Category: Theater

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History Politics Theater Women

Gloria: A Life Review

My friend Chris and I went to see Gloria: A Life, the Gloria Steinem one-woman show. The play is closing in New York City at the end of this month, but it will be traveling to other parts of the country that Gloria changed during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have met Gloria at dinner parties in the Hamptons, where I found her to be soft-spoken and not bra-burning at all. And, while I’m 66 and should have had her as the fabric of my life as an influencer, I spent the better part of the ’70s at the University of Nebraska, where Nixon’s resignation was on page two. I’m sort of not exaggerating. So, she wasn’t on my ‘friends’ list.

Gloria: A Life takes us through the trajectory of not only Gloria’s personal journey through her journalism career, harassment, and enlightenment to the plight of women and the opportunity to change the outcome for the next generations, but also the sisterhood of the women of color, who really started it all and embraced her as their token white woman. Who knew? History unfolds before us — not the “war to war” history that men have always injected into our education, but rather cultural history and women’s history … and it’s Glori-ous! I thank her and those less well known for their commitment.

Abortion and women’s rights over their own body take on a predominant role in the unfolding of the journey we are still navigating. The play’s actors pointed out that each of us in the room had our own experience around “Glorias.” This was true for most of us in attendance, as the majority of the audience members were women, and more than half were over, let’s say, 50.

During my days at the University of Nebraska, I dined each night with my sorority sisters in the Pi Phi dining room. Every now and then, a hat was passed, and everyone put in whatever money she could spare. No one knew whom it was for, but abortion was only available in New York City in the early ’70s, and the hat’s bounty would pay for the flight for one of our “sisters” to fly there and have the procedure performed. By herself. Alone. Because that was all that was available to us. I put in whatever I could with pride and commitment to her right to choose. I can honestly say that in the three years I called that sorority house “home,” I don’t recall anyone having left school to have a baby (which women would have had to do back then), but I do remember a number of “pass the hat” moments. Yes, we all have our own experiences of that time in history, and my only regret is that it wouldn’t be for years that I would join the movement to commit to my own gender’s growth and equality.

I never subscribed to Ms. magazine. Never read it. Thought burning a bra was silly (and still do). But I also didn’t realize what the play so gently but powerfully lays out: how male dominance over our lives and our views of ourselves has been nurtured since birth. And I didn’t have a prayer of knowing how to silence that as I charted my own course. A man close to me said to me on the phone yesterday, “You have no trouble speaking truth to power.” That may be true now, but throughout most of my adult life, I was clueless as to what that truth was. Gloria and her gang of girls helped each other out of the darkness of their indoctrination. And being present in the play helped me see how I gained clarity as well.

IMG_4395For me, one of the best parts of the night was a group of six young girls, maybe 8 or 9 years old, who were sitting across from me in the top row. They loved the play. They hung on every word, and when two of them spoke in the ‘chat with the audience’ afterward, they were articulate and cool, but more importantly, excited about the future they could fashion. One of them said of another: “She’s the president of our group; I’m like the vice president.” This was cause for some concern, because one of the moments of clarity in the play was when the light bulb went on that we women need to participate with equal input in roundtable discussions. This stands in stark contrast to the pyramid paradigm established by men, in which a king sits at the top of those who are climbing over one another to get to his position. Like a board room table that always has a seat of power. Not all men. And especially not those in the audience. One man’s daughter told us her father had asked her to see the play with him.

Thank you, Gloria, for all that you’ve done. Thank you to the girls in the top row for all you will do. It was nice, in this moment of our history when I have little hope, to leave feeling like maybe there is hope, after all. Women are the answer. How cool is that?

Categories
Books Theater

To Kill a Mockingbird Review: Aaron Sorkin Brings Us Inside the Finch Inner Circle

101032-11Who knew Atticus had a sense of humor? Who knew Calpurnia had such insight, wisdom, and spunk? Who knew Scout had any uncertainty about her dad? The way I interpreted Scout from reading the book and watching the 1962 film is that she was observing without much insight. I never thought of Atticus as witty. Calpurnia? I never thought of her at all. But Aaron Sorkin must have seen those qualities, and he has brought them to us all in his play opening on Broadway next week: “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Harper Lee introduced us to the Finch family and their neighbors and friends decades ago, but Aaron Sorkin brings us into the family’s inner circle. And we are all the better for it.

