Go see “In The Heights” on Broadway, as it is totally rad. Don’t believe me? Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the subject. I think they’re pretty much spot-on, which means I agree with the Times on something, a scary thought. The music and dancing are FANTASTIC (the pit orchestra is particularly good), the dialogue reasonably funny, the plot sort of predictable and disjointed, but it’s Musical Theater, not an Albee play.
It doesn’t hurt that our friend Shaun is in it, primarily as a chorus member but also an understudy for two of the leads. So go see it.
We drove up last Saturday, a day those of you on the Eastern Seaboard was mostly one long torrential downpour. The drive was stressful. Two hours of driving at 60mph on horrible New Jersey roads, not being able to see more than about 100 feet in front of the car. Seriously, NJ, is there any reason why your roads have to be bumpier than my face? The Jersey Turnpike is one long rumble strip. It was particularly nice when the wind would blow from right to left, and I’d steer to the right to keep in my lane, and watch in wonder as the car continued to drift to the left because the front wheels had started hydroplaning. I’d lift off the gas, the wheels would stick, and the car would jerk to the right. One poor soul almost spun his Jetta in front of me, would would have resulted in Death and Dismemberment for all concerned.
We finally arrived in Manhattan, parked at a reasonably non-shady parking garage near Times Square, and walked the half-block to the DoubleTree Suites. My parents were up for the weekend as well and had already checked in, so we just grabbed a room key from the desk and headed up. Thank SGLBJ for high-speed elevators, says I, because we were on the 29th floor. The view was fantastic, and I had my camera, so it’s a surprising oversight of mine that I didn’t take a single picture of anything all weekend. Sorry about that.
I plopped myself in a chair to try and bleed off some stress, while Sarah mixed me a tasty intoxicating beverage from the stash we’d brought with us (because if you’re going to open the minibar at a hotel anywhere in the world, and triply so in New York, you may as well just start wiping your ass with twenties). After we changed clothes and relaxed a bit, we headed out to meet our friends for dinner at “El Deportivo,” which sounds like some kind of place the INS takes detainees for a last meal before shipping them back to Nicaragua. We ordered drinks, met up with our friends, and then I left.
I had to work, you see. Some application guys had scheduled a major upgrade for the weekend, and needed someone to run a backup of their system first, and I was the guy. I’m always the guy. Remember when I said I’d been working too hard? Yeah, having to interrupt drinking and fun to go do work is not good times. Luckily, it went superfast, so I ran back out to meet up with the family and friends at a bar near the Richard Rodgers theatre named “House of Brews,” which had cask ale. This is not something one normally finds in America, so I had one, and it was fantastic. Man…English beer. Good stuff.
The theatre was pretty bumpin’, a good crowd for the last preview show before Opening Night (which was on Sunday). We had pretty decent seats, on the lower level, good view of the stage. My knees were pressed hard into the back of the seat in front of me, which kinda sucked for the guy sitting therein, because I have a tendency to start pretending to play the drums when I hear funky latin beats, and my bass-drum leg was making that poor fellow’s seat bounce up and down like Carmen Electra on a trampoline. He almost turned around to say something and I realized and stopped, but it was an effort to remain reasonably still for the remainder of the performance.
Luckily, it was captivating. Like I said, a little predictable, but who cares about that. I know how “No Country For Old Men” ends (I read the book), but I’m still beyond stoked to see the movie. “In The Heights” is the kind of show that I almost hope doesn’t have too long a run, because it’d be nice to have MTI or Tams-Witmark get hold of it so I could do it at Brandywine High in a few years, although we’d have to have one HELL of a pit band to pull it off. It’s just fun from beginning to end. And the guy that wrote it, and stars in it, is all of 28. Speaking as someone who is slightly older than 28: I hate him. Go see the show.
After the show, we met Shaun at the stage door, and he was able to take us inside and show us the set, which was ridiculously detailed. One of the leads had brought in a high school portrait of herself which they hung in the shop owned by her character’s parents. There was an ATM with graffiti on it (it appeared to have signatures of the cast and/or crew all over it in bright neon colors). The sidewalk upstage had GUM STAINS ON IT. These are the kind of details you can do, I guess, when you have months to construct a set. (My favorite set of all time, although I’m hardly an expert on such things, was the one they had for “Sunset Boulevard” where a house descended from the rafters. Not a small house, either, but the entire downstairs interior of a Hollywood mansion, covering almost the entire stage, simply dropped into place, with Glenn Close walking around on it as they did so.)
Sarah and I took the opportunity to bust a few moves on the stage, so we can now say (and in fact have been telling everyone we know) that we have Danced On Broadway.
Afterwards, Shaun took us to a club named either “W” or “The Whiskey,” I’m not entirely sure which. The confusion stemmed from the fact that it was all basically one club, but with two completely separate environments: a 7th floor lounge, where we stood around for a while and were bored, and a basement dance club, where we found ourselves around midnight and simply threw down the moves for upwards of 90 minutes. I awoke on Sunday with crippling thigh pain because of my unstoppableness on the dance floor. Eventually, we tired, and some folks had to take trains and cars to get back to their normal lives, but the rest of us headed to a pizza place, where I ate half a pie and part of another to soak up the staggering amount of gin I’d taken in by that point. Eventually, Sarah and I made it back to the hotel, where we crashed hard on the pull-out bed.
The next day, we managed to actually get up, get breakfast, and get on the road shortly after noon, and aside from an incident where I did something stupid in the Lincoln Tunnel and almost caused an accident, made it back to Delaware safe and sound. Whoo. The next day, I went back to work, and nearly wept at my desk.
Tomorrow: the final installment of pictures of Charles from like 2 months ago. I’ll have to take some more; he’s probably grown an inch since then.
