New York City, August 2023

[kate_nepveu]

Just back from a Wednesday-Saturday trip with the kids to NYC.

On Wednesday, SteelyKid and I went to the big Macy's with the goal of touring every floor. However, we spent a while actually shopping for fancy-ish clothes, so when we hit the eighth floor and discovered that it was not, as we'd thought, the last, we decided that we'd come close enough and we could live without seeing luggage and furniture.

Thursday, we went to a Yankees game for the second August in a row; I never posted about the last one, which was just a day trip, but having grown up outside of Boston, it physically pains me to be in Yankee Stadium even though I was never particularly a baseball fan. Nevertheless, Chad's side of the family are all Yankees fans who've passed it on to the Pip (who is playing baseball moderately seriously these days), and I will put up with it for their sake. Anyway, though the Yankees lost (and we got rained on), it was an exciting game and the kids were into it. I note that it's weird how much the new pitch clock affects watching in person; I'd get distracted by a kid behind me or something and suddenly three pitches had gone by without my noticing. (It was an afternoon game and T-shirt day, so there were many, many children there.)

Yesterday we went to the Met during the day; please see Tumblr for a long report with embedded pictures on Van Gogh, contemporary art, and random things.

That night we saw The Play that Goes Wrong off-Broadway, which is an incredibly silly new-ish play in which "the Cornley University Drama Society" attempts to perform "The Murder at Haversham Manor."

More information, no spoilers

The program contains such gems as a letter from "Chris Bean" (the Society's president, the director of the play, and the actor playing the detective role) that starts,

We are thrilled that the Cornley University Drama Society is now performing at New World Stages. We can only apologise to those involved in the would-be Off-Broadway production of Equus, which due to a clerical error, is now being performed in the Cornley University Gymnasium. We hope there are no hard feelings and we've left the vaulting horse out for you.

and a cast listing for "Max Bennett," playing Cecil Haversham, that reads:

Max is in his first year at Cornley University where he is studying human geography and crime. He is an avid fan of films, and his favourite is The Legend of Bagger Vance, which he's seen 27 times. This is Max's first production with the Drama Society, and he is very glad to have donated a large portion of his recent inheritance to help the show.

Over the course of the show, as the audience reacts positively to "Max's" performance, he mugs more and more shamelessly, clearly just delighted to be on stage. It's kind of adorable, honestly.

("Chris" gives a little speech at the start of the show saying that in the past, budget difficulties have led them to put on shows like "James and the Peach," which had to be changed to "James … Where Is Your Peach?" when the peach went bad.)

Before the show officially begins, "Annie the stage manager" and "Trevor the lighting & sound operator" are asking audience members if they've seen a dog who is supposed to be in the play and asking (presumably planted) audience members to help them repair the set. (One of my favorite bits is that "Trevor" replaces three missing floor boards … and eventually a completely different one does the stepped-on rake thing and smacks someone in the face.) The kids were entirely on board right from this.

Things go wrong for the "actors" and "crew" basically immediately, as the title promises, in very slapstick-y ways that build and repeat, and then change instead of repeating just at the right time, but always escalate. It is absolutely not intellectual or sophisticated, but it sticks to its premise [*] and is a well-oiled machine. We happily put aside cynicism and laughed ourselves silly.

[*] I genuinely felt bad for the "actors" while also appreciating the acting! There's one moment where "Chris Bean" is desperately and repeatedly calling for a prop. Someone in the audience eventually yelled where it is, and he breaks character as the detective and says (paraphrased), "You're not supposed to talk to me, I'm on stage! Stop laughing, everything is going terribly!" I did try to stop laughing, he was so upset! Of course, he then went on to say, "Be like this man in the front row, he hasn't laughed once in 45 minutes," so, you know.

Anyway, other than one mildly homophobic joke, I've no complaints, and again, the kids loved it, which was the goal, after all.

Today we did a quick pass through the American Museum of Natural History, and then we came home! And now I need to go to bed, but if I didn't write this tonight I knew I wouldn't at all.

Poll #29852

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

View Respondents

+1 (thumbs-up, I see you, etc.)?

View Answers

+1
31 (100.0%)

Comments

[genarti]

Our until-recently-housemate M loves the Goes Wrong Show (which is the televised version of this, building upon the success of The Play That Goes Wrong, in which the Cornley Dramatic Society presents several other plays with similar levels of desperately earnest incompetence combined with bad luck), and we watched all of it last year, and then saw a local production of this play as well. It's such fun! As you say, not terribly deep or sophisticated, but enormously silly and with impeccable comic timing and ability to keep building on a joke until it brings the house down (sometimes literally). It sounds like a fabulous show to bring kids to!

[kate_nepveu]

OMG there's a show?!?

(googles)

BRB trying to reset our DVD player to be region free...

[genarti]

I'll ask M what the current best ways to watch it are! Highly recommended as little half-hour chunks of nonsense and hilarity.

[kate_nepveu]

I see it's streaming, I was just hoping to present the DVDs to the Pip for his birthday in a few months because that seems like a nicer present! But I can't figure out how to make our very old Blu-ray player change regions, so ...

[skygiants]

ooh, I searched for DVDs previously as a gift to give former housemate M and could not find them, so if you've uncovered DVDs of any sort that would be very useful to me when his birthday rolls around again!

(Seconding Beth on the show, in any case, I think you guys would have a great time with it.)

[kate_nepveu]

maybe they're a recent release? anyway Amazon has them as imported region 2 DVDs.

[trent_goulding]

Sounds like a pretty great trip, all in all!

[kate_nepveu]

it really was!

[thistleingrey]

I read DW more regularly than anything else; TIL you also use Tumblr. I wonder whether Newsblur and Tumblr still shake hands reasonably....

[kate_nepveu]

I mostly reblog stuff on Tumblr (lot of animals, art, fandom stuff); I don't know if you can follow just my tag for stuff that's basically-mine: https://katenepveu.tumblr.com/tagged/%21

[thistleingrey]

Thanks! Newsblur breaks the feed into items, which helps. Tumblr doesn't seem to generate tag-specific feeds that Newsblur recognizes (not sure which of them is the issue, not testing because it's not significant for me).