Coming Together

Good morning, good morning, good morning. It is so great to be alive when there's a trip to New York in the immediate future. I bought the tickets for the 5 definite shows last night and was able to get great seats for all of them on the days we wanted to go. It works out nicely that we can see the last Off-Broadway performance of In the Heights, and that there's a Monday night performance of anything, much less Gypsy with the fabulous Patti. My companion isn't able to make it to that one, he'll still be on the train coming back from Connecticut, so it sucks to be him, but I'll be there waving my Patti flag proudly. I'm very happy that I'll get to see both her and Audra twice this summer. I get to see them next week in their shows, and then in August when they're at Ravinia together. My companion made our hotel reservations, we'll be staying at the Times Square Marriott, which is a great hotel, except their new elevator system is very annoying. Hopefully they'll have the bugs ironed out, it was only 3 weeks old when we stayed there a year ago and it didn't do a good job of allocating people to elevators. It would send 50 people to one elevator and then have 3 arrive with no one getting on. It'll be nice and close to most of the shows and they've got their own Broadway souvenier store next to Starbucks that I can check out and it's close to Broadway New York. Plus, the best part is that TKTS is right outside so as soon as we put our bags in the room we can go get in line for a Saturday matinee show, hopefully beating the crowd. The only drawback is that I won't be seeing Light in the Piazza here since we'll be gone for most of the run and I have other things to do when we get back (Wednesday night I can crash, but Thursday I'm going to the dress rehearsal of Most Happy Fella at Ravinia and Friday I've got Side Show. Speaking of MHF, someone buy my Friday night ticket already!). I'm fine with that since I saw the Live From Lincoln Center broadcast, but I'm worried that if no one shows up for it, instead of realizing that they need to make Chicago a flagship stop and promote the hell out of shows, the producers will interpret it as no one in Chicago cares about theatre and will stop bringing shows here at all (Ave. Q and Drowsey Chaperone announced expanded schedules, and we're still not on either of them, like either of them are going to play well in Raleigh or Charlotte or Fort Wayne). Of course part of the problem is we've got all three of our major theatres locked up with Wicked, Color Purple, and soon Jersey Boys. There isn't a lot of space left for large touring shows. Anyways, tomorrow is Gorey Stories and Sunday is Superman, this is turning out to be a fabulous month.