I
don't know that this thought occurred to me on this specific day of the trip
but I'll record it here regardless: of all Caucasian tourists, old British men
are the easiest to identify before a single word comes out of their mouth.
Every old British dude looks like a caricature of an old British dude. Not true
of the women; totally true for the dudes. Brits aside, the gamut of
international tourists we came across was pretty amazing. I used to feel like
cruises put you in touch with people the world over, but New York tourists
are crazily diverse.
Sarah
mined Foursquare (yup, that’s still a thing) for restaurants that were highly
rated by locals, and throughout the trip food was good and affordable. For
breakfast, we went to a little bakery called Amy's Bread. Nice breakfast
sandwich, good coffee, then we were off to start the day. At the TKTS booth,
when you've bought tickets within the last eight days, you can return, show
your ticket stubs, and go in a fast pass line. So we were among the first to
the counters when they opened and we scored excellent seats for the matinee for
Beautiful. With the show hours away, Sarah led us on a crosstown walk to the
Hudson River, where the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum is located.
Admission
was free because the local Science and Tech museum in Ottawa (of which we are
members) has a reciprocal agreement with a bunch of other science-y museums
across North America. Free-ness alone made it worth the walk, but on its own
merits the museum is worth a visit. The main attraction is the USS Intrepid, an
aircraft carrier that served in World War II and Vietnam, and endured multiple
kamikaze attacks and torpedo strikes (not during our visit). There’s also the
Space Shuttle Enterprise on site, as well Growler – a decommissioned nuclear
sub. We went to the sub first, which I have to admit was bigger inside than I
expected (although I’m sure it feels plenty small when the hatch closes and
you’re at the bottom of the ocean). I can’t imagine how the actual operation of
the sub works, because there’s a thousand dials, and valves, and switches, and
some of those are places you’d expect (in navigation) where others are just in
a hallway, or in the mess, or in the latrine or wherever. The sub hasn’t been
active for decades but you can still catch the scent of diesel. And the tour
guides on board – retired officers who'd served on the Growler – said the
smell was twenty times as bad when it was a live vessel (not to mention the
fact that everyone on board smoked).
Next,
we checked out the Intrepid, which was as massive as you’d expect an aircraft
carrier to be. There were more retired officers on board and they were
fantastic – super informative and just loving their job. There were a dozen
jets and helicopters on deck, but I’m not much of a military enthusiast, so I’m
hard pressed to remember specifics. We finished up the museum visit by checking
out the Enterprise. You don’t get inside that one, sadly, you only get to walk
the platform around it, which is laaaaaaaaaame. (This bugs me more after the fact
than it did at the time.)
Restaurant
crowdsourcing brought us to Bareburger, which was one of those natural,
organic, non-GMO, non-factory farm burger joints where the patties comes
strictly from cows who provided their meat on a voluntary basis. (I kid!) It
was pretty good. Then we went to see Beautiful.
This
trip was for Sarah’s birthday so I wanted to do whatever she wanted to do. And
90% of the time our interests coincide. But that doesn't happen to be the case when it comes to Carole King. I think she’s very talented, I appreciate her…
but I never get a craving to hear me some Carole King. So you can imagine how
interested I wasn't in seeing a musical about her life. But because I’m not a total
monster, I faked... not enthusiasm but at least mild interest. And as it turned
out: fantastic musical! Seriously! The lead actress sounded exactly like Carole King, and she was self-deprecating, and 100% percent believable, and hilarious,
(and gets many bonus points for being Canadian). Male lead was great too, and
continuing the trend of male leads on Broadway – he was an absolute brick
shithouse. The music was solid, and because a lot of the story is about Carole
and her husband writing songs for various bands, the numbers get shared
equitably among the ensemble. Loved it. Probably the second best play we saw.
Dinner
was at Ponche Taqueria: totally solid, family-run Mexican place. Then it was
time to see Hamilton. I don’t think it was until we stepped inside the actual
theatre that we acknowledged our shared nervousness. Not about the quality of the play,
which we knew would be excellent, but we both felt this growing anxiety that
something was going to happen that would stop us from seeing the play. I remember thinking
that even acknowledging the fear would jinx us. The tickets would get lost,
or they’d be fakes, or the show would be cