I hope you don't get the impression that I slummed it up in New York. While my Saturday night was spent conversing with hobos and art majors (gross!), my Saturday evening was downright classy. I went to a Broadway show with my great aunt whose heart is forever taken by glitz and pizazz of music, theater and their child, musical theater. I would like to reminisce for a moment. I just used four "z's" in a sentence. Reflection over.
Broadway is a funny place. Any place where the people have their own lighting and frenetically burst into song is an odd place in my mind. It's probably an odd place in most minds, it is an queer brand of folk whose mind doesn't find it relatively odd. Odd or not, Broadway is as memorable as it is musical. My aunt and I went to see Curtains, a murder mystery musical that with all alliteration aside was deceptively engaging. It starred David Hyde Pierce, the '90s version of Clay Aiken, as a singing detective.
At the intermission, two characters had already been brutally killed and the plot was in a frenzy of violence, percussional whimsy and a dance number. Only Broadway could get away with hanging a senior citizen and blowing away a stage manager with a Colt .45 while singing and dancing a la Mary Poppins. In any other setting the audience would be left in shocked silence yet here they were singing along.
Rest assured, by the end of the night the murdering fiend had been apprehended with a little tap dance and a lot of falsetto.
As I left the theater I reflected on what I'd just witnessed. All of the lyrical drama that had just occurred, all of the flamboyant lighting and colors flashed around in my head. I looked around at other theater goers in hopes of reading some of their thoughts.
Man after man had the same foolish smile on his face. It was a smile that expressed just how uncomfortable, relieved, entertained, and sober we all felt after our brush with David Hyde Pierce. In each pair of eyes flashed the anxiety felt when Hyde Pierce thrust his pelvis with gusto in the first act. And under each man's breath whispered the same phrase that hung in the cold New York air before drifting down 45th Street.
'We should have gone to Spamalot.'
Sounds like you had quite a weekend. I would like to hear more.
Posted by: Nancy Williams | March 13, 2008 at 12:41 PM