On Broadway and Off, New York City

I[heart]NY. Everyone who is going to write anything about the city does, even if they thoroughly despise it. It's such a bustling and lively place that it's chock full of interesting tidbits and good stories, even if you do hate it, and in fact sometimes especially if you hate it. There's much to be said about the cost of everything, crowds, the slowness of tourists ambling blindly about Times Square, but I won't complain much about those things because I rather love New York, a town I've found to be remarkably manageable considering its enormity.

(Well, generally manageable that is. You can find just about anything, but often not when you're looking for it, even with an iPhone. I should not have walked around midtown Manhattan for 30 minutes looking for pizza and end up at a Times Square Sbarro, even near midnight. And finding a cup of coffee that isn't from Starbucks or a deli is nigh impossible, and to this end I must extend credit to Madison for better catering to coffee fiends like myself. Also, there was the time we accidentally boarded an express subway and bypassed our intended destination of Central Park by about 50 blocks and wound up in Harlem.)

See, you can find everything.

But as I was saying, New York is a city so great that when you say you're going to New York people generally assume you mean the city and disregard the state altogether. The only other time that might feasibly happen is if you said you were going to Kansas, in which case Kansas City is probably the assured destination merely because there aren't any other destinations in Kansas to my knowledge, and even then they might think you were headed to Kansas City, Missouri.

We checked into our hotel early and found our room to be rather agreeable, if not modestly sized. My mother and I shared a queen-sized bed in a room the size of a king-sized bed, but the shower was excellent and the breakfast free, both commodities being of great value here. Although, our one, tremendously slow elevator was broken a few times, in which case we would have to take the service elevator. This was a little box that looked like a birdcage, made with thin bands of steel and a metal gate for a door, such that you could see all four sides of the elevator shaft at any given moment. Also, there were no buttons, so a mechanic was always present as a stand-in elevator operator, using a lever to make the thing go up and down and responding to bell rings on different floors, once arguing with a cleaning lady in Italian for making him stop at her floor while he was clearly busy with guests. She would just have to carry her housekeeping cart to the next floor. I tried to avoid growing old in either elevator by taking the stairs, but as our room was on the 9th floor I quickly decided that patience was the best method.

Broadway

Among the many things I love are tall buildings, bridges, and Broadway musicals. New York has all of these, and I shall talk briefly about them in due course, starting with Broadway, since it took up the most amount of our time and constituted the vast majority of our expenses. We managed three Broadway shows in just four days, which I'm rather proud of.

How Broadway is struggling as much as it is is something of a mystery to me, but it certainly isn't for lack of support from the Straub family. Did you know that your average orchestra-level Broadway seat costs $125? And somehow, despite these generally being the best seats, you can easily spend $250 for one ticket at a show if you were so inclined. We paid full-price for one show, Wicked, which was well worth the cost, but for the others, Accent on Youth and The Phantom of the Opera we got half-price tickets from the Theatre Development Fund's TKTS booths, which are probably the best thing NYC has ever done for its tourists, aside from taking the hookers off of Times Square and 42nd Street (though neither has improved in regards to character).

It's the Broadway spectacles that attract me. I freely admit to being the worst sort of cliché fan of Broadway. I like the shows that are tried and true and which have the most extravagant sets, lights, and pyrotechnics. I've seen at least a baker's dozen Broadway shows, most being the big productions everyone recognizes. [Note: A subsequent revisiting of old ticket stubs reveals that I've seen at least 16.] What's more, I've generally had remarkably good seats at these (a special thanks to my parents here). But the reason I like the elaborate shows so much is not only because they're a thrill to watch, but the mechanics involved are incredible. I spent a few years working tech crew at my own high school's musicals, and I am here to tell you that as smoothly as those shows run, nothing about being backstage is easy. It's a little like an episode of "ER." Something goes wrong and pandemonium breaks out, with people running amok, frantically trying to figure out a solution before anyone in the audience can notice, all the while the crew displacing blame to someone in the cast and the cast doing the same to the crew. It's quite fun.

But the first show we saw, Accent on Youth, was not a spectacle, as it was not a musical. Rather, it was a good-hearted, witty, subtly hilarious sort of play about growing old featuring David Hyde Pierce of "Frasier" fame. That one was especially nice because it catered to an older crowd who respected proper Broadway policies.

Call me old-fashioned (a 22-year-old should not need to use this phrase), but there are certain rules Broadway audiences no longer respect, even at $125 a ticket. For one thing, jean shorts are not acceptable attire, nor should denim be worn in any respect, excepting perhaps that a nice jacket is donned. But, far more importantly, do not bring your bratty kids or screaming infants. At Phantom of the Opera a mother-daughter pair was sitting next to me eating candies out of a plastic bag (this being explicitly condemned at the beginning of every show), while the mother narrated every damn moment of the show to the girl, who was perpetually behind on the show's events precisely because of the mother's narration, always missing what was happening and therefore needing further explanation to catch up. And then the girl began perusing the playbill during the show's climax with her mother's indiglo watch, at which point I nearly bent over and said, "You know, they have turned the lights off for good reason."

Another good example is the mother who brought an infant to Wicked. I don't mean that by way of disrespect to a toddler, I mean an infant, swaddling clothes and all. At least three times the baby began screaming and had to be taken out through the theatre's creaky doors, much to the dismay of the entire Goddamn theatre.

