Tuesday, May 5
Flew up early to beat the rush -- i.e., the PG ShowPlane group, arriving tomorrow with uber-competent Paul and Jackie Busang of Gulliver's Travels -- and also to see a couple of more shows. For once, Broadway is awash in plays, not just musicals, and I had a devil of a time deciding which eight shows to cram in the standard six-day Broadway week, although this time I could actually do nine, because "The Norman Conquest" has a Saturday morning show. 
For the first night I chose the Bill Irwin-Nathan Lane-John Goodman-John Glover "Waiting for Godot" (that's GOD-o). I give the actors pride of place because Beckett's play is such an established classic. I first encountered it in a drama survey at Harvard in fall, 1959. The play had just made its English language debut in London 1955, and it seemed very strange and new and we congratulated ourselves for being on the cutting edge. Now, as I'm coming up on my 50th anniversary with it on the page and stage, it feels as though it's always been there, the essential play of the 20th century.
With me were dear friend Janes Hewes and my daughter Celia and her husband, Jeb, and it's because of him that we went backstage afterwards -- Irwin, a master of physical theater who for many years rarely even spoke on stage, has long been a student of Jeb's mother, Brenda Bufalino, a master tap dancer.
Wednesday, May 6
Today started with the big morning melee for the press and Tony Award nominees (announced Tuesday), which I've written about at length (see the May 8 post, below).
Then for something very different in the afternoon: Lynn Nottage's "Ruined," off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center Stage 1, a must-see because it just won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for drama. With me was Gwen Orel, who has contributed to PG theater coverage for almost a decade. "Ruined" is an epic play on a horrendous subject, the rape of women in contemporary African civil wars, but nonetheless it manages to achieve some uplift. It's very much a contemporary version of "Mother Courage," the equivalent character of Mama Nadi being the best part of the play.
BTW, I expect to write reviews of all these shows in the weeks ahead. (NOTE: Now, I already have, most of them. Go to www.post-gazette.com/theater for one group review of three musicals and another of four (five) plays.)
(These are our New York granddaughters, not street mimes. On the left, Alice, playing in the park; just below, Ella, with the clown mask she got for her birthday.)
For dinner, I met the PG group at Barbetta's, a handsome, classy place on Restaurant Row. This year's group wasn't big, just 30-some, but they were lively. And Barbetta's started us off on a very high note.
I can't say quite so much for the group's first show, "West Side Story," which is richly lyrical and makes novel use of Spanish for added authenticity, but lacks the gut-wrenching feel of danger I expected. Maybe it's just too familiar -- this is another show I first encountered in college, when the first national tour came through Boston. But even the most familiar tragedy should still be able to stir you deeply.
Our group was treated to a post-show chat with several cast members, arranged for us by new CMU grad ('08) Tro Shaw, a wiry, plaintive Anybodys in the show. With her was George Akram, a very handsome, laid back Bernardo, who talked about the different Hispanic cultures represented in the cast. Tro remembers getting bitten by the show biz bug at age 4, in a production of "Romeo and Juliet." She was also a gymnast at A.C.T. in San Francisco -- as you can see in her lean, nimble movement.
With them was Matt Hydzik, the standby for Tony, a Hopewell native who won a 1999 Kelly Award in Quaker Valley's "Fiddler on the Roof" (and shared a Shakespeare Monologue and Scene award that year with Gillian Jacob), then went to Penn State. Matt recalled studying with Mario Melodia at the Edgeworth Club and the arts program at Sewickley Academy, and studying also with Ingrid Sonnichsen and Jill Wadsworth. Others in the show with Pittsburgh connections whom we didn't get to meet include Mike Cannon who plays Snowboy and Eric Hatch (Point Park) as Big Deal.
There's also a small Pittsburgh connection for Argentinian Josefina Scaglione, who spent a couple of months in her mid-teens in a summer dance program at Point Park. ..... Thanks to Pittsburgh playwright Jim McManus, a friend of Tro's, who first put me in touch with her.
Did I end up that night at the Sardi's bar for a post-post-show drink? Maybe, maybe not, but I did that more nights than not. Part of the attraction is watching a real pro mixologist (that;'s him in the picture) perform his efficient wonders.
Thursday, May 7
I spent a good part of the day filing my story about Wednesday's Tony nominees press mele -- an OnStage Journal entry far more timely than this one. Then my wife Mary arrived -- that's her, noting Eugene O'Neill's plaque on a Times Square shop.
The PG group went to "Billy Elliot," but since I've seen in several times in both London and New York, I went with Mary to "Living Together," technically the second play of "The Normal Conquests" trilogy, though we saw it first. All three plays intertwine so tightly that it's hard to know where to begin or end, and as soon as you've seen one play you'd like to go back and re-see another to get an extra degree of interlocking detail you missed the first time around. I even think you can tell who's seen which other part when they laugh for seemingly no reason -- it's because they just remembered what scene in another play a character has just entered from or is exiting to.
Friday, May 8
This day I had a treat I look forward to in NYC -- picking up Ella and Alice, our grandchildren, at their West Village school and wandering home with them through Greenwich Village. We usually manage to hit an ice cream or pastry shop, and this time we started out by playing hide and seek in a gorgeous little garden parklet near their school. Then we all went out to supper, celebrating Ella's 11th birthday -- amazing that she's so old.
