Deena and I joined two friends Sharon and Ed Carloni this week for a quick getaway to New York City.  We began by taking an Amtrak train 130 miles south to Penn Station located in the heart of Manhattan. The Amtrak ride was occasionally bumpy, but comfortable overall.  Penn Station is located near the Madison Square Garden.  I remember going to the Garden as a child to see the circus.  Once we arrived last Wednesday around noon, we took a cab to the nearby Intercontinental Hotel on 44^th Street, adjoining the Theater District.  After an hour to refresh ourselves, we went to lunch and then to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater several blocks away from the hotel.  The theater, previously known as the Plymouth Theatre, was developed by the Shubert brothers more than a century ago, and it has just over a thousand fairly cramped seats.  It is a typical Broadway theater, but with its own peculiar charm.  On our way to the Schoenfeld, we passed other venues such as The Golden (featuring “Stereophonic”); The Jacobs (“The Outsiders”) and a few more with very long lines of people lining the sidewalk and occasionally spilling into the street, as well.  We had chosen to see “The Notebook” (reviewed elsewhere in this post.)

After the show, we returned to our hotel and later had dinner at Il Forno, an Italian restaurant nearby.  It was something of an “open air” eatery, packed solid with patrons who just wanted good food without more than the basic fare.

Deena and I were fairly tired when the night arrived.  We turned in early, but around 11:45 p.m. there were several flashes of light outside our tenth-floor window, accompanied by as many absolutely booming claps of thunder, which reverberated among the skyscrapers like cannon fire.  Without a cloud in the sky, it was not a storm at all.  It was still technically July 3^rd and these effects were clearly not from what one might purchase at a roadside stand.  I searched in vain for an explanation in the local papers the next day, but found none.  Ed suggested that the city was testing their pyrotechnics for the coming celebration, and that hypothesis seemed plausible enough to me.

On Thursday morning, we took a cab to the Tenement Museum on the lower East Side.  Tenements are something of vestiges from the last two centuries and they are as common in America as they are in England and Scotland. We did we see one that was apparently more than a century old and which had been completely renovated for paying tenants.

The definition of tenement according to New York law is:

Any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let, or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or some of them.”

We saw static displays featuring two different families, the conditions under which the immigrants lived and artifacts from their household, such as an ironing boards, stove and cooking utensils, tables and chairs, etc.  Typically, tenements only had three rooms; a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom.  In the case of the German family who occupied the premises in the mid 1800’s, the living room was converted to a bar where patrons could drink beer, munch on pretzels or German delicacies, all for a price which paid the rent. The husband ran the bar and his wife prepared snacks and meals until she contracted tuberculosis and died in her late forties, only several years after having a child.  The other family with an adjacent apartment was a Jewish family and they ran a garment business out of their premises.  There was no running water in the building.  Tenants had access to a single, outdoor faucet.  Also, outdoors, were the toilets.  The museum had an amazing bookstore along with coffee cups, refrigerator magnets and, of course, more than a hundred titles of books, all available online for those who cannot personally visit the museum.

Deena and I watched the many people from around the world that passed us on Eighth Avenue.  We saw Japanese families, Muslims with hajibs, Sikhs with pagri, passing Vietnamese, Caribbean men with locs, brown-skinned women speaking fluent Spanish and cabbies from Somalia and Sudan waiting for fares along the curb.  We supposed that if you spent thirty minutes at a table of an outdoor restaurant, people from fifty or more countries would pass you by.  Yet, they are all New Yorkers in some sense as we were in that moment.

The New Yorkers we met (cabbies, street vendors, ushers and so on) were all very courteous and pleasant, contrary to urban legend.  After the success of this trip, we hope to make other trips as well.  Besides seeing the sights, Deena and I were also able to approximate the arrangements needed to travel to the City should she have surgery there on her aneurysm.

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THE NOTEBOOK REVIEW

It had been quite a while since I saw a professional musical.  The last one was the traveling presentation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, which I saw in Wichita Falls, TX (definitely “off-Broadway.”)  And while I hadn’t read Nicholas Spark’s novel, I had seen the movie starring Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner et al.

I looked at the reviews, which were not particularly charitable.  Said Variety:

Musical theater can be a sucker for a romantic tale, whether it’s about obsessive devotion, idealized passion, or lost loves. “The Notebook” based on Nicholas Spark’s bestselling, 1996 debut novel, has elements of all three — but they’re thinly rendered here in this Hallmark movie of a musical, awash in sentimentality and drenched in wistful longings and wish fulfillment.”

The New York Times criticized the songs as “insubstantial” and the lyrics “vague and humorless.”  The reviewer concludes:

When songs provide so little information, barely differentiating the characters let alone advancing the plot, a musical tends to sag.”

But audiences frequently ignore what the critics have to say, and so did I in this case.  The protagonists (Noah and Allie) meet at a young age one summer and fall in love.  Noah is called to serve in Vietnam and while he writes to Allie each day, she never receives his mail because her parents keep his letters from her.  She eventually decides that Noah has forgotten her and she is affianced to another.  Noah, however, who vowed to fix up an abandoned house for them in which to raise a family someday, remains true to his calling after separating from the service.  Years later, they meet again.

To someone unfamiliar to either the book or the movie, there was something of a learning curve, because the musical occurs over the span of a lifetime.  Thus, different actors and actresses played the same characters, and occasionally one of the characters was black or not for one of the time periods. This was something of an innovation that I thought might broaden the appeal of the musical to other audiences. In fact, Joy Woods (@joynwoods), the actress who played “Middle Allie” seemed to have the best voice in the house.  She is the recipient of the “Joseph Jefferson Award for Performer in a Supportive Role” in the same musical and role in Chicago’s Shakespeare Theater.

One of the best surprises came at the dénouement as the actors and actresses had their curtain call to a standing ovation.  The absence of an orchestra pit led me to believe that the soundtrack to the production had been pre-recorded.  However, as the cast were taking their bows, the back wall of the stage began to recede into the floor and voilà!  There was an orchestra after all.  It was a small orchestra rather than the whole ensemble.  Maybe 35-40 musicians altogether.  There were oboes, violas, trumpets and flutes but not four of each, and generally not more than one.  In fact, the percussionist had to play the timpani, chimes, cymbals, tam-tams, gongs and bass drum all on her own.  But she did so flawlessly.  There was a standing ovation for the orchestra as well.

I really don’t know how the production could have been improved.  Sets glided in an out seamlessly, there was a rainstorm as the movie and novel required.  The two main performers (Noah and Allie) had color-coded clothing to distinguish them in different periods from the supporting cast.

The theater was warm and welcoming.  During the intermission I browsed the merchandise at the gift shop.  I do wish the seats were a bit larger, however. Deena, Sharon, Ed and I are all agreed that the performance was marvelous and speaking for Deena and I, we would gladly see it again.