There is so much hype around whether or not my beloved Sorkin (yes, I am a Sorkinite, and proud of it!) will change the book’s characters to the point of no return — and how to tar and feather him if he does. It gave me pause for concern. Will he buckle under the pressure? Change whatever limb he’d gone out on in his writing of this play around my very favorite book in the world, and of course, one of the best films of the twentieth century? As he said, “It was a suicide mission.” I had no reason to fear. He held nothing back. He, like the rest of us who are aging, might be at the point where he doesn’t care anymore what we think, and the play is all the better for it.

Sorkin gave us additional layers into each of the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird” without changing any of the core values and attributes we already know so well. Atticus has a sense of humor. Scout has a wisdom while she reminisces that couldn’t have be shown up in the book because she was still a child. Tom Robinson is more insightful than Atticus and has a better understanding of the community in which they live. And Calpurnia — who might be the most important person to us in this production — has a relationship with Atticus, not just the children. This relationship gives us the doorway to the change Atticus must make in the way he looks at his neighbors and friends. Without her, he slides by. It’s almost like Harper Lee’s book introduced them all to us, and Sorkin made us part of their inner circle. Part of their family.

It’s not easy to give Atticus humor. But without it, there is no way any of our souls could withstand the devastating realities of life back then, which we now know isn’t as far away as we thought. His humor is never at anyone’s expense. It’s sometimes above their pay grade, but it’s not above ours, and it makes the message palatable. He changes and grows in a way that he seemed too weary to do in the book or film.

Jeff Daniels as Atticus? Don’t be mad at me, Aaron, because I have heard your interviews about how there was no one else to play the role, but I think you are wrong there. One of my fellow attendees said, “He spoke the words that showed he changed from someone who believed everyone is good and has a point of view that should be considered to believing that there are some people not worth respecting, but I didn’t see it in him. They seemed like empty words.” While I recognize that Gregory Peck is a hard act to follow — just in his physical demeanor alone — it was more than that. Jeff Daniels didn’t change. And, his timing is not on point, except for in his comedic messaging, and since every other cast member’s timing is perfectly synchronized like one of the great Barry Manilow tunes, it really stands out, and not in a good way. He doesn’t walk the stage well. And, the stage, which I found somewhat interruptive, is changing in front of us and he looks like that guy who is from Wall Street and has no business helping the movers move anything. If he is supposed to play it that way, they need to change it. It’s distracting. I don’t think Jeff Daniels, who I feel was genius in “The Newsroom” is my Atticus. Sorry, Aaron. I’m not sure who should have played the role, but I will keep you posted as I marinate in it.

The starring role is Scout, played by Celia Keenan-Bolger, whose timing is impeccable. She is onstage throughout the play and never once looks like she doesn’t totally belong where she is standing. Her ability to be childlike and yet wisely grown up is uncanny. And her comedic timing? Spot on, girlfriend. She has award nominations under her belt, but the Tony nod that will surely come her way is well deserved.

The other stand out is LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s Calpurnia, who doesn’t allow her Mammy presence from “Gone With the Wind” to make her nonthreatening, but instead lets it be the adjective in the sentence of her role in society in the time to which we’ve been transported. She is Atticus’ teacher and conscience, and I wish we all had someone like her in our lives.

When the curtain came down on the first half of the play, I thought I’d just seen the best first act of a play ever. I can’t say the second act is there yet. I think, for example, that there were three times at the end of the play (and we were 2.5 hours in, so it was time) when I thought Sorkin had made his point and the curtain would drop, only to transition to another scene. I think this can be fixed. Sometimes more is just more, and the second act has a bit more in it than we need. And the court scenes? Aaron, you have to go back to “The Supremes” episode of “The West Wing.” Don’t gently layer in Tom’s bad arm. The movie, in which we see it through the physical act of Atticus throwing him something he can’t catch, was important. It was ACTION, and we need action in the court — not the physical attacks that simply broke up the dialog but didn’t seem real.

This play will be around for a long, long time. It will sit on the shelves with “A Few Good Men,” “The West Wing,” and “Moneyball,” which I think are Sorkin’s best. It will also sit inside everyone who sees it, as a warning that what you want to be reality is not necessarily reality, and the danger in thinking that it is can be catastrophic. Tom would have lived if Atticus’ desire to see the glass as half full wasn’t so cemented in his desire for his community. Harper Lee forgot to tell us that, and Sorkin added it to remind us of the hubris of thinking we can walk in anyone else’s shoes. By the way, Sorkin’s ability to give us this is what makes his play elevate Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” to a whole different level.

