T Minus 83 Days: The Ups and Downs of Old Broadway

We got back to the Radisson in New Jersey pretty late (we took a detour without the proper directions at the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City and ended up spending an extra hour on the road lost in Queens and Brooklyn while coming back from Hatfield, sigh!) We had decided that we would spend Saturday in the city going to a museum and seeing one more Broadway show. Shortening our New York trip by one day meant missing an evening with my brother and his family and also one less day in New York to explore, but we felt the extra day at the Archives had been well worth it.

Saturday was beautiful. Unlike the previous week, the temperature was balmy, and the sun was out. We drove in to Manhattan, parked, and took a cab ride (Barb’s first in Manhattan) to the American Museum of Natural History. I hadn’t been there in many years and it was as exciting to me as it was to Barb. Many of the exhibits have been renovated since the last time I recall being there (over 10 years). We started out with the Hayden Planetarium’s Cosmic Collisions presentation. We walked through an exhibit which demonstrated the scale of the universe from 10 to the 26 power down to 10 to the -26th power (the size of the universe down to the size of a quark). All of this was very sobering to put our lives into a cosmic reference.

Then we went through the main attraction at the AMNH, the dinosaur exhibits. AMNH still has the largest displayed collection of dinorsaur fossils in America and it is awe-inspiring. Standing beside a complete skeleton of a T-Rex or an Allosaurus is hard to describe. Yes, we have all seen it in Jurassic Park and in photos, but standing beside the actual fossils is a completely different experience.

We had a light lunch and then finished our explorations by going through an exhibit which illustrated all of the known species of plant and animal life on earth. Another thought-provoking experience.

We decided to walk from the Museum to Columbus Circle to shop there. We bought some stuff to take home there and then headed to Times Square to have dinner and get tickets for our final Broadway show of the trip. We had a delightful dinner at Le Pigalle (we sat next to a couple of young ladies, one of whom told us she lives in Chicago but works in San Jose two days a week as a consultant and she is now looking forward to seeing HAiR in July or August!) and headed over to TKTS. Once again, Avenue Q was gone, so we decided to see the last Kander and Ebb musical that will ever appear on Broadway, Curtains. And boy, do we wish we had chosen differently ;-(

It was a sad experience to see this show. First, I had a real gripe with TKTS. When we saw the Drowsy Chaperone, we were offered orchestra tickets which normally sell for $110 for $55 each. This is the classic “50%” discount that I remember from TKTS a long time ago. When we asked about tickets for Curtains, they only had mezzanine tickets, which normally sell for $70. So I assumed we would pay $35. However, when they asked for payment in cash, they wanted $115 which is only about 25% off. I questioned them and they said it was 50% off the top ticket price regardless of the ticket you get. So someone getting orchestra seats really gets the 50% discount, but someone who can only get mezzanine seats is getting a much lower discount. I complained a bit, but I realized Barb was frustrated with my behavior (and rightly so), so I went ahead and purchased the tickets, despite feeling a bit ripped off (if I had known what we were about to see, I would have been MUCH more upset!)

We barely got to the theater and nestled ourselves into the 16th row in the mezzanine (definitely “nose-bleed country”). There was, of course, no legroom. However all of these inconveniences were going to pale by in comparison to the show that was just about to start.

I will cut to the chase. I have seen over 50 shows on Broadway in my life, including such clunkers as Carrie and Superman, and without any doubt, this show was the worst I have ever seen on Broadway. It resembled a bad community theater production, and wasted the normally incredible talents of such actors as Karen Ziemba, Debra Monk and David Hyde Pierce. In some ways like Drowsy Chaperone (noted in an earlier blog post during our first week in New York as excellent), it is a musical within a musical, this time a kind of “Columbo meets Crazy For You”, but really really bad.

What is saddest about this is that Kander and Ebb are one of my favorite Broadway composing/writing teams. Of course, everyone loves Cabaret and Chicago, but they have done other incredible shows like Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Woman of the Year, Zorba, and my favorite Kander/Ebb flop (not, in my opinion, because the show was bad, but because of awful timing coming out at the end of the "sung-through" musical period), Steel Pier. Every one of these shows, even the ones with the least commercial appeal, were at least reasonable attempts at good theater and good Broadway music. This one fails on all points.

It is cheesy, relying on cheap jokes, bad puns, wheezy “western” choreography. They took one of the best songs in the show, A Tough Act To Follow, which is a classic Kander/Ebb gentle ballad and hopped it up into an awful imitation Busby Berkeley number, complete with lighted stairs, blowing fog and a kick-line.

And then, to add insult to injury, the audience gave the show a standing ovation, doing what audiences normally seem to do these days, especially on Saturday nights. I guess if you pay $110 for a ticket (or even $55!) you have to convince yourself that you didn’t waste the money. Well, sorry folks, this time you did.

I expect Fred Ebb is turning over in his grave every night the curtain goes up on this monstrosity. It is clear this was done for the money, and like Vera says in “Chicago”, “Sorry, suckers!” It is a shame that the Kander/Ebb legacy, which was, for the most part, almost universally brilliant, has to end on this tarnished note.

We drove back to New Jersey wishing that somehow we could have ended this incredible trip on a better note. Barb tried to laugh it off… “Well, we batted .500 this trip!” And indeed, it doesn’t do anything to dampen our enthusiasm for our upcoming production of HAiR, or diminish the wonderful accomplishments and discoveries we had at the Archives. We just wish it could have been better. Sigh.