Tag: musicians

I saw "Sunset Boulevard"

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What I saw: “Sunset Boulevard,” a musical, on Broadway at the Palace Theater at Broadway and 47th.

What I did beforehand: riding lesson, dog walk, shower; drove to town, walked to train station, waited on the platform outside because the heated waiting area smelled like farts, heard an announcement that the train was running 15 minutes late. Heard a Connected Teen say “Whoa. Like, the next train is at like, Goldens Bridge and like, running 40 minutes late.” 

I texted the Bacon Provider. He encouraged me to like, bail on the train and drive. So I did. It was a relatively quick drive to the city, followed by a slow crawl while I figured out parking. Never trust navigation software about getting places within NYC. They’re all wrong. 

What I wore: yellow Fluevog men-styled oxfords, black mini-cord pants, purple Eileen Fisher sweater, dangly gold earrings. 


Who went with me: my friend S, who also wore purple.

How I got tickets/Why I saw this show: S suggested it, and booked them.

Where I sat: Mezzanine Row E, somewhere in the middle of the row, between S. and a French-speaking woman with a Québécois accent who was writing things down in a notebook during the production, took out her phone and caught a photograph during the first act and failed to suppress her flash. 


Things that were sad: we were scolded, as a group, for having and using phones by an irate usher during intermission. The woman next to me, who was the one who took the flash photo, sat calmly eating from her bag of ROLD GOLD® Tiny Twists Pretzels and made no indication that she heard the usher at all.

Things that were funny: the original movie version of Sunset Boulevard is a Hollywood classic , directed by Billy Wilder. The dark and slightly campy film-noir inspired many zingers and spoofs over the years, and any time a classic line is uttered in this production the audience burst into cheering. 

Things that were not funny: when we left, there were a number of pretzels on the ground next to my seat, broken and ground into crumbs.


Something I ate: meatballs at the Marshal.

What it is: a big, glossy Broadway vehicle for the aging movie star, with soaring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, a large, full orchestra, and most of the good lines fans of the original film are looking for. Maybe Glenn Close isn’t quite the singer to deliver the songs as perfectly as they could be sung; certainly it mattered not at all, and maybe was better for her imperfect pitch. 

Who should see it: Glenn Close groupies, film-noir aficionados, Broadway buffs,  admirers of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Billy Wilder boosters, pretzel-loving Quebeckers. 


What I saw on the way home: mounted NYPD, but after that, just the road.

I saw "The Band’s Visit"

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What I saw: The Band’s Visit, a production of the Atlantic Theater Company, at the Linda Gross Theater on W 20th Street between 8th and 9th

What I did beforehand: cleaned the dining room, watched the Bacon Provider bottle a batch of beer.


What I wore: black motorcycle boots that I bought at the Ranch & Home in Kennewick, Washington in 2002, rust stretch corduroy James jeans with horrifying and degrading non-functional front pockets, black Tanner belt, black Lululemon tank, black slouchy neck Smartwool top that they don’t make anymore, no makeup 

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Who went with me: the Bacon Provider, who seemed like he would have rather done nothing

How I got tickets/Why I saw this show: I subscribed to the season, online, but oh wait also okay in December of 2011 I ate lunch at a table next to Tony Shalhoub and was very distracted by his voice behind me, animatedly discussing the details of an exciting new project.

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The percussionists had sticks in their bags. And I didn’t know about the “h” then. Or also how soul-crushing New York is.

Where I sat: Row E, Seat 9


Things that were sad: this is not a tear-jerker, but is rather a sad musical about the desolate lives of lonely people 

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Things that were funny: police band uniforms, roller disco, first dates. As we left the theater it seemed the rest of the audience filing out around us had lapsed into  speaking Hebrew.
Things that were not funny: the joy of celebrating the glorious diversity of our world’s different cultures now feels like a dangerous and naive indulgence

Something I ate: fried calamari at a decent Italian restaurant about a block away

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What it is: a new musical adaptation of a movie, performed without intermission, and lasting 90 minutes. 

