On we go with this diary of the eleven-day trip that I took recently with my friendly friend Amber to Las Vegas, Philadelphia and New York. Before you read about Day 7, you really oughta read about what transpired on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6 and my Philadelphia Addenda.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Left the Philadelphia Marriott at 10:15 AM, took a cab to the 30th Street Station, ate breakfast at a Dunkin' Donuts there (hey, not bad) and stumbled onto the 11:25 AM train to New York. That meant shlepping our bags down an escalator and onto the train. Despite having shipped all our soiled garments back to L.A., my suitcase weighed about as much as I do and a nice lady who was stronger than I am helped me get it up onto the overhead rack. Turns out she's a physical trainer and she lives in L.A., not far from Amber. By the time we got to Penn Station, the two of them were fast friends and I think/hope we'll be seeing more of her.
The train got into New York around 12:30, fifteen minutes early. Finding our way out of Penn Station, where many have perished in the same quest, used up the time we'd gained and then some. Through dumb luck, we lucked into daylight and one cab ride later, Amber and I were at our Times Square hotel, several hours before our room would be ready. Instead, we checked our bags, went out for some lunch and then took the subway down to Lincoln Center to pick up the tickets for our Tuesday evening theater-going.
I don't know how many of you know about House Seats. Here's a definition that I found online…
Every show on Broadway holds a certain number of seats offsale to the general public called "house seats." They are reserved for the authors, producers, cast, theater owners, etc. and are generally released 48 hours prior to each performance if not used.
Even if all the good seats for a show — or even all the seats, period — are sold, there may still be house seats. They hold some back just in case a Very Important Person or one of the stars' parents or someone with clout suddenly wants to go to an otherwise sold-out performance. If Mike Pence was in New York and had a sudden yen to see The Boys in the Band, they would stick him in a house seat. That's assuming the producers wanted to let him in at all.
Often, I either know someone in a show or I know someone who knows someone in a show and house seats can be achieved. They are not free unless, of course, the person arranging for them wants to pay for the tix themselves, which they never do. But they are almost always better seats than you can get via Ticketmaster or Telecharge or any other official source and more importantly, they're not marked-up to scalpers' prices. The seats I got for our Tuesday evening show cost me $187 each. Scalper sites were asking $700 and up for comparable rows.
On a New York visit many years ago, I learned something the hard way. When I procure house seats for something and they don't send me specific seat numbers in advance, it's a good idea to go to the box office as far as possible ahead of showtime and grab the physical tickets. As long as they're sitting in the box office, some box office employee may be tempted to give them to someone more important than I am (a category which only includes everyone else in the known free world) and stick me in the last row of the balcony facing away from the stage.
When Nathan Lane was about to debut in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum — this was '96 — one of its authors, Larry Gelbart, graciously arranged for me to get house seats. Foolishly, I thought I could go to the box office fifteen minutes before showtime and claim them. As I tell people, an unfunny thing happened on the way to that show. Gelbart's prime house seats had been given to someone else and my date and I wound up in, literally, the last row downstairs at the St. James Theater.
I don't know if they've fixed this since but that last row was not only leagues from the stage, it was also torture for anyone over about 5'10". I'm 6'3" and there was so little legroom in that row, I could not sit in the seat and an usher informed me it was either there or come back another night. I wound up leaving the seat up and sitting, none too comfortably, on the front part of the cushion. I could do this, of course, because there was no one seated behind me.
Nine months later when I was in New York again, Mr. Gelbart was nice enough to get me his house seats again. They were in the second row in the center on the aisle, where I could have been the first time if I'd had the smarts to pick my house seats in advance. That time, I did. Lesson learned.
So Amber and I made the trip to seize our well-placed tickets for the next night. I also had house seats for our Thursday night show but those came via a PDF that was e-mailed to me and it had our seat assignments…so advance pickup was not necessary. Then it was back to our hotel where our room was ready.
At 6:30, we met Charlie Kochman and his splendid wife Rachel for dinner at a highly-recommended Italian restaurant which I won't be recommending. Then we hiked over to the Avenue I was takin' them to…42nd Street. The show we were attending is a revue playing there called Newsical. Simply put, it's ninety or so minutes of topical songs and sketches performed by four very talented people and one pianist.
It's a very low-budget presentation, so much so that they don't even have printed programs, nor did the players' names seem to be posted anywhere. On the way out, I asked if they had anything that would tell me who those four talented performers were and they didn't. Fortunately, I knew one of them — my longtime friend Christine Pedi, who's been featured on and off Broadway, on Sirius XM radio (she's one of the hosts of their Broadway channel) and most importantly, on this blog. That's Christine above, dressed as a statue that Donald Trump would probably like to tear down because it welcomes immigrants.
From Christine, I got the names of the three other performers: Michael West, Scott Foster and Susan Mosher, with Ed Goldschneider on the piano. They're all wonderful and deserving of recognition. Betcha you see some of them soon in other shows, maybe even shows that have program books.
The show, which was written by the also-undercredited Rick Crom, is a lot of fun. One particular song about Sarah Huckabee Sanders (played by Christine) must be a fairly recent add and it's still playing in my head. As with all decent political satire these days, you'll like the proceedings better if you don't like Donald Trump. In theory, it oughta be possible to do something funny from the other POV but it never seems to happen, just as Liberal-oriented talk radio never seems to reach the largest audiences. As I've written elsewhere, doing political humor from a Conservative stance is like trying to write a Marx Brothers movie and make Margaret Dumont the funny one.
We went out after with Christine and ate and talked and ate and talked and talked, talked, talked…and that was about it for Monday. Tune in tomorrow as I try to explain why I liked 97% of the new production of My Fair Lady.