Thank you, Aaron Sorkin, yet again.

Categories
Personal Essays Theater

My Ballet Recital

imagesWe all have them, those stories from our childhood that are laugh-out-loud funny today, but at the time were like Greek tragedies that we thought would destroy our selves forever. I was having lunch with a friend the other day, and I started to tell her how much I admired her grace in getting out of things. How she could quietly resign from a women’s group of which we were both members. We both wanted to get out of this group, but she just faded and disappeared while I went out like a bull in a china shop, leaving repercussions that I’m still experiencing. Then it hit me.

“This is so like my ballet recital when I was five.”

“What?”

“Well, there I was planted on the stage all curled up ready to unfold as the flower I was always meant to be. I was supposed to stay in first position and rise up with my arms unfolding gracefully as the bumblebees danced around the stage and the trees swayed to the music. Unfortunately, as I rose in my glory, I inadvertently nudged the passing bumblebee who stumbled into the swaying tree, who started crying, at which point the bumblebee pointed at me and yelled that it was all my fault — even though I had stayed planted in that first position, stoically taking the charge as if I were one of the Los Angeles Lakers’ defensive guards. I swear my feet never moved. Do you believe me?”

She nodded, fully aware that I still needed to have my traumatic experience validated fifty-five years later.

“Well, everything unraveled and the long and short of it was that my teacher told my parents — with me standing right there, mind you — that she thought I should move from ballet to tap, where my natural tendency toward passionate movement would serve me better. Tap? You can’t be serious? Who wanted to do tap? That was the end of my ballet career, but do not think for one moment that it hasn’t been with me every day since. Don’t think that I don’t plunge when others float into a room. When I walked down the aisle on my dad’s arm, may he rest in peace, don’t think that I wasn’t that flower struggling to make sure I didn’t trip on my dress, which was not even floor length lest I be distracted. And may I also say, now that we are talking about it, the tree hated me from the get-go and cried to get me in trouble. I’m sure of it. Whatever.”

She then told me her story.

She was in a dance class, and her number was a Mexican dance that was to take place around a piñata. They practiced the dance, which ended with them breaking open the piñata and continuing to dance around it after its contents had fallen to the floor. But they practiced without the candy in it, and so when they actually broke it open during the performance (in front of probably thousands of people), instead of continuing to dance around the candy on the ground, she immediately stopped and started to gather candy (perhaps the word scramble might better describe her action, but I want to be supportive here, since she was very kind about my trauma), and the dance number ceased to be what it was supposed to be and became a free-for-all as all the kids scrambled to get their share of the candy. When the teacher talked to her about it, she earnestly explained that it made no sense to continue dancing around after the candy was on the ground; no self-respecting Mexican child would do that. But the teacher just didn’t get it. I got it, though. It made perfect sense to me.

I felt as though sharing my story had purged the pain of the past, and I hope my friend felt the same way. I do not believe her story was quite as painful as mine because she wasn’t thrown out of the class afterward, but I think it’s best not to compare yourself to your friends. Nothing good comes of it. We must share our experiences, learn from them, and remember that the rearview mirror is smaller than the windshield for a reason. Look forward, Christine. I may even take a ballet class next winter after my hip replacement. You never know.

Categories
Music Theater

Phantom of the Opera: A Love Story

Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation.
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.
Silently the senses abandon their defences…

Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendour.
Grasp it, sense it tremulous and tender.
Turn your face away from the garish light of day,
Turn your face away from cold, unfeeling light –
and listen to the music of the night…

And I was hooked. It was 1986, twenty-five years ago, and I was in London, right after having given birth to the fabulous Sarah, and from the moment the chandelier dropped right over my head, I started watching my inner demons meeting my loving self. The Phantom of the Opera was not just the greatest musical I’d ever seen live, but the story—that tormented but loving man struggling with his best and worst selves—was about the best and worst parts of us all. I loved him.

25th Anniversary of Phantom of the Opera

I bought the music. I sang the words. I sang them in the dead of night when I was feeling dark, while the rest of the world slumbered. I saw the play again on Broadway. And then I introduced Sarah to it when she was six, and then I saw it again with one of my best friend’s children, Sabrina, and … and … and…

Anyone who came to visit went to Phantom, and I usually went with them. In other words, I have no idea how many times I’ve seen it.

