Shows in Manhattan April 2002

I had been trying to arrange another day in Manhattan with my sister and sister-in-law but their schedules were conflicting, we couldn't find a common day and my excursion ticket was getting close to the end of its validity period. So on the spur of the moment I decided to take a trip by myself and do nothing except see some shows.

On the train up [on which an announcement was made that shoes must be worn while walking around the train]  I had been trying to decide whether to get off in Newark and take the Tubes to the hotel first in order to get a room and to get rid of the valise or whether to go through to New York and get a play ticket  first. Since the train was almost 20 minutes late the decision was made for me when I arrived in Penn Station at 12:30.

The first show I wanted to go to was at the Haft Theater at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I took the IRT down, even though it was only about an 8 block walk, because the rain was falling very heavily. The box office was to open at one and I thought I could pick up ticket, go back to Jersey City to get a hotel room and get rid of the valise and get back to the theater for a matinee or, if I bought an evening ticket, back  to a different theater for a matinee. There was some sort of delay at the box office. I managed to get out of the rain into the lobby with two women but then the  doors were locked behind us so no other customers  could come in; but no tickets were being sold. 

It wasn't until around 1:15 that the ticket booth opened and a mob of people who had been locked out in the rain joined us. I really hadn't decided whether I was going to be going to a matinee or night performance; in fact, I rather wanted to avoid the matinee because I suspected it would be filled with elderly people who might not make a good audience. But in  all the hustle bustle, I got swept along and took a matinee ticket because it was in a good location. 

At this point there was not enough time to get back to Pavonia and get rid of the valise and get back to the theater without really rushing but there was still a 40 minute wait  before the curtain. Although I hadn't eaten that day I wasn't particularly hungry but still wanted  to go to some coffee shop just to sit down out of the rain. 

There must have been five or six coffee shops within three blocks of the theater but each one of them had open doors,  a sign of no air conditioning. Unfortunately that was the case. I walked into several but each one of them was like a hot steamy sauna. The temperature was only in the '70s but the humidity was extremely high. I found one, Austin's Cafe on 7th between 36th and 27th, which was nicer than the others. It  also wasn't  air conditioned but it had a lot of ceiling fans so at least it was  breezy. It was decorated in wood and light colors,  very light and airy with the lighting arranged very well and attractively. It was basically a soup and salad restaurant with many fancy desserts. I wound up with a slice a pound cake and a Snapple. The clientele seemed to be young female art students from FIT. [Side note on art: of the 14 people in my German class that's just started 10 are studying art history and all the 10 are young and female.]

For the show, Rodgers & Hart's Dearest Enemy, I was sitting towards the front and in the center about seven rows from the stage. The auditorium was functional but pleasant ; the sound was unamplified and natural and straight, with about 50 musicians and about 50 chorus singers. The show is based on Mrs. Murray's tea party at Murray Hill to  detain Howe and the other British generals while the American army escapes from Brooklyn Heights to Harlem and New Jersey - and Mrs. Murray invents the Manhattan cocktail.

There is only one song that's become standard, "Here In My Arms" [it's adorable, it's deplorable that you were never there], click here to hear it in RealAudio. The other numbers are listed click here and also here.

I don't know what the original production was like but in this one that song appeared four different places: twice in the overture; in a full production in the first act; several reprises in the second act and then one more time in the epilogue. Probably because it was being played so much, it began sounding more and more like "Liebling, Mein Herz Läßt Dich Grüßen" from about the same period.

The show had been billed as a Rodgers and Hart musical, set in the Revolutionary War,  that hadn't been performed in 60 years. I should have noticed that it was being put on by the Village Light Opera Guild, but that didn't really register. 

The show wasn't at all like the Rodgers and Hart musicals from the '30s: The Boys from Syracuse or Jumbo or Pal Joey. The lyrics weren't the sharp, witty, pun filled lyrics that you connect with Hart. There was very little wordplay and very little sound play compared to what he wrote in his lyrics. At first I thought that the show was good but not what you expect from Rodgers and Hart. But since their other plays from the 20s [which also are seldom produced] do have songs with witty "Hart" lyrics [The Girl Friend, Mountain Greenery, Thou Swell, Manhattan, You Took Advantage of Me],  I couldn't figure out why this music was so different - until about a quarter of the way into the show.