Anyhow, Wicked is the show I've longed to see for years, being one of very few "big shows" I hadn't yet seen and being a story that was quite fascinating to me. As a child, while most friends I know reminisce about their fear of the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys, I would fast forward to the parts with the Wicked Witch (especially when she melts!) because she was my favorite character. I had a similar fascination with Ursula from The Little Mermaid. So anyhow, the story intrigued me and I'd heard nothing but good things about the show, which lived up to my expectations in every possible way. The graphic designer in me is even mildly fascinated with the show's poster (right). I was like a kid on Christmas morning walking to our 10th-row seats, taking in the remarkably built-up proscenium and studying the map of Oz covering the stage. When the "Defying Gravity" scene began refusing to blink was all I could do to keep my goosebumps under control... Except that I thought Elphaba was supposed to fly at the end of that song. Can anyone clear this up for me? Everyone my mother and I asked who had seen the show seems oddly unable to recall. Either way I see this as a Broadway failure, whether the crew failed to get her hooked up to a rig (and it certainly looked like that was attempted) or it was not written into the song that's all about flying. Still, what a tremendous performance.

Lastly, we saw The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway's longest-running musical at 20 years, and which felt a good many years stale. I don't know if it is too recycled a show or a cast with poor chemistry and largely unimpressive voices. The opening scene with the auction and the restoration of the original theatre set was quite impressive, but the chandelier crashing back down mid-show was disappointingly anti-climactic. It's a great piece of set design, to be sure, but for a chandelier to "crash" and make no noise, just a big flash of light, is ridiculous and laughable.

But the thing about Phantom that I've always loved is the story. I read the book by Gaston Leroux years ago, and it's exactly the sort of dark, gloomy, vaguely mystical tale I love. Even if the book is somewhat dull, the story is among my favorites, but much of this gets lost in translation to the romanticized versions we're familiar with. For one, the Phantom is a stalker and killer — there's really no away around this plainly obvious fact — and to see him blubbering on stage when Christine runs off with Raoul incites feelings of awkward discomfort rather than sympathy. We should sympathize with his story, but he's not a whiner. And Christine herself is an interesting character since she seems to live up to all kinds of old-age ideals about femininity. She's a dolt, you see, who is easily persuaded by flattery and quite literally has a difficult time choosing between French nobility and a sociopathic murderer, making her decision based on sweet nothings rather than merits of personality because, let's face it, not much about the Phantom screams endearment. I guess that's another point for Wicked, one of remarkably few stories with [more than one] strong female lead.

Not on Broadway, but related, is that we also saw a live taping of The Late Show with David Letterman, who is not any funnier live. Getting into the show involved standing in a long series of lines, which usually led to other lines elsewhere in the area, throughout which time college-aged students are practicing your laughs with you and leading you to believe that if you don't laugh and cheer at everything you are a lousy audience and a boring person because you must perceive everything that happens as hilarious, even when it usually isn't. It's all a bit fraudulent.

Off Broadway

I talked my mother into walking the Brooklyn Bridge with me, although we only walked half-way because there wasn't anything in Brooklyn we wanted to see. The Brooklyn Bridge is an astounding architectural accomplishment, over 125 years old, and showing no signs of weakness, outliving most other bridges round the world built at about the same time. It is over a mile long and seems fit to hold anything you care to put on it, even in windy conditions, despite being built before much was known about bridges' uncomfortable relationship with aerodynamics and what can happen when that relationship isn't understood (see Galloping Gertie). P.T. Barnum once led 21 elephants over the Bridge in a parade during a period of uncertainty over its stability, and the Bridge was understandably packed with as much weight as it is ever likely to hold during the mass exodus from Manhattan following the closure of the subways on 9/11.

The rest of our time in New York was spent with a little of this and that at a leisurely pace. We visited not a single museum and spent less than 30 minutes in Central Park, all of which I'm quite fine with. It was miserable weather-wise, with constant rain dampening the mood and any desire to take pictures (New York loses its charm when set against a gray backdrop).

When it rains New Yorkers shuffle along drearily with their black umbrellas as if they had just come from a funeral that was of great inconvenience to them. You could tell tourists by the color of their umbrellas, which clashed with everyone else's. The volume of umbrellas moving along with the many pedestrians in New York provides for some rather dangerous obstacles as well. Many of them nearly poked me in the eyeballs (usually my mother's bright blue one), while others just redirected raindrops onto my uncovered head or shoulders. And to be sure, New Yorkers would sooner stab you in the face with the pointy ends of their umbrellas than allow for any minor variances in their route. One girl demanded that I move as she walked towards me, despite walking in the very middle of the sidewalk just as I was, as if she had the right of way simply because she'd claimed it first. But then, New Yorkers aren't known for their friendliness. This traffic problem extends to any place where there are people, including crosswalks. You know your traffic is bad when cops must direct traffic at a regular intersection, this being quite common. And speaking of cops, what is it about the NYPD? They all look as if they were cast in Hollywood, every one of them fit and attractive with a very precise degree of racial variation.

Other than that, I met up with cousins, I met up with a friend from Semester at Sea, I ate at a lovely Greek diner and a place that only sells variations of Mac & Cheese. I also boldly tried a New York Egg Creme, only to learn that it contains neither eggs nor cream.