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Who should see it: people who speak Arabic, people who speak Hebrew, people who are waiting for a phone call, policemen, fans of Tony Shalhoub

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What I saw on the way home: a large and healthy-looking rat peeking its head out of the bushes on a traffic island near West 34th, torrential rain that rendered the surface of the normally dark and narrow Saw Mill Parkway a glassy lake, and a mouse that I did not run over about half a mile from home. It was one of the scariest drives home of my life.

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Budapest #1

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We’ve been here in Budapest a couple of days and so far we’ve been delighted by things small and not small. The perfect spring weather helps. 

Today, we started with hotel breakfast, where they did not manage to burn the bacon to my liking but it was still delicious. After that, we went for a walk in search of maybe a hat or sunglasses but found ourselves walking one of those streets that shows up in the guidebook as “where you should go shopping” but we would only describe it as “where you should never go under any circumstances unless maybe you wanted to make video footage of terrible restaurant barkers.” Bleh. Tourist traps! But then, we wandered over to the Central Market Hall where they sell, you know, like, real traditional Hungarian cured meats, and the spices, and wines, and all the fruits and the vegetables, like Budapest’s version of the Pike Place Market. It was gorgeous and full of Hungarians. 

Központi Vásárcsarnok


After that, we crossed one of the many scenic and lovely bridges over the Danube to the Buda side of the city, and on an impulse headed up the hill to the citadel. This park is full of crumbling steps and dilapidated railings and increasingly stunning views and an uneven path up to the fortress at the top and I would recommend the climb to anyone just coming to the city and seeking a way to see it all, because you get to see it from above. After that we walked down the other side to Bartók street and chose a random café for lunch and it was great and then, after admiringly watching those yellow streetcar/tram things going by we took one back over to the Pest side where our hotel was and could not figure out how to actually pay for the trip.

BARTÓK BÉLA ÚT

After that, we needed a rest but then after that we went and had high tea and then we got dressed because we had bought opera tickets.

It was the Janáček opera Jenůfa and if you don’t want spoilers about the plot of this opera skip the next paragraph.
If you don’t mind spoilers, I will start off by telling you that I always Google the plot of operas before I see them so I know what I’m getting myself into. I am a good audience member in that I laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts and mostly I need to know in advance when I need to be prepared to be sad or happy or whatever. So let me just say (here come the spoilers) that this is an opera about a dead baby. And it did make me cry, twice, but briefly. I am also a bad audience member in that I get bored easily at the opera, and I’m not what I would consider an actually educated opera fan but I have gone to a bunch of them over the years and I usually enjoy them if they are not too long. I don’t mind extremely sad operas or even the ones where people take a long time dying on stage and singing their guts out at each other (looking at you Tristan and Isolde). 

Anyway, the old opera house in Budapest is glorious and seems gently well-preserved in a not-kept-wrapped-in-plastic-to-preserve-the-freshness kind of way. It’s extravagantly gorgeous, with painted ceilings and a lot of marble and gold leaf, but not gargantuan like the Met in New York. And our tickets were the nicest seats in the house, in a little box on the dress circle, and were about $50 each, which doesn’t even buy cheap seats in New York.
Most of the guidebooks to Budapest will recommend seeing the opera house, because it is very beautiful and special, and, yes, it is those things, but it is also an opera house and you are supposed to see an opera there.

Operaház

So if you go to Budapest, you should not go to the opera house and take a freaking guided tour. You should put on your dress or a tie or both and go to the freaking opera. The tickets will be much less than New York, the opera will be good, you can read the supertitles in English, the sparking wine at intermission will be more than adequate, and then, at the very end, when you are clapping and watching the many singers and principals and the orchestra and the conductor and all the many members of the audience sharing this experience, you can reflect, as I did, upon the many, many hours of musical education and practice that went into this one night happening. And you, like me, might be really grateful that there were people ready to teach all those musicians to sing and/or play, way back like 30-40 years ago.