The reason was that in spite of the billing this wasn't a musical comedy, it was an operetta, the other big form of the 1920s. That would explain the big chorus, the historical theme, the reverent and patriotic appearance of George Washington - also no doubt connected with the September 11 terrorist attacks. Hart probably had to write lyrics to fit the genre and wisecracking and puns don't fit too smoothly into operetta. 

As an operetta it had many big choral numbers; a male chorus of about 25 and female chorus of 20 or 25 with a lesser number of solo songs by a half-dozen principals. There was no real dancing but only "make believe dancing" or movement and pattern-forming. The diction of the chorus, especially the male chorus - everything was natural and unamplified - was great as was that of the male solos; but many times the female soloists were hard to understand. 

As the show went on, it sounded more and more like the Viennese operettas by Lehar, Künnecke, Stolz after the First World War, in both plot and musical style. The similarity reached a high point with the appearance, hallowed and awe-inspiring, of George Washington in the Epilogue, parallel to, for example, Franz-Josef coming on the stage "Im Weißen Roessl". As an aside I just realized that  when I was a teenager and half the audience in the Graz Opera House stood up when "Franz-Josef" came on the stage in that operetta [the rest were, no doubt, socialists or fascists], it had been 42 years since the fall of the monarchy;  now it's 40 years since I saw the operetta. Since I remember the operetta clearly, the audience must have remembered the Empire clearly -- something which was incomprehensible to me at the time.

The orchestra and both choruses were very good in the music; many of the secondary actors, actually chorus members, were pretty poor in secondary roles as actors. The character of the Irish son was played terribly by someone who is probably in his middle 20s acting very poorly at being someone 13 or 14 years old. The two main leads, acting and singing, were an Irish sister who was professional, trained and slick and the British officer, her lover, who was very good as a singer, baritone, and sort of adequate as an actor. Unfortunately, he had a very obnoxious and loud claque with him that was irritating. Click for cast list

When George Washington made his appearance, it was embarrassing and the audience began to titter. You have to have a lot of poise and gravitas to carry off playing an historical figure like Washington or Franz-Josef suddenly dropped into a musical entertainment and this actor didn't have that poise. He  looked artificial and uncomfortable, declaimed poorly and really wasn't even acting. The audience began getting restless after the titters but were pulled back into shape by the lowering of the Grand Union Flag, the raising of Old Glory and a reprise of Yankee Doodle Dandy. The scene sounds terrible but except for Washington it was done well.

The performance was sold out. Since it was a matinee I expected there to be mostly retirees. But the audience was a mixed age group. The group sitting next to me was a mother, grandfather and grandson, apparently bringing the grandson to his first show.

The play ended around 4:45 and I walked over to the 23rd Street Tube station and took [the jammed packed] tube to Pavonia. I was trying the third of the three hotels around Pavonia Station, Candlewood Suites. There's  a shuttle van between the station and the hotel but when I called, the person at the hotel said it was just a 5 minute walk, so I didn't wait for the van. [The shuttle doesn't run at all times; in fact, the only time I could use it was on Saturday night when I was going back into Manhattan. When I returned around 11 or 1130 pm the shuttle had already stopped running and the next morning, Sunday, when I had to get to Pavonia at around 9 AM, the shuttle hadn't begun running. ]

The walk to the hotel from the tube station is not that far but because you walk through a lot of construction sites it seems longer. Theoretically it was only one block further than the Doubletree but then you had to turn down 2nd Street, heading closer to the river for almost two blocks; and even after you reached the hotel, you couldn't go in because the entrance was set around the far side of the building and you had to walk almost two more blocks. The location is substantially poorer than that of  the other two hotels.

It was a large room and contained a full kitchen, a full-size refrigerator, a full range with an oven as well as a microwave oven; but it wasn't laid out as well as the Doubletree [which did not have the cooking facilities]. Still it was a nice room and substantially larger than you get in Manhattan. The hotel chain has a gimmick of giving you a quarter when you check in because there is an automated store in the lobby with you can buy groceries. All sodas, which usually cost a dollar or more in hotels, are 25 cents; the store is run on the honor system and you pay into a box. Most of the other items are the price you would be paying in a 7-11. Tourists must be coming back because hotel rates are no longer low. The rate was supposed to be $99 but I didn't want to pay that so they gave me  a "special rate" that dropped it to $89. I could be picky because I was considering taking the overnight train back to Washington.

I checked in, dropped off my valise, got washed; I also realized that the two-fer tickets I had weren't valid for Saturday night shows, so I did what I've been meaning to do for [literally] 40 - or at least 35 - years. I called the Amato Opera House up and was able to get a single seat for that night's performance. 

The shuttle brought me back to the Pavonia tube station. The station was jammed packed [on a Saturday afternoon around 6pm] to the level of people being pushed out to the very edge of the platform; partly New York people coming to and from the Pavonia shipping center but partly just a mix of people going into and out of Manhattan. The train was just as crowded. I took the 8th street bus from 9th street over to the east side but wasn't paying attention and  by mistake got off at Broadway instead of at the Bowery. Walking the rest of the way, this section of Broadway was filled with people in their 20s and 30s, feverishly shopping in the trendy stores all around. I cut over on Bleecker to the Bowery.

On the phone the one woman from the Amato Opera House, apparently Tony Amato's sister-in-law, said I was getting a "chair",  an overflow measure when they're sold out. Perhaps because I gave an out of town address for my credit card, there was a change. As I picked the ticket up, she said: "I got you a good seat". She was right. I was in a regular seat in the third row on the aisle, C2.

The program said the theater had been a brownstone townhouse; to me it looked from the outside as if it had been a garage. The "lobby" is about 6 feet by 8 feet at the door. You then walk down to what had originally been the basement. The interior of the building has been completely ripped out, so you have a three or four story ceiling above you, except the back section which has a small balcony . 

The theater is 10 seats wide and about 10 seats deep. The stage is about the width of one car plus an additional a yard; the stage looks  to be about one car length in depth. The audience comes down a stairway to the back of the theater where there's a snack stand as do the performers and musicians who enter the stage [only initially, not during the performance] from the front. There's a fund drive on to build a n outside stairway for them; a building was erected next door to the opera house and cut off the entrance they used to use. The orchestra is in a sort of cave under the stage

As I said, I'd been meaning to go to the Amato ever since I heard about it when I was in high school, but never had. It's very unusual. It presents full scale, not cut down, productions of grand opera [I think the name used to be the Amato Grand opera] with costumes props, scenery, and the full cast. The repertoire is mostly Italian but they also do Mozart and French operas; Rigoletto was ending this week and Carmen is starting next week. But what is unusual is that they do the operas in a theater that seats 100 or 120 people and on a stage that's maybe 20 x 30 feet. The second unusual thing is that it's a private family operation. It's been run since the 1940s by a man [Tony Amato] and his wife [she died about a year ago] and now their niece and sister in law. I'm sure it's now getting various cultural grants, but for most of its existence and, I think, even today, most of its funding is private, not from tax money.

I've given a lot of detail on what the theater is like because of the unusual and eye popping production. It was Rigoletto which opens with a ball. Well, they opened with a ball with the chorus singing, the principals singing, the dancers dancing, all on that tiny stage with no one bumping into each other and no one looking cramped. I had read a blurb on a poster out front from a PBS documentary that said something like: How do you get 45 performers onto a 20 foot stage." Well, they did it and did it well, although I counted never more than 35 people on the stage at one time. I happened to be about two yards from the edge of the stage and the orchestra pit but even the people in the last row had great intimate acoustics [in the back, the narrow auditorium gives a tunnel effect to the sight lines, however].

Maybe a professional musician or an opera aficionado could find flaws in the production but I didn't. The singing, especially by the Duke and Gilda was professional; the costumes - which you saw very close up - and sets ands orchestra were slick and professional. The physical level of the performance was on the same level as that of the Washington Summer Opera at CU and even as that of many of the Washington Opera productions.

During one of the intermissions I was speaking with the woman behind the counter who told me she lived around the corner, had baked all the cookies and cakes that were there and that she brought them in hot about 10 minutes before the theater opened. She was going home during the second act to get more cookies. Also wandering around during the intermission, I noticed flyers for purchasing a video of a documentary that PBS had recently done on the Amato CLICK THIS LINK; if PBS replays it in your area, you might want to watch it.