There are a few things, however, that I must confess. I find Andrew Lloyd Weber to be very strange. He’s a cross between Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory and some kind of weirdo who has wet lips and darting eyes because he is hiding something. But as with all amazing storytellers, you sense that he has good and bad inside him, and he lets it out through his music… in the dark of night. Sharing it with you personally would be too dangerous, so he shares it with millions in the dark so he doesn’t have to look you in the eye. I think some other people are like that too. Martha Stewart, for example, whom I have met. I find her socially awkward, and I think she fed culinary masterpieces to her guests in stunning settings as a way of saying, “Please like me because I don’t know how to talk to you.”

Then there is my interpretation of the love story. When this perfect play came out, the talk among the dinner party circuit in New York and London always seemed to center around the love between Christine and the Phantom, or Christine and Raoul. And I certainly knew that Christine’s love for the Phantom was the love gift Weber gave us. But I took it a step further in my own mind. It seemed to me that the story was also about learning to love yourself, even when your thoughts or deeds might not be so very loveable. Christine loved him; she saw that his cruelty was the result of wrongs done to him, and I hope that when he disappeared into that chair at the end, he had learned to love himself. She had shown him that he was loveable and I hope his self-loathing, which was as painful for me to watch as his demise, disappeared with him.

But back to the love.

We never said
our love
was evergreen,
or as unchanging
as the sea –

but if
you can still
remember
stop and think
of me . . .

Think of all the things
we’ve shared and seen –
don’t think about the things
which might have been . . .

Think of me,
think of me waking,
silent and
resigned.

Imagine me,
trying too hard
to put you
from my mind.

Recall those days
look back
on all those times,
think of the things
we’ll never do –

There will
never be
a day, when
I won’t think
of you . .

So, thus ends the twenty-five year reign of Phantom of the Opera, and all it’s meant to the more than 200,000,000 people who saw it. Think about the billions of times someone has played Think of Me or The Music of the Night and felt just a little bit better. I know that hundreds of years from now, they will still play the music of the night, or watch the PBS production I watched last night, and they will know that a great man understood love, the dark side, trust, and melody. Great, great melody.

Categories
Movies & TV Theater

Movies and Popcorn, No Butter

I love movies, and I love blogging. In the few years I’ve been writing Freesia Lane, I’ve reviewed many movies and TV shows. When HBO and other distributors started to send me movies and invited me to blog about them, I thought, Wow, I’m a reviewer. Ok, not so much, but I do love movies, and I really do love thinking during and after about what made a movie work or not work from my very limited  female dreamer’s point of view.

Then everyone started making their ridiculous Bucket Lists. I thought the movie Bucket List was ok, but it never occurred to me as I watched the film that the result of Jack’s little trip around the world fulfilling his Bucket List would be that my fellow Americans would come to believe they all had to make their own. I do follow the crowd, however, so I tried—really tried—to make my Bucket List… and came up with a bucket half full (notice I didn’t say half empty.) You simply can’t put down See a movie a week on your life’s Bucket List. It’s not seemly. But Become a successful movie reviewer seemed lofty enough. So here we are.

There is something about gathering popcorn (no butter) and a diet coke, sitting in a theater waiting for the lights to go down, and then getting lost in the popcorn and the plot and the performances. Sometimes within the first five minutes of the film you can pick out the character who is going to speak to you during the movie, or be you during the movie, or teach you something extraordinary during the movie. I love it.

So, here is my new blog, Movie and Popcorn, No Butter. I hope you will comment, debate, decry, and confirm everything I write. Please sign up to get it in your e-mail. And thanks for your support of Freesia Lane and Movies and Popcorn, No Butter. I am eternally grateful.

Christine

Categories
Movies & TV Music Personal Essays Theater

Kennedy Center Honors: Bruce Steals the Show

I love watching the Kennedy Center Honors each year. For those of you who don’t follow TV the way I do, it’s the repeat of the Kennedy Center’s Achievement Awards, where they award those in the arts for their lifetime contribution to American culture through their craft. This year celebrated Robert De Niro (film), Mel Brooks (comedy), Dave Brubeck (jazz), Bruce Springsteen (music), and Grace Brumbry (opera). It was Bruces’s tribute that stole the show.

Jon Stewart (tell me he wrote it himself) gave one of the most moving and inspirational introductions that I’ve ever heard. He started off funny, as are all amazing introductions, and talked about how perhaps Dylan and James Brown had a baby and it was Bruce. And, then he went into his point that he didn’t really understand Bruce’s music until he began to yearn. Yearn is one of my favorite words. I think the world is bland without it.

He went on, “I didn’t understand Springsteen until I began to question the things I was making and doing in my own life. It wasn’t about the things. It was about stories of lives that could be changed. I was working in a bar in NJ and every night when I closed the bar, I got in my car and listened to Bruce and everything changed. I didn’t think or feel like a loser. When you listen to Bruce’s music, you aren’t a loser, you are a character in an epic poem about losers. That is the power of Bruce Springsteen.”

“It’s that whenever I see Bruce do anything, he empties the tank. Every time. And the beautiful thing about this man is he empties that tank for his family, his art, his audience and he empties it for his country. And we, who are on the receiving end of that beautiful gift, are ourselves rejuvenated, if not redeemed. And, I thank you.”

Then the bio tape started to roll and the message was even stronger. They quoted Bruce. “The song writers who inspired me were searchers,” he said. “They spoke about our lives and our dreams. I searched for stories about the people I knew.”

Then the lyrics started.

“The screen door slammed. Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays. Ray Orbison singin’ for the lonely. Hey that’s me and I want you only. Don’t turn me on again, I just can’t face myself alone again.”

Then back to Stewart’s voice-over. “He wanted his songs to bear witness to the hardships and heroism of everyday life.”

Then they showed Bruce singing. On stage, sweating his passion vocally like a pig before the slaughter, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last year during the inauguration with a black chorus behind him in red robes that seemed to make his flame stronger. At the big football thing in January – oh yeah – the Superbowl, where he led three or four generations in a half-time show that was much stronger than a bared breast. And, I realized that Jon Stewart was right. He empties his tank every time he plays. And, he has played through so many moments of our lives.

Voice-over again. “I try and meld my voice to the story I’m telling. And, when a moment comes in our common history, I want to be there,” Bruce said.

Then the music again, “The dream of life comes to me, and like a catfish dancing on the end of my line, come on up for the rising. Come on up. lay your hands in mine.”

“Bruce doesn’t sing, he testifies.”

“I’m in the middle of a long conversation with my audience. It will be a long conversation for both of us by the time it’s done.”

The stage was then graced with the Viet Nam vet in a wheel chair who wrote Born on the Fourth of July. He told the story of being invited by Bruce to a concert where he played a song for him, and he said he felt proud again to be an American. It was a moment to be sure.

And, then his peers came out and sang. The last song was by Sting and everyone in the Center stood and sang and moved slowly, and with a cool unity that only happens once in a decade. Mel Brook’s wife, among others, was crying. Stars were moving and singing and forgetting the cameras.

And, when it was all over, Bruce stood and patted his fist twice to his heart, and I really got, for the first time, that way of showing the love. And, his friends on the stage who had just done their very very best to honor him with their talent and his music, they also patted their hearts twice right back to him.

What a gift to watch. And, Luke (my dog) and I played it over and over again and moved to the music and sang his words, and I am grateful for yet another moment in my life filled and enriched by the music.








Categories
Movies & TV Theater

The 2009 Tony Awards

Watching The Tony Awards tonight, I can’t help but feel so very grateful that despite the fact that our economy has tanked and we are all watching every penny, the theater persists. It turns out that this was Broadway’s most successful year ever. Perhaps we need to go to the theater now more than ever, and we are doing this form of entertainment rather than a week away somewhere south. Whatever the reason, it makes me fell good that Broadway is still on the roadway. Imagine if the lights went out as they did during the great depression.

The singing and dancing was awesome. Click here to see the opening number which you will watch ten times, I promise. Turns out that 30% of The Tony Awards this year was made up of song and dance numbers. Young Billy Elliot painfully danced his grief right through my heart at the news of his mother’s death. The frenetic, verging on violent, dancing in the West Side Story number and the nostalgic number from the sixties from the Jersey Boys will make you stand up to move to the groove. The long-hair rendition of “Hair” from Hair took me back to 1970 when my aunt and uncle took me to see the play in Boston when I went east to look at colleges with them. Good times. All of it made the evening a calorie-free buffet of great music, song and dance. 

The best was three twelve year old boys getting the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. They stood up there thanking their moms and dads, their sisters and brothers, and best of all, their ballet dance teachers. And, they had the strength to tell other boys not to be afraid to love to dance. What a night. 

Nothing is perfect however. I could have done without Marcia Gay Harden’s self-involved acceptance speech (same as when she won the Academy Award) clearly practiced over and over again in front of her adoring husband on the way to the awards. I do have tickets for God of Carnage this month and look forward to seeing her scripted rather than on her own. I think she’s better that way. And, Liza honey, it needs to be said. You need to retire in your apartment filled with large pictures of yourself and call it a decade. I hate to be cruel, but.

Lastly, I have a really good idea. We are all trying to save money, cut back on time wasting TV watching, and jet fuel usage right?Let’s combine The Tony’s (or should it be Tonies, which doesn’t look anywhere near as cool) and The Academy Awards. The Tony people can bring the dance numbers and songs to the show, and the movie actors can do all the acceptance speeches, except for those by children under twenty. We can hold it in Omaha, Nebraska half way between New York City and Los Angeles. It will save money (always a good thing), and I’m sure it’s good for the carbon footprint, so it’s greener too! Gad, it’s a great idea.

Who do I call? 

Categories
Theater

West Side Story Review

I saw West Side Story, the original movie, with my father when I was under ten. It’s the first movie I remember seeing. So, it made sense that I would take my daughter, now 22, to the revival of the play when it opened a month or so ago.

I have been singing the songs ever since. Maria, Tonight. God, it doesn’t get any better. They could never lift the curtain, play the songs and everyone could close their eyes and see this play. No one writes music like that anymore.

That said, we have to question some of the casting decisions this time around.

For example, Maria. This new Maria is not Latino at all. With the Latino population growing to new heights (isn’t it 20 percent or something?), are you telling me they couldn’t find a true Latino Maria? I understood Natalie Wood those oh so many years ago, but I thought we’d made more progress than this. Besides, this Maria would never have the guts to run off with anyone. Trust me.

I’m not sure how to discuss Tony and be politically correct at the same time. Tony was not strong enough. Tony was the techie guy behind a computer screen, not the Tony who could fly up a flight of fire stairs on the outside of a brick apartment building above 124th street like Spiderman. My wrists are twice the size of his. There is no room for a Metro Tony in West Side Story.

Anita steals the show. She is amazing. She dances with a fever of passion that takes all the anger that must well up inside someone who has no options but a strong sense of self and has to dance before she explodes. She sings well, and she cares about the part. You don’t realize it until afterward, but there are those that love to do stage acting and those that do stage acting but don’t love it, and she is the former.

They did some of the scenes in Spanish. Even I Feel Pretty was in Spanish. I get it, and I promise I believe that ‘Give me your tired, your poor’ should include everyone, but it reminded me in the middle of I Feel Pretty that I’m not one of those Americans who feels that language in America should be anything other than English. Shoot me. And, I didn’t want my brain to go to political issues in the middle of West Side Story when the play is already fraught with the social injustice called our history which brings on guilt for me anyway. Moving right along.

The sets, the sets. The set for the fight taking place on the pavement under the underpass is phenomenal. How does one figure that out? Whoever designed it really brought the place – the walls, the darkness, the hopelessness – to us in the theatre. I thank you. It made all the difference.

Going to a play in today’s world calls for more than a few hours of entertainment. There are chores after the play ends.

I thought a bit about Sondheim and Bernstein during the play. I wonder at Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story. His finest hour? I read somewhere before I went that Berstein had been surprised at West Side Story’s success. “Who would want to see a show in which the first act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage?” Isn’t that amazing? My how times have changed. I then found out that there is a book with lectures he gave at Harvard where he discusses the play.  (How did I live without the Internet? I don’t remember going to the library.) The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) (Paperback). I downloaded it to my Kindle. (LOVE my Kindle)

Then I went to ITunes and downloaded a bunch of the songs from the movie which I will surely make into a CD for Sarah at my earliest convenience (Translation: It will never happen).

Then I went back to the Internet and found some articles about the original play, cast etc.

I think I do these additional things after a play – at least one that I liked – (I did nothing after Wicked other than be grateful I never dressed as Glenda for Halloween and preferred to be grapes instead) to extend the high and possibly to amortize the cost of the play which was absolutely absurd.

Also, I can’t say it was an indicator of the financial crisis receding or not, but it was packed. Standing room only.

Go and see it. Do.