Knock Knock - SPRING BREAK

A couple of us took or are taking a spring break from Knock Knock.  JArc (Nancy) is taking her sword and armor to Italy for a week.  

Mine was shorter; just last Thursday through Sunday but as there was a theatrical theme I’ll include some comments here.   Some months ago we decided that I needed to see WarHorse on stage in NYC and this was the weekend.  My wife had seen it with our daughter a year ago and hadn’t stopped talking about it since.  And as anyone who knows Connie knows, she doesn’t throw praise around where it’s not warranted.

She did not exaggerate.  I encourage anyone who can get there to make a point to see this magnificent play and see it in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  It uses every aspect of theater imaginable.  Puppets (massive), lights, sound, music, masks, effects, on and on and on…and wound around a truly emotional story.  I could fill page after page after page of this blog writing about this play but it wouldn’t do it justice.  See it.

Other bits…

It was a beautiful Spring day in NYC as we drove in Friday evening and as we spent about an hour getting to and through the Lincoln Tunnel we had plenty of time to listen to weather predictions on the radio.  They, too, did not exaggerate.

Saturday was a crappy day in NYC.  Cold, intermittent rain, winds racing down those canyons that made it even colder.   As our tickets to WarHorse were for the evening performance, we had planned to stroll around during the day and repeat one of our favorite rituals which is to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. 

When we saw how accurate the forecast was, we opted for the more indoor approach which meant going into Times Square and seeing what was available from TKTS where you can get a day-of-the-show discount.  The lines were long but Connie found a “play only” line and since we are play junkies he joined that much, much shorter queue.

Let me say right now that even though it was a crappy day weather-wise.  Everyone seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood.  Over and over again all day long we ended up in long, good natured conversations with people all over town.  The only thing I could figure out is that is that New Yorkers had been thrown off by a winter with no snow and much warmer than usual temperatures and when a day came that was the traditional crappy early spring day in March, the familiar yuckiness seemed to cheer them up.  Just a theory.

Back to TKTS.  We weren’t sure what we wanted to see and we had to do some fast research with the help of our new cheery NYC friends.  We narrowed it down to 2 – The Best Man and Seminar.  The Best Man is an old Gore Vidal play that is usually revived during a presidential political season and has an incredible cast including Eric McCormack, James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury, John Larroquette and Candice Bergen.  We hadn’t heard of Seminar but learned that Alan Rickman was in it and that this was his last weekend.  Next Tuesday Jeff Goldbloom would take over Rickman’s role.   Since we determined that would pay to hear Rickman read the phonebook, we bought 2 tickets for the matinee.

Seminar is a smart, intelligent, well-paced, funny and thought provoking play and Rickman is a joy and will probably be up for a Tony for best actor in a play.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

One great moment before the show was overheard by Connie in the ladies’ restroom.  Obviously, one woman wasn’t quite sure who Alan Rickman was and it was being explained to her by a friend.  Finally, the woman got the connection and exclaimed:

“HE KILLED DUMBLEDORE?!”