Here's Matt Yglesias with a good explanation of the charges being brought against the Trump Foundation. As far as I can tell, Trump and his minions have never offered any proof that the allegations aren't true; just countered with insults and charges of "witch hunt." I'm sure that all the folks who wanted Bill and Hillary tossed in the slammer for every possible infraction by the Clinton Foundation will hold Trump to the same standard. Sure they will…
There is tremendous outrage out there about immigrant families being torn apart. You know who's fine with it? All those folks who told us Gay Marriage would destroy families.
Even Conservatives like Rod Dreher are uncomfy with Trump lionizing Kim Jong Un as a great, talented leader. It makes you think Kim got a dub of the pee tape from Putin.
And of course, no one with a straight face can look at the "agreement" between Kim and Trump and think that Trump got anything but hosed. Well, actually, he got something that he can sell to his followers as a triumph but if Obama had come back with that, it would have been condemned as a Neville-Chamberlainesque bargain. Daniel Larison describes what it actually says.
On we march with our recap of the eleven-day trip I took recently with my stunning friend Amber to Las Vegas, Philadelphia and New York. We're in New Work now but before you read about Day 9, you'll want to read the summaries of Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, my Philadelphia Addenda, Day 7 and Day 8. Onward —!
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
This one'll be a lot shorter than Part 8. Heck, Angels in America is a lot shorter than Part 8. Anyway: Last year, I took Amber to Las Vegas and as I wrote back then…
Near Times Square in New York, there's an Italian restaurant I like called Carmine's and they've cloned it in Vegas. It's in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and we went there Saturday evening for a dinner that felt like it wasn't served until Sunday morning. They brought the garlic bread immediately and then the entrees arrived — I am not exaggerating — an hour later. I complained to the manager who went off, investigated, then came back and said, "We screwed up" and told us the $100+ meal was on the house with his great apologies. Who says you can't win in Vegas?
Despite the piss-poor service there, Amber loved the chow when it did arrive and she asked if we could go some day to Carmine's in New York. So for lunch on Day 9, we met my pal Vinnie Favale at the one in Times Square and Vinnie brought along his son Jon. This is who Vinnie is and in case someone's reading this blog years from now and the link is dead, it explains he's a long-time exec in CBS's late night division who oversaw Late Show with David Letterman for most of its run and is now involved with Stephen Colbert's show. He's also been involved with Howard Stern's programs and other fun ventures.
We talked at length, mostly about the TV business and ate Carmine's Shrimp Parmigiana, which is indecently yummy. Vinnie is sharp and funny and he knows almost as much obscure Show Biz Trivia as I do. After Amber was suitably stuffed with shrimp, he was nice enough to indulge me with a trip down to the Ed Sullivan Theater from whence emanates Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
About that iconic venue: The place started life as Hammerstein's Theatre in 1927 — a legit house wherein the first play was a musical called Golden Dawn starring an actor named Archie Leach. After a while, Hammerstein's Theatre turned into the Manhattan Theatre, then into Billy Rose's Music Hall, then back into the Manhattan again. At the same time, Archie Leach turned into Cary Grant.
In 1936, the building turned into CBS Radio Playhouse Number 1 and thousands of radio broadcasts came out of it. In 1950, it was converted into a television studio, CBS's Studio 50. Among the hundreds of shows that would be done in there were The Jackie Gleason Show, The Merv Griffin Show, What's My Line?, The $10,000 Pyramid, To Tell the Truth and Password…but the biggie, which came outta that building from the early fifties through 1971, was The Toast of the Town, later renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. And in 1967, Studio 50 was renamed The Ed Sullivan Theater.
It has kept that name to this day, even after Ed's show went off in 1971. Game shows and other programming filled it and in the mid-eighties, the sitcom Kate and Allie graced its stage. It was during those Kate and Allie days that I got my first glimpse inside — a tour of a sad-looking studio with many, many things falling apart or in bad need of repair.
A Mr. David Letterman moved in in 1993 after the place was totally redone for him — an amazing transformation. I got inside around '95 or '96 and loved what had become of it. Colbert's occupancy in 2015 came after another complete makeover and this one removed some of the improvements made for Dave and put back some of the original architecture. It's just beautiful in there now.
