And I'm not saying that sarcastically.
Yesterday Peg and I went in to Manhattan to meet up with our old friend, my old college buddy and best man, Medge. (Michael Edge, but as he tells the story, when he was in high school he used to introduce himself as "M. Edge" and it sort of got worn down.) We met up to see the musical The Lost Boys on Broadway and do dinner.
The show was... okay? Great music, definitely going to get the cast album. (Well, except for the final number. Why do a medley of the key songs from earlier in the show when you could have turned "All the damned vampires" into a production number?) The story... they made some changes that we all agreed weren't to the benefit of the show. Grandpa is dead, and they've inherited the house; Lucy's divorce is explicitly because her husband was an abusive drunk (and that becomes a major plot element); Sam is gay and just becoming aware of it; David and his gang aren't just bikers, they're also a metal band and Star is part of it; Laddie is gone; the underground hotel is now an old ironworks, to better fit the style of the staging; Michael willingly drinks the blood instead of being tricked into it; and of course with Grandpa long dead and literal ashes, there is no truck full of fence posts and the ending becomes a bit more conventional. (And Sam delivers That One Line instead of Grandpa.) One nice touch is that there's a "post-credits scene" after the curtain call -- in the middle of the last bow the stage goes black with a thunderous crash, and then lights come back up on a minor character from the first act, a woman searching for her missing police officer husband, in the ironworks coming across the vampire blood and lifting it to her lips just in time for another blackout.
Overall I'd call it a 6, maybe a 7 out of 10? Don't go wildly out of your way to see it, but if you get the chance, why not?
Dinner was at a place called "Sushilab" a few doors down from the theatre on 47th Street, and we met more friends of mine from college -- Larry Lustig and Laura Norwitz -- whom we literally hadn't seen in twenty or thirty years. It's a tiny rooftop restaurant that seats maybe 20, 25 people, and getting there is like going to a high-end version of one of those hidden hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Tokyo that you can only find by going up a winding staircase to an unmarked door. Which pretty much describes how we got to it -- into a hotel lobby, where someone guided us to an unmarked hallway lined with stone buddhas, which led to an elevator, which let us off on the sixth floor, where we had to walk past a bunch of hotel rooms to the emergency stairs, where we climbed the final two flights to the roof. The place was more or less open to the sky -- cloth panels and camouflage netting made up the "ceiling" overhead. The food was great -- Peg and I had chicken yakitori, our friends had various sushi rolls and nigiri bites (oh, and Peg had some nigiri, too), and we topped it all off with that classic Japanese dessert, chocolate mousse cake. If it weren't for some very slow service due to the non-sushi being prepared in the hotel kitchen and the lag time involved in that, I'd give it a 10 out of 10. Even so, easily a 9 out of 10.
So, yeah, fun day yesterday. We've not had enough "excursion days" this summer so I just wanted to share.
Yesterday Peg and I went in to Manhattan to meet up with our old friend, my old college buddy and best man, Medge. (Michael Edge, but as he tells the story, when he was in high school he used to introduce himself as "M. Edge" and it sort of got worn down.) We met up to see the musical The Lost Boys on Broadway and do dinner.
The show was... okay? Great music, definitely going to get the cast album. (Well, except for the final number. Why do a medley of the key songs from earlier in the show when you could have turned "All the damned vampires" into a production number?) The story... they made some changes that we all agreed weren't to the benefit of the show. Grandpa is dead, and they've inherited the house; Lucy's divorce is explicitly because her husband was an abusive drunk (and that becomes a major plot element); Sam is gay and just becoming aware of it; David and his gang aren't just bikers, they're also a metal band and Star is part of it; Laddie is gone; the underground hotel is now an old ironworks, to better fit the style of the staging; Michael willingly drinks the blood instead of being tricked into it; and of course with Grandpa long dead and literal ashes, there is no truck full of fence posts and the ending becomes a bit more conventional. (And Sam delivers That One Line instead of Grandpa.) One nice touch is that there's a "post-credits scene" after the curtain call -- in the middle of the last bow the stage goes black with a thunderous crash, and then lights come back up on a minor character from the first act, a woman searching for her missing police officer husband, in the ironworks coming across the vampire blood and lifting it to her lips just in time for another blackout.
Overall I'd call it a 6, maybe a 7 out of 10? Don't go wildly out of your way to see it, but if you get the chance, why not?
Dinner was at a place called "Sushilab" a few doors down from the theatre on 47th Street, and we met more friends of mine from college -- Larry Lustig and Laura Norwitz -- whom we literally hadn't seen in twenty or thirty years. It's a tiny rooftop restaurant that seats maybe 20, 25 people, and getting there is like going to a high-end version of one of those hidden hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Tokyo that you can only find by going up a winding staircase to an unmarked door. Which pretty much describes how we got to it -- into a hotel lobby, where someone guided us to an unmarked hallway lined with stone buddhas, which led to an elevator, which let us off on the sixth floor, where we had to walk past a bunch of hotel rooms to the emergency stairs, where we climbed the final two flights to the roof. The place was more or less open to the sky -- cloth panels and camouflage netting made up the "ceiling" overhead. The food was great -- Peg and I had chicken yakitori, our friends had various sushi rolls and nigiri bites (oh, and Peg had some nigiri, too), and we topped it all off with that classic Japanese dessert, chocolate mousse cake. If it weren't for some very slow service due to the non-sushi being prepared in the hotel kitchen and the lag time involved in that, I'd give it a 10 out of 10. Even so, easily a 9 out of 10.
So, yeah, fun day yesterday. We've not had enough "excursion days" this summer so I just wanted to share.
-- Bob
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....