Raves and Rants Along Forty Second Street

Showbiz David Out of the Past
originally posted 5/18/08


Penn Station, New York

“Another hundred people just got off of the train,” wrote Stephen Sondheim in his ground breaking musical Company. It felt more like a hundred million when I got off of the train on Wednesday at 5:07 p.m — and had to fight my way through a human version of freeway gridlock at rush hour. Try figuring out Penn Station — or the subways by night when track repair is under way — when even the locals don’t get it. And then it’s a city from hell.

My first goal was the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th. Nice people. Super rates. Only one cockroach so far (last visit). Maybe it forgot to check out before I checked in. Walls on every cool floor covered with art from the Warhol-Studio 54 era. Beautiful faces; how could we live without. And what a suave new lounge, where I began this post. Module furniture pieces across a spare landscape of black carpeting enlivened with abstract burgundy shapes. Piano standing by for jazz. Large head shot of Walt Disney in his extreme youth. He too was once cutting edge. .

Café 28, another golden Gotham find, just around the corner. Don’t let anybody tell you that New York dining is too expensive. Dine at a Deli and live.

After my Gershwin check in, I subway it up to half-price tickets. New York Theatre is an addiction, and I’ve got to see Broadway’s latest naughty darling , 2007 Tony winner Spring Awakening. Another ground breaker, raved the critics. Everything here has to be ground breaking. Here, the high culture snow job is a bunch of late 18th century German students railing against beastly societal repression and shouting to follow their hormones — all in the key of rock. And some of these songs do rock, no doubt about it. Among the audience pandering highlights: A wildly simulated act of man pleasuring himself; a dude and his S&M galpal going regular and so realistically, for all I know she is now on maternity leave. Somehow, the oddball premise, a bit forced and contrived and wrapped in pc trimmings, left me a bit unmoved.

What I love most about this great big metropolis that never lets me down are its rattletrap subways. Thrashing metal music to my soul. When I first came here in 1961 to visit my grandmother in Brooklyn, it took me three hours on a variety of ill-chosen lines before I found the Decalb Avenue stop.. What a ride! So ear shattering, so defiantly anti-digital.

Since then, I’ve learned the easy art of asking the helpful locals, who all speak English (how unlike L.A.). Chasing after an 8 pm. curtain in the Village for another “ground breaking” musical called Adding Machine, the young man who helped me figure out where I was going encouraged me to try seeing another new musical, In the Heights. “The guy who wrote it was a friend of mine in high school.” I was already intrigued..

After Adding Machine (starts out fiercely dramatic — woman hates accountant husband —then falls apart into woozy allegorical mush), Village life on a non ground-breaking summery evening offers more pleasure. Men playing card games in a small street corner park under real trees. People slipping into hip night spots. I take a touristly peek into Café Wa? where Ginsberg held court. You drop down a steep narrow staircase that feels like a psychedelic funhouse and enter a funky underworld of night.

South Pacific in revival: Glorious; everything the critics said it is. Not one vacant seat in the house.

If only ever-dying Coney Island could be revived like South Pacific. I take a ride out to check on its health. Now, school kids are bussed out to ride the Tilt A Whirl and its like behind barbed wire fences. And when the Cyclone opens, they all run across the street to line up for the thrill of a lifetime.

The Wonder Wheel, which once I rode, was not turning, nor the parachute dropping. I bought a Nathan’s original — bare dog on bare roll served in a box. Was that all there ever was? And along a bleak block of closed concession stands, there sat one lone concessionaire in his Bust a Balloon booth. Would love to have snapped him. I asked. He turned his head away and signaled me to leave him alone.

Queens is another world, so unlike the New York city feel. That’s where I take in the Big Apple Circus on a rainy Friday morning. Another average pleasure hailed by overactive critics? I left wowed by the artists, unthrilled by the show.

God bless the NY Public Library. With an hour to kill before In The Heights on Saturday afternoon, I drop by the performing arts wing to merely inquire for future reference about the Richard Barstow papers. Olive and staff favor me by pulling out a sample box, and what finds it contains — things about Barbette in the eyes of Barstow, and of John Ringling North very much alive and creatively active at a production meeting. More on these revealing fascinations later.

And then THIS: Among the old 3x5 cards Olive encourages me to peruse, I find a reference to something I self published in high school off a mimeograph machine titled Sawdust 1957 — one of my youthful rants. Incredible! I gotta go back. They have things there that you might not find in Baraboo or Sarasota..

Onto In the Heights: Jackpot! Truly affecting. Red hot salsa score. This is the one. This will sweep the Tonys.

Last stop: Saturday night at the Helen Hayes to see the funky and half-funny Xanadu, nights in roller rinks luring me there. Wonderful for maybe thirty minutes. After that, too much campy shop talk among the Gods grows tiresome and flat. Not even 90 minutes long, and it’s on Broadway. Were it not for the disco-era hits that this silly silly silly show rides high on, an instant turkey surely it would have been

And how like a tired turkey I feel. Miles of subway steps. Dozens of high powered Broadway songs. Amtrak, take me back to California.

Now let another hundred people have at you, New York