Colbert's show was dark the week we were there, which was a good thing because we kind of had the run of the place. I got to talk to Pat Farmer, a stagehand who often turned up on Letterman shows in bits like reading Oprah Winfrey transcripts. His fondness for the shrine was evident and we swapped tales of its history.
The one thing that bothered me was that Colbert's set seems too big and busy and it felt like all the catwalks and its sheer height diminished the performing area…but maybe I wouldn't feel that way if I was there when a show was in progress. It was also kind of weird to encounter the ghost of Jackie Mason when he isn't even dead yet. Nevertheless, it gave me the finger. Much appreciated, Vinnie.
Thanks to Gilbert Gottfried having to cancel our podcasting date, Amber and I could have dinner that evening with my cousin David (author of this book and this book and this book and others) and his great wife Dini. We dined at Joe Allen on W. 46th Street and it's one of those restaurants where everyone dining there is either in a play or attending one so you can see parties finish eating and leave on schedules. If you go there, try the broiled chicken.
For our evening's entertainment, the four of us hiked over to the New World Stages on W. 50th, which is kind of a cineplex for live theater, to see what I'd been told was a particularly good version of Avenue Q. I'd seen the show before, though not this production, but Amber, David and Dini hadn't. It debuted on Broadway in 2003, ran six years there and has almost always since been playing Off-Broadway…and everywhere else. It has become one of the most-produced musicals of all time…and for good reason.
In case you don't know, it's a send-up of Sesame Street with puppets who curse and fornicate, set on a street where folks aren't cheery and happy and explaining the difference between Near and Far. The songs are bouncy and some linger in your head for quite a time after. This current production seems to be as fine as any with very good performers who got every possible laugh. Whenever you next get to Manhattan, go see it. It'll probably still be there.
Tomorrow: Our last full day before returning home. I'll tell you how Bernadette Peters was spectacular in Hello, Dolly! and how she wasn't even the best one in the show.
My friend Amber loves the chicken fried rice they make at Benihana. Back here, I linked to a video of a Benihana chef telling you how it's made but the one today is more oriented towards doing it at home.
There are really two steps. One is that you study the video to see what it involves. The second is that you realize that for a lot less time, money and hassle you can just drive to the nearest Benihana and buy a few "to go" orders of the stuff. Here — watch the video and see if that wouldn't be a whole lot easier…
The fine folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…
Joye Murchison Kelly, Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk to Receive 2018 Bill Finger Award
Joye Murchison Kelly and Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk have been selected to receive the 2018 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.
"We're really excited about this one," Evanier explains. "The comic book industry employed too few women in its early decades. Back when this year's honorees were active, their gender was horribly unrepresented among the creative talents that made the comics—and what few there were went totally unrecognized. The work of these two extraordinary ladies deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated."
The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 via a proposal from the late comic book legend Jerry Robinson. "It's to recognize and salute writers for a body of work that has not received its rightful reward and/or recognition," says Evanier. "Even though the late Bill Finger now finally receives credit for his role in the creation of Batman, he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or attention."
Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly was 20 years old in 1944 when she began working for Dr. William Moulton Marston on Wonder Woman. She had recently graduated from the Katherine Gibbs School in New York, where she had taken a psychology class from Dr. Marston. He had written almost all the scripts for his Amazon Princess and found himself in need of an assistant writer he could school in the precise way he wanted the heroine depicted, and Joye Hummel, as she was then named, learned quickly. Soon she was writing scripts on her own, mainly in Marston's New York office, where she also worked alongside Wonder Woman's artistic creator, Harry Peter. Like Marston's own stories, her work appeared in three publications — Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics, and Comic Cavalcade — under the house byline "By Charles Moulton," and none of it was credited to her. Her work appeared until 1947, and much of it has recently been reprinted to the delight of current readers. Ms. Kelly and her husband Jack will be traveling to Comic-Con so that she may accept her award in person and also appear on Saturday afternoon for a special spotlight interview: her first-ever visit to a comic book convention.
Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk (1913–2000) served as a writer/editor from 1942 to 1944 at All-American Publications, which was allied with (and soon absorbed by) the firm now known as DC Comics. She later worked, again as a writer/editor, for Timely Comics (now known as Marvel) and EC Comics. Much later, in the 1970s, she returned to comic book editing for DC, supervising, among others, Wonder Woman, Young Romance, and Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane. For all these companies, she occasionally freelanced scripts, working on her own or with her husband, the prolific writer William Woolfolk. Though much of her work was on so-called "girls' comics" like the romance titles, she wrote for a great many superhero and adventure comics and is often credited with adding the element of Kryptonite to the Superman mythos. In her 1970s stint at DC, she discovered and gave work to a great many new writers and artists, both male and female. Her Finger Award will be accepted by her daughter, Donna Woolfolk Cross who, as a bestselling author herself, continues the family tradition.
The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914-1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.
In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.
The major sponsor for the 2018 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.
The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel on the evening of Friday, July 20.
Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un hasn't accomplished much more than to give those two men a photo-up which they obviously feel will make them look good to their respective bases. Oh, and they both may have managed to make South Korea feel like it's being abandoned by the U.S. I can get why Kim Jong Un likes that; not so certain why Trump wants to take bows for it.
But I guess if you feared the outcome of that kaffeeklatsch would be immediate nuclear war, it was kind of successful. I have a friend who feels he's scored a success if he asks a woman out and she merely refuses and doesn't call the police on him. So congrats to Trump for not creating a disaster…yet.
I'm not like another friend of mine who has decided to judge Trump on what he calls the Sean Hannity Scale. The way it works is that Trump gets credit for any accomplishment that is so inarguably good that Sean Hannity would have praised it if it had been done by Obama. Since Hannity thought it was wrong for Obama to even say he'd be open for a meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump failed that test by even going to the meeting.
I'd really like to see Trump achieve some good things — and by that, I mean things that are good for the U.S. and even for the world. Unfortunately, he seems to think that convincing his base that he's actually accomplished something is just as good as actually accomplishing it. And I guess in his world, it is.
Canada should be pissed with the U.S. over the trade deficit of comedians. We got Jim Carrey, Martin Short, Norm MacDonald, Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd, Howie Mandel, Samantha Bee, Mike Meyers and Seth Rogen. All they got from us was one McKenzie brother.
Hey, it's the next installment of our play-by-play coverage of the eleven-day trip that I took recently with my fabulous friend Amber to Las Vegas, Philadelphia and New York. Before you read about Day 8, you really oughta read the chapters on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, my Philadelphia Addenda and Day 7.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Let me warn you at the top: This is a real long post. I mean real long.
Dick Cavett once said that when he first moved to New York, he realized an amazing thing about it. You could go to bed there and in the morning when you woke up, you'd think, "Hey, if I walk outside, I'll be in New York!" I still sometimes feel that way when I'm in the city.
On those visits, Breakfast always seems elusive and gets supplanted by Early Lunch. Amber and I met my pals Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin at Sardi's, where Jim's prominence as a theatrical performer is noted with a caricature on the wall. Jim and Steve are a splendid union of two very talented people who seem to know absolutely everyone in their profession, their profession being The Theatre.
The great thing about knowing performers is that I usually don't have to tell you about them. I can show them to you by embedding a YouTube video. Here's nine minutes of Jim and Steve singing about their relationship…
I knew Jim before he met Steve and now cannot imagine him without his longtime partner. The four of us sat and dined and talked and talked and talked and had a very good time.
Because lunch ran so late. I wasn't all that hungry as it neared time to head uptown for our evening's entertainment. Neither was Amber so we decided to each get a slice of pizza to tide us over until after the show. We went to Joe's Pizza on Broadway in Times Square, which many will tell you sells the best individual slices in town. She had pepperoni and I had plain cheese and they were pretty good. Then we took the subway to Lincoln Center and got there with enough time to spare that Amber asked, "Is there somewhere around here where we could get two more slices?"
I had Yelp! show me what was nearby and most of the pizza spots seemed like places where it's a whole pie or nothing. But a restaurant called Francesco Pizzeria on Columbus Avenue was described as a "slice joint" and I thought I recalled it getting a good review from Dave Portnoy, who does those YouTube pizza reviews that I occasionally post.
I was right. He gave it an 8.1 out of 10 and I trust Dave. Unfortunately, his guest reviewer was Dr. Oz who gave it an 8 and I wouldn't trust Dr. Oz to tell me where to buy aspirin. The slices we got there were good — Amber liked hers more than the one she had at Joe's but we got pie that was a lot greasier than what Dave and the alleged Doctor sampled. Mine required two napkins' worth of blotting.
Full of cheese 'n' dough, we strode back to Lincoln Center to see the new revival of My Fair Lady. Dividing line, please…
I was really looking forward to this. The national touring company of the original production of My Fair Lady was the first real Broadway-type show I ever saw. I had the songs memorized by age ten…but that was the last time I saw it performed on stage. It is not a cheap show to do, requiring as it does a very big cast and very lavish sets and costumes. Most local groups simply cannot afford to do it, or at least to do it right.
[CORRECTION ADDED YEARS LATER: I read what I wrote again and realized I'd seen it performed on stage in the eighties. Rex Harrison was doing a "farewell tour" in it so everyone could say they saw him in it…and cringe a bit when he forgot lyrics.]
I enjoyed 97% of this new production tremendously. The costumes and sets were superb. The cast was excellent. Harry Hadden-Paton is good enough as Higgins to make you forget Rex Harrison. Lauren Ambrose is good enough as Eliza Doolittle to make you forget either Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn, depending on which Eliza you have embedded in your brain. The orchestra does full justice to the score.
And it has Diana Rigg as Higgins' mother. I am just the right age to have loved her as Mrs. Peel on The Avengers — the *real* Avengers, not those usurpers of the name led by Captain America. Mrs. Higgins has never been a large part and Ms. Rigg probably learned all her lines in about twenty minutes. But she also scored with every damned one of them and the applause at her entrance made me quite happy.
The show also has Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza's father, the role Stanley Holloway played on the stage and on the screen. Alfred P. Doolittle has two show-stopping numbers — "A Little Bit of Luck" and "Get Me To The Church on Time." The first was fairly routine this time out…charming but nothing spectacular. The "Church" number, though…oh, my goodness. The "Church" number.
This is kind of interesting. The original Broadway version of My Fair Lady in 1956 had no trouble securing a top director, a top production designer, a top costume designer, etc. But it took a while to find a choreographer. Several of the best ones turned it down because it wasn't a real dance show. It was mostly ballroom-style and a little of the English Music Hall style dancing in which Stanley Holloway excelled. There was no number where a choreographer could show off or be particularly innovative.
There is now. I suppose some would quibble that what they did with "Get Me To The Church" is out of character with the show itself, adding in acrobatics and rotating sets and drag queens (yes, drag queens) and extra, extra choruses. They might be right on some level but boy, was that number spectacular. Norbert Leo Butz is an actor first and a dancer second so he doesn't turn into a Fred Astaire wanna-be when he dances. He dances in character and at the end of the song, the place exploded. It was maybe the most exciting dance number I ever saw on a stage and Amber and I were on our feet along with the general consensus.
Everyone in the show is so perfect that you're probably wondering when I'm going to get to the 3% I didn't love. That's now but first I need to insert one of these…
Remember: You've been warned.
They changed the ending. At the end of Pygmalion, the George Bernard Shaw play on which My Fair Lady was based, Eliza and Higgins do not fall in love. She leaves him, though not as an act of defiance or anger. She leaves for a reason that has been valid for any woman at any time in our history: She simply has not gotten any affection from the man.
Shaw wrote the play for a prominent actress of the day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who as her name would suggest was not a woman of great independence. She did however have a keen sense of what pleased audiences and she decided it would please audiences if Eliza and Higgins wound up together. That was how the first English-language stage performances of Pygmalion went, much to Shaw's surprise.
He does not seem to have stopped this, though he did pen a note that was added to the published version of the play that said that Eliza wound up marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill (the silly fop who in M.F.L. sings "On The Street Where You Live") and they moved in with Higgins for a time before she opened her own flower shop, a possibility mentioned earlier in the play. Higgins remained a mentor to her and also the "confirmed old bachelor" that he said he was.
Shaw also suggested that Eliza stayed interested in Higgins and had some fantasies about dragging him "off his pedestal" and seeing him "making love like any common man." He also wrote that while her instinct told her not to marry Higgins, it also told her not to give him up and that he would remain "one of the strongest personal interests in her life."
Pygmalion was performed then with many variant endings, some honoring Shaw's views, some not. Shavian scholars have debated for years just what is the proper ending and indeed, the published text of the play was changed at least once during Shaw's lifetime. The 1938 British film starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller had an ambiguous ending, also not approved (but not stopped) by Shaw. Eliza flees Higgins' home to be with Freddy but then returns to Higgins and it is suggested she cannot or will not leave him.
The screenplay, probably more so than Shaw's original play, was the basis for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady and it ends of course with Higgins realizing he has grown "accustomed to her face," getting off that pedestal as much as any "confirmed old bachelor" can…and Eliza deciding her future is with him. In the new version, she returns to him and it does seem to be leading up to them being a couple, as every audience member who knows My Fair Lady from any venue expects.
But then she runs away from him. In fact, she runs off the set and up an aisle of the audience, the suggestion being that she is running as far from him as is humanly possible. The End.
Advance word on this revival suggested that the traditional ending had to go because it did not match with current attitudes about women and Me Too and such. If you didn't know that was a concern, it's announced clearly when in one scene — and remember this show is set a long time ago in Edwardian London — a completely gratuitous band of women march through a public square with signs demanding the vote for women, which is of course never again mentioned in the show.
There is a separate argument as to whether plays set well in the past should reflect society then or now. Assuming we decide a play should not contain sensibilities we have outgrown, I would argue that the change in My Fair Lady is still wrong and unnecessary. My friend Shelly Goldstein wrote on her Facebook page this morning…
OK, let's really take a deep breath here. My Fair Lady is not sexist. Henry Higgins is supercilious & chauvinistic but he's no worse to Liza than he is to anyone else. The show isn't a romance and it isn't about sexism. It's about language, class and the choices one makes to rise above the station some would insist is your only option.
Professor Higgins in any version of this musical is about as far from a Harvey Weinstein as you could get and still be an asshole. He insists that Eliza be properly chaperoned when living in his home, doesn't show the slightest interest in wanting to touch her and is outraged at the suggestion of her father who is more than willing to pimp her out for money. There are those who have even argued that Higgins and Pickering are "confirmed old bachelors" because they're both gay. That's how total Higgins' disinterest is in molesting his fair lady but there's nothing in the text to indicate that either.
He treats her like a lower class person only because she talks like one and he argues that that alone is the reason she is but one half-notch above a beggar woman. He is anti-female only in the sense that he personally does not want one in his life, which even the most avowed advocate of women's equality would concede is his right. His song, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?" is a parody of how foolish some men — most notably, a man who's never really had a woman in his life — can be about the opposite gender…and also about their own.
He makes a deal to pay her for participating in his little wager that he can pass her off as duchess by giving her the elocution lessons which she came to him to get. He could have made the exact same bet to pass her father or any lower-caste male off as a duke.
Her learning to talk like a proper lady was her idea, remember. He keeps his part of their bargain in every way. And in the traditional text of My Fair Lady, the climax is that this arrogant, I-don't-need-anyone person comes to realize that he needs her…and while she could leave him at that point — and has once — she chooses not to. Even in the year 2018, what is wrong with that story?
What to me is particularly amiss with the changed ending is that it just plain doesn't fit. I doubt you can take any decent play ever written, invert the last 10-15 seconds and have it apply. Imagine if in the closing moments of The Music Man, Harold Hill skips town with all the money he collected for band instruments, laughing at what suckers they are in River City. Or if you have a production of Death of a Salesman and every word is the same until the last second, as his funeral is letting out, Willy Loman turns up alive. If you want your My Fair Lady to end as this revival does, you should probably drop "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" and everything else that starts to humanize Higgins in the end.
You should also explain why she comes back to his home at all. The way it plays, she comes back because (I guess) she still has some feelings about him and needs to explore them…or something. But then he is nicer to her than he has ever been before and she responds by, without a word of explanation, sprinting into the audience and (I guess) out of his life.