Barcelona #1

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My traveling companion and I arrived in Barcelona yesterday. We took the train from the airport (aeroporto), the up-side of which is that it is the most inexpensive option. The down-side is having the shacks and graffiti-covered hulls of buildings you see from the train as your introduction to the countryside of Spain.  And of course, this being Spain the lovely colorful subway map that comes in all the travel books and is posted on walls seems to have essentially no relation to the lines as the trains actually travel them.  We simply scratched our heads, argued a bit, and got on the train everyone else got on. What a relief to see that our stop was only number four (of course, when I say “our stop” what I mean was the connection we were going to attempt, which was in Spanish on the train and is in Catalan in all of the guidebooks).
At some point on the train a man with an accordion appeared in our car. When this happens in New York, people make eye-contact with you and roll their eyes theatrically. Here in Spain, local folks went into extreme no-eye-contact-mode, and the tourists smiled at their traveling companions with a half-wink, “Say, this never happens in Tokyo!” In New York, we have yet to have a man with an accordion get on our subway car, though we have had the rapper and fellows with guitars. I love music on the train, even when the musicians are not talented. It’s obviously people like me who keep these folks in business.  I usually let my Traveling Companion keep the Euro change in his pockets, but I had to intercept the 2 Euro coin from him; he is a true believer in tipping street musicians of all kinds.
Triumphantly we got off our train into a packed underground station with flights of stairs and tons of people, some wearing party masks, and one of them carrying an unhappy, meowing cat in a crate. We made our way to the huge paper posters of train schedules to discover that they were written in some sort of cuneiform script. Here, our triumph ended, and we ascended to the street.
At this point, you see, we were utterly unable to see how you switched to the subway train line, so we walked. Emerging on Passeig de Gràcia (which also has a Spanish name, Paseo de Gracia), we immediately encountered an enormous Sunday political rally, complete with flags, party stickers, neck-kerchiefs, loudspeakers, a lingering helicopter hovering above, soldiers, police, and thousands of strolling, well-dressed people. My Traveling Companion wanted to know what they wanted and why they were assembled. I had no clue. Many of them waved a red banner with “CCOP,” which is probably Catalonian Communists. I have a history of encountering communist party rallies, and happened upon one the last time I came to Europe, near the open air market by our hotel in Venice.  This time, my Traveling Companion would never have tolerated me taking a picture, so I didn’t.
The hotel was not too hard to find. As in Italy, the street signs are attached to buildings at the corners of intersections so it took us a few blocks to verify that we were headed in the correct direction. I brought along an orphaned AT&T iPhone in case of emergency (Verizon phones are based on shorter string technology and do not stretch across the Atlantic Ocean), and turned on this phone to use the compass.  I was right about north (a skill I cannot always count on, but did inherit from my father). The iPhone is being covered by “Orange” wireless. Tempting to make some calls, send a bunch of texts, etc., but once I saw a $3000 mobile phone bill. 
Besides, I felt like a hero when I found the hotel (for about five minutes). We had to wait for our room until 3:30 pm, about 4 hours. We went and got delicious croissants and cafe au lait around the corner (being too simple-minded to be able to order anything more substantive). The wait for the room was actually excruciating! Stupid details of the timing of check-in and check-out are always so dicey. My Traveling Companion did not sleep on the plane but fell asleep waiting in the lobby and still sleeps now.
Our room is as strange and wonderful as I expected. Modern in the extreme, with three levels, two rooms and two baths. They have the bizarro key-in-the-light-switch deal here, which makes sense but also adds to the initial confusion of figuring out a room. The other hotel guests include a squalling baby and several commandeering adult men, who seem like they are in our room when they talk in the hall; this is never more startling than when you are sleeping off a headache and an overnight flight in coach. Housekeeping persistently knocked around 6 pm and I had to shout genuine nonsense at them to make them go away.
I logged on with the “free wireless,” which is 60 minutes worth of wireless, free every 24 hours.

We will rise soon and go eat tapas around 9:30 pm, enjoying sitting outside under a heater, listening to our fellow diners chatting in French on one side and Korean on the other.  We will enjoy the communal aspect of the Euro-zone, where our waiter will bestow the most marginal service imaginable, and expects no tip, and we will bask and eat in a plume of second-hand cigarette smoke. There will be fried white anchovies and a decent glass of red wine even though I will ask for white, and it will be a privilege.