I missed the PG group's morning walking tour, which is always of a different, interesting corner of NY, and, to increase my regret, always with a really good lunch to follow. 
At night, I went with the PG group to "Guys and Dolls," for which my expectations weren't especially high. As so often happens, the result was that I had an unexpectedly good time. Of course, "Gs and Ds" is one of the greatest musical comedies of all time. It's also the only one containing references to my two homes, Pittsburgh and Rhode Island.
Mary went instead to August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," which I'd already seen twice, once with some students in my August Wilson course at Pitt and then for the opening. I'm still hoping to get back to see it a third time before it closes its limited run -- though if it does well at the Tonys, I suppose it might extend. (By the way, if you go, cough up a buck for the Lincoln Center Theatre Review in the lobby -- it includes several interesting essays relating to Wilson, plus one by me.)
Saturday, May 9
This was the ShowPlane day that traditionally starts early, in a hotel meeting room, with coffee and discussion of what we've seen so far. There was a nice turnout, which always surprises me, since I'd probably sleep in if I were in their place. As always, the group had plenty to say about what they'd seen -- it always stretches me to try to stay a few steps ahead and have something to tell them, because they always have plenty to tell me. 
Everyone headed in different directions for late morning shopping and then individually-chosen matinees. Some probably preferred even more shopping to a matinee. But Mary and I did more theater in spades, heading first to the 11:30 performance of "Table Manners," supposedly the first part of the "Norman Conquests" trilogy.
There we ran into Mark Rylance and his wife, musician Claire van Kampen, who were settling in to see the one-day marathon of all three parts of the trilogy. In case you've forgotten, we know Mark in Pittsburgh from his pajama-clad Hamlet at the Public Theater back in 1991, then from his visits in 2003 and 2005 with the Shakespeare's Globe company from London in the all-male, original practices versions of "Twelfth Night" and "Measure for Measure."
Mark was at "Norman" partly to see the work of director Matthew Warchus, who has directed him several times, most notably (to me) in "Life X 3" (London) and "Boeing Boeing" (Broadway). Warchus also directed "God of Carnage," which means he's competing with himself for a Tony. Mark told us he's been offered a Broadway production of "La Bete," that modern Moliere-like comedy with the longest opening comic monologue in the history of the universe (Pittsburgh saw it done at Playhouse Rep by the brilliant Heath Lamberts).
The moment "Tables Manners" ended, even before the curtain call (and I love curtain calls), Mary and I were out the door sprinting five or six blocks to Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage," a really slick, satisfying comedy -- almost embarrassingly so, because we find ourselves laughing so hard at the self-satisfied upper-middle-class. I'm already casting the Pittsburgh production in my anticipatory imagination.
"Carnage" is short, so we had time for a quick trip to the Drama Book Shop on 40thSt., an essential part of every New York visit, and then a visit and drink with Jeffrey Eric Jenkins and wife Vivian. Jeffrey's been a friend ever since we took graduate theater classes together at CMU in the early ‘80s (he got a degree, I became a theater critic); we've shared leadership roles in the American Theatre Critics Association; and now I get to torment him by being late with my essays for the "Best Plays Theater Yearbook" he edits.
Then Mary was off to feast on the two fine actresses in "Mary Stuart," while I joined the PG group for "9 to 5," an entertaining musical version of the 1979 movie comedy. Afterward, the group met with CMU '04 grad Megan Hilty, who plays Doralee, the Dolly Parton role, and Mark Myars, dance captain and swing. That's Megan and me in the picture, up above -- note the ghost light on the empty stage behind me. (Other Pittsburghers in the cast are Gaelen Gilliland, Fox Chapel High School '92, and Neil Haskell, Point Park.) The cast was high on just having recorded Parton's score.
That night Mary and I definitely did repair to Sardi's, along with Gwen Orel, former PG critic Phil Stephenson and his fiancee Miriam Walden (that's them just above, with me -- why do I look so tired?) and the PG's Sharon Eberson and Maria Sciullo. And who should we run into but Simon Jones, who we'd see the next day in "Blithe Spirit." Together, we all kept that mixologist busy.
Sunday, May 10
The PG group left this morning. Or so I assume -- I was still asleep. 
Mary and I finally got started in time for an all-too-short visit to MOMA and its shops, before "Blithe Spirit," a perfectly light and light-hearted end to a week of theater.
We visited Simon backstage afterward, then watched him sign some autographs and took him across the street to his local, which is of course Sardi's, where he has the added pleasure of visiting his hair, memorialized in his caricature, which dates from 1986.
So we were pleasantly sloshed when we finally grabbed a cab to head for LaGuardia and return to the real world.
Captions, from the top:
1. Posters in Shubert Alley.
2. Alice (not her real nose).
3. Ella (not her real face).
4. Sardi's mixologist, at the upstairs bar with the view of Shubert Alley.
5. Mary and the Eugene O'Neill plaque in Times Square.
6. Christine Ebersole (who plays the ghostly Elvira) and SImon Jones (the pragmatic Dr. Bradman), backstage at "Blithe Spirit."
7. Ella's birthday dinner.
8. Phil Stephenson, Miriam Walden and a tired CR, back at Sardi's!
9. Simon Jones (right) visits his hair (left) amid the caricatures of fame at Sardi's.
Posted
Jun 01 2009, 03:34 AM
by
Christopher Rawson