I also ordered an English breakfast tea, and after looking around a bit, she said she couldn’t find it and that they must be out, so could I order something else? I looked to my left, where a jar labeled “English breakfast tea” sat within eyeshot. I asked her “What about those?” She seemed startled to see them, but was happy to get one of them for me.


I ate in the store, and left, reminding myself to not come back. As I walked to the subway station, I noticed that it was a little chilly (at least, in relative terms), but I was really too far from the apartment to go back, so I hoped that it’d just be a nice change of pace after the last couple of days. I got to the subway station and had the pleasant experience of getting there just as the train arrived. I rode for a couple of stops to my transfer station, and got to the other track just as the next train was arriving—again! (I should have bought a lotto ticket.)


Getting off the train, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself only about a block or so from my theatre and, also, that the hoardes of people I expected to be crowding the Harry Potter show were nowhere to be seen. I was seeing Bernhardt/Hamlet, a new play by Theresa Rebeck, featuring Janet McTeer, Dylan Baker, Jason Butler Harner, and Paxton Whitehead, among many others. It’s nominally about Sarah Bernhardt daring to play Hamlet, but it’s about art, creativity, self-empowerment, feminism, and more. It runs out gas a little at the end (and stops more than ends), but it’s in previews and will probably work out the kinks. One of the good things for me was that I was in the third row center, and while the stage was a wee bit too high, most of the play was in close-up for me, so I could really watch some very good actors do some very good work. It was so intimate, in fact, that at one point when they’re staging the ghost scene from Hamlet, the fog pouring from the stage kept hitting me right in the kisser. I could see it coming, and blam! Just really superb work from all concerned.

This is the kind of shot you get when you think you 

know what the final product will look like, but don't really.

 

This shot does no justice to a really lovely set --

and is only a third of it

The play was advertised as running 2:40, but came in closer to 2:30 (I don’t know if they’d cut stuff, or had just guessed the running time based on rehearsals), so I had about three hours to kill before my next curtain. By this time, it wasn’t raining, but there were more-than-occasional drops, and I really wished I’d brought my umbrella and a jacket. There really wasn’t enough time to come back to the East Village, so I stopped at the Drama Book Store and poked around for a little while, but almost nothing really appealed to me. (I always check the Chekhov translations to see if there are any new ones and, if so, what they’ve gotten wrong. Today’s miscalculation came courtesy of Libby Appel of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I saw her translation of The Seagull a few years ago, and to say she missed the mark is like saying Donald Trump has had some slight hiccups in his presidency.) That took up only about fifteen to twenty minutes, so I resolved to look for someplace cozy to have some tea and read. Checking Yelp, I found a place on W. 54^th that looked likely and headed there. Unfortunately, when I got there, I discovered that, not only was I not the only one who had that idea, the place was tiny and couldn’t accommodate a third of the people waiting in line.

Fortunately, there was a place farther down Ninth Avenue that, while not cozy (meaning no dark walls, dim lighting, and couches), was comfortable enough and served very good tea. Unfortunately, it came equipped with an initial group of twentysomethings whose voices were pitched at the exact frequency to bounce off the walls with unpleasant results, and subsequently by two women who were giving each other live updates on what they were each posting on a dating site. It was not unentertaining, but was also not what I was looking for.


Ultimately, I was able to catch up on my email, surf a little, and charge my phone before I was time to walk a couple of blocks to catch Carousel. In an effort to be a good fellow audience member, I won’t dwell on the woman to my left. We were in the front row of the mezzanine, and the ushers made a point of telling us to not put anything on the padded railing. My seatmate promptly balanced her programs and two (two!) cups of wine on the railing, and then got a little put-out when the usher told her to knock it off. She guzzled wine through most of the first act (seriously; two cups) and then apparently had the DTs when she ran out. She kept shifting and moving and making odd gestures and (I think) rubbing her legs. I will also not dwell on the couple on my right. In keeping with the theme of the evening, the female half of the duo kept leaning her elbows on the railing, making sure that no one in back of her would be able to see anything on stage. As for her male counterpart, there was a mechanical problem in the show that involved a line of trees from one scene not flying or rolling out properly. When the following scene began, it was obvious something was wrong because one of the actors was trying to maneuver a set piece around the trees that weren’t supposed to be there. About a minute into the scene (and a number, “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over”), the voice of the stage manager boomed over the god mic that there was a mechanical problem, so they were stopping the show, and the actors should leave the stage. They did, the curtain came down, and we all waited. My neighbor kept congratulating himself for spotting the actor who was having trouble. (He managed to continue his back-patting all through the scheduled intermission, as well.)