At the Washington Opera the median - not average - age of the audience is not old it is beyond ancient; I'd guess at 75 - 80 years old. This audience was mostly in their 20s and 30s. Although the opera puts on condensed performances for children on Saturday mornings, the regular performances of full operas would be a wonderful introduction to opera for adults, partly because of the intimacy and immediacy of the setting.

Intimacy. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought that. The seat on my right was empty and the seat next to that was filled by a man even older than I am. He was popping in and out and when the curtain went up the seat next to me was still empty; a few minutes into the opera someone came in and got into the seat; but since it was dark, I couldn't see exactly who it was. During the first act the man had stretched his arm across the back of the seat between us - which was now occupied - and was squeezing and tapping the person on the shoulder. I knew that because he was clumsy and was often banging his hand into my shoulder. When the lights came on at the intermission, I saw that next to me - and next to him - was a pretty girl in her late teens or early 20s. For no reason - I had said nothing and wasn't even looking at them -  she said to me: "This is my professor and he's introducing me to opera". [I did not respond: "Oh, is that what they're calling it nowadays."] 

The cast seems to rotate and change almost every night. I was next to the aisle on the other side of which a line of chairs had been set up to give each row an extra seat. [They're the circles in the seating diagram above.]  A woman who must have been in her early 40s but who was dressed so well and was so well maintained that she looked very young was next to me; her husband, also prosperous and tastefully young-dressed was behind her. It turned out that they were the parents of Gilda who was making either her Amato debut or her Rigoletto debut. From eavesdropping, I knew that the people in the row in front of me were one family and that one of them, although not tonight, sang at the Amato. While I had been leafing through the program, I also  noticed that one of the singers on another night was a Paul Maldonado; when I was in college in Jersey City, one of the people I knew was a Maldonado whose family was very involved in opera, I think his sister was a professional opera singer, and who were attending opera not only in new York and New Jersey but even further afield. Maybe opera went through to another generation.

If you're ever in Manhattan, make sure you go to the Amato.

When I came out of the Opera the weather had changed dramatically; it was noticeably cooler and seemed fresh and brisk and breezy. The Opera House is next to a rock club called something like CBGM or UGBM which apparently is a well-known club. As I was walking along the Bowery, the streets were filled with people in their 20s, maybe even in their teens, coming into and going out of the clubs and bars on the Bowery & side streets.

I  hadn't had supper and it was around 10:30 or 10:45 pm. I thought of going to the Italian pasticceria Venerios on First Avenue but suspected that at this time of night it already was closed or might be closing. The woman running the refreshment stand at the Opera House had recommended the Dolphin Restaurant [the official address is 33 Cooper Square but it's really at the Bowery and 6th Street] so I went there. 

It was very attractive, tastefully decorated in shades of pink, although it was tending to look a little like an upscale bordello. The waiters and waitresses were very slick and professional and nice looking. Unfortunately, it was a seafood restaurant with a strong smell of clams. I could find nothing I really wanted and settled on oyster fries although I wasn't too excited about fried food at 1045. For what they were, the oyster fries were good, served over salad with rice and hot vegetables as side dishes.

Since the weather seemed so refreshing, I decided not to wait for the bus but to walk over to the west side. As I began walking, however, I realized that the weather had been deceiving. It certainly was cooler than it had been the day before and even cooler than it had been five hours earlier; but the humidity had not dropped as much as I had first thought and I wound up very sweaty by the time I got to Sixth Avenue.

The platform at 9th Street was jammed packed and the train was even more crowded. Because it was late on the weekend, the train went over to Hoboken and then backed out again to Pavonia [where I got off] and then on to Journal Square and Newark. I knew that the shuttle bus wouldn't be running and it was a long and somewhat sweaty walk over to the hotel.

I had made this a spur of the moment trip and had no play tickets for Sunday. I  got to Manhattan about 9:15 and started walking for exercise because it was so early that there were no box offices [or museums] open which I could call or visit to see what was available.  When I did find out there was nothing that I wanted to see, taking into account that if I stayed to see a matinee, I'd lose the advantage of my discounted train ticket and have to pay twice as much to get back, I decided to take an early train back to DC.

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