So what happens next? She left him once and came back. Does she come back again? We don't know. People defending this ending are arguing it's merely restoring Shaw's ending…but Shaw didn't have Higgins expressing anything like the change of emotions he does near the end of My Fair Lady. Shaw's Higgins never changes one bit.
Does she wed Freddy? Shaw said she did but we get no indication that that happens either and even if it did, that's not an empowering act for a woman…marrying a man for whom she has not shown the slightest ounce of affection. And oh, yes — to have a place to live, they'll have to go persuade Higgins (the guy she ran away from like he was Dracula) to take them in.
Does she make something of herself? Does she open that florist shop that Higgins and Pickering were going to help fund? That would sure be a better life for her than remaining a prisoner of the gutters, condemned by every syllable she utters. As is, we don't know she doesn't wind up back there.
This version of the play doesn't say what becomes of her. It just kind of stops…and the audience we saw it with let out a big, unheard collective "huh?" It surprised them but not, it seemed to me, in a good way. Eliza running for dear life away from the man who taught her how to speak like royalty was not what the book Alan Jay Lerner wrote led up to.
We cheered the show of course because everything before that was so splendid. The performers certainly deserved the standing ovations they received…and if they'd trotted out the designers and choreographer and arrangers, we'd have cheered for them, too. I absolutely recommend you see this show if you can…and considering how hard it was for me to get tickets, I suspect it'll be there for a long time.
If you do see it, please write and explain to me how the ending fits that play or even any concept of how women should be treated today. I'm not even sure My Fair Lady should be about how women should be treated today but if it has to be, that wasn't it.
The Tonys last night seem to have done okay in the ratings department. The show's never going to be a blockbuster there, given that its premise is to bestow awards for work most of America will never see to people most of America has never heard of. And if they have heard of them, it's mostly because they were on TV or in movies.
The hosts — Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles — were largely unobtrusive, making the night about others rather than themselves…which was fine. Many of the winners gave great, touching speeches and many of the winners were big surprises.
This was supposed to be the evening when Angels in America dominated the stage but that distinction instead went to The Band's Visit. Mean Girls was also supposed to win a lot and didn't. Often, the Tony for Best Book of a Musical is presented during the non-televised portion of the award-giving but it was part of the telecast this year, obviously because they thought Tina Fey might take it home.
My friend Shelly Goldstein came over and we watched the show in a skillful way. My TiVo was recording both the Tonys and also John Oliver's show over on HBO. We watched the first half-hour or so of award-bestowal, then hopped over to view Mr. Oliver's program. When we returned to viewing the Tonys, we were a half-hour behind the broadcast…so we could skip instantly ahead through commercials and station breaks. By the time that "pad" was used up, we were current with the Tonys, watching the last half-hour or so in real time. Thus, we watched a three-hour awards show and a half-hour of John Oliver in three hours. Who says time travel is impossible?
Having only seen a few of the nominees, we had no real opinions as to who was win-worthy or not but we were qualified to judge the show itself — it was okay — and the all-important question of which shows probably managed to make viewers say, "Hey, I want to see that!" The Band's Visit probably did that just by winning so many trophies. Frozen and Spongebob Squarepants didn't win much of anything but I bet they sold more tickets than some shows that did. (These are my views, by the way, not necessarily Shelly's.)
Carousel probably didn't because though the number was rousing and fun, you could watch it and still have no idea what the show was about; the same with Once on an Island. My Fair Lady is a marvelous show and I'll be discussing it here shortly…but they opted to cram three of its numbers into their allotted time and that meant slicing them down so much they lost all impact. Given how hard tickets already are to get, that might not matter much.
And the number from Mean Girls sure didn't make me want to buy a ticket but since I'm not teenage and female, maybe they don't care. It'll do fine without that Tony Bump.
All in all, a decent show especially when watched with Shelly Goldstein and great food from the Wood Ranch Grill. It's really the best way to watch the Tony Awards.
Tonight when he should be prepping for the most important meeting of his life, Donald Trump is staying up, composing outraged tweets about the low-rated Tony Awards, that failing actor Robert DeNiro and all those gay people who stood and clapped for what DeNiro said.
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.