 I tried getting a shot of the marquee,

but it was too bright and showed up as

a white blob on my phone

After ten minutes, the show resumed, and went smoothly for the rest of the evening. (As far as I could tell, anyway.)


Like one of Sunday’s shows (which I’ll be discussing in the next post), the show was well-directed, well-acted, and well-sung, but ultimately failed (in my opinion) because the dramaturgy and structure of the way musicals were written in 1947 is so different from what we do today. (I’m not saying today’s shows are better; they’re just not the same species.) Let me stipulate that Oscar Hammerstein II is probably the single-most important creator in the history of the musical. That said, I don’t know if his books work anymore. I’ll illustrate my point with three examples from Carousel. The first is what follows the famous “bench scene.” It still is a remarkable scene in that, in ten minutes, the main couple—Julie and Billy—really meet, get to know each other, and fall in love; you can see it all happening, and it works really well. Pretty much the next time we see them, though, they’ve been married for three months, we find out that he hits her, and that she stays with him because … she stays with him. That’s a lot to unpack, and all of it is given in the form of the exposition that used to open plays with maids answering phone calls and telling the “caller” (and us) everything we need to know about the circumstances of the play.


The second point is that the whole “hitting her” thing gets virtually glossed over. Yes, it’s referred to a lot and is pointed out as being an example of Billy’s tragic flaw: his temper and rashness, but it requires the modern director to figure out how to present the material in a way that really condemns it beyond what the book has given him. Jack O’Brien is one of our best directors and has done his best to deal with it, but there’s only so much he can do. I’m not saying it overshadows everything, but it’s also kind of an elephant in the room.


The third has its basis in Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s smash that rewrote the rule book for musicals to a great extent. Even though dance had been used to advance or deepen the plot of musicals before it, Agnes DeMille’s dream ballet took the tool to new places. Unfortunately, the team kept going back to the concept, and it doesn’t always work—as is the case here. The plot involves Billy’s death and a celestial figure offering him the chance to go back to Earth for one day (mainly to do something good enough to get him into Heaven). He chooses to go back and see his daughter (who is now 15 and troubled), and we get a lengthy ballet depicting that. Now, I’m all for character development and exploration, but this dance (while well-done) does nothing to advance the story or deepen our understanding of the main characters. We get to know Louise (I had to look up the character’s name; she’s that forgettable), but we don’t care—and she’s otherwise so underdeveloped that her troubled teen years are more or less solved by the company singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and coming to the conclusion that that girl they’ve dismissed as unworthy trash for 15 years isn’t so bad, after all.


But the audience went bananas. The show closes in a week, and the crowd (which leapt to its feet at the end; though that’s not unusual anymore) seemed to be full of people who’d seen the show before and went crazy throughout, giving loud and enthusiastic whoops at everything, so maybe it’s just me. (It usually is …)


When I came out of the theatre, what rain there was had abated, and it was a lovely evening. I hadn’t eaten much since the bagel tragedy of the morning, so I was trying to think of someplace to go for supper, but ended up at the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel. The Algonquin and I have an affinity because of its history with its Round Table of writers and wits, even if the table and the room they lunched in have long since succumbed to “renovations.” There is a round table that masquerades as the actual Round Table, but it’s in the wrong place in the wrong room. There is a bar just off the lobby that, in its heyday, was a quite charming hotel bar with a great deal of history. Nowadays, it’s illuminated with extreme blue lights and a television tuned to football games accompanied by oldies over the music system. All things considered, I should have stayed in the lobby.

This really isn't an exaggeration; 

it's pretty damn blue in there

As it was, I had a strong Old Fashioned on a pretty empty stomach, so I was feeling no pain. There was no way I was going to walk back to the Village in that condition, so I took the subway back to 14^th Street and 1^st Avenue, stopped at Baker’s Pizza, which we’d discovered during our last trip, got some slices, and came home.


It was in that condition that I debated whether to sleep or write, and opted for the former. That means that tomorrow, I shall continue my dissection of classic American musicals, describe another day of nothing between shows, and finish with one of the greatest theatrical evenings of my life.