In New York City
I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too, NYC just got here this morning, 3 bucks, 2 bags, 1 me, Have you ever been to the Big Apple, have you ever been, New York New York a helluva town. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole it the ground. You can help but sing all the NY songs you can think of when you first see the most famous skyline in the world. Paula and I are staying in a shoebox of a room. Silly, when you barely spend 2 minutes (outside of sleeping) in your hotel room, you get a palatial, enormous room. When you need to use the room to work for much of the day, you end up with a postage stamp that is barely big enough for a bed. No desk no chair oh well.

Paula is writing her paper for her Oxford appearance, it’s due Monday. And I am attending my conference for the League of American Theatre’s and Producers. And of course we are seeing lots of great shows. Because of the conference we get lots of freebies and boy am I getting shwag. CDs and tshirts and underwear and little chachkies with show logos all over them.

Our first night we saw Sweeny Todd. It was different than any Todd I’ve seen before. It’s usually a huge, opera-esque show with an enormous set. Everything about this production was understated and it was wonderful. Starred Patty Lupone, check it out http://www.sweeneytoddonbroadway.com Buckets of blood.

The next afternoon I saw Lestat. http://www.lestat.com yes that Lestat. Lots of very beautiful stage pictures but all in all not a very entertaining show. The entire first act was all ballads and no comedy. But lots of blood sucking.

The next evening we went to an off Broadway play called The Lieutenant of Inishmore. http://www.lieutenantofinishmore.com the bloodiest show I’ve ever seen. The tag line was “think Quentin Tarantino meets Monty Python” I guess that was appropriate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much blood in a movie let alone on stage. But the show was frickin hilarious.

So we figured we got more blood than we bargained for. We went to The 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. http://www.playbill.com/events/event_detail/6261.html no blood at all. A really wonderful show.

Tomorrow it’s Avenue Q http://www.avenueq.com they say that its Sesame Street meets Southpark. Looking forward to that one.

Saturday it’s the Drowsy Chaperone http://www.drowsychaperone.com they say this is the runaway hit of the year. It premiered in Los Angeles but I didn’t get a chance to see that one. I’m thinking Sunday it’s The Color Purple.
http://www.colorpurple.com that one wasn’t on my list until lunch today. The League threw a lunch in the Rainbow Room with Oprah herself. She plugged the show, showed us a video and had the entire cast there singing the title song. Very beautiful and it’s got me wanting to see it. Home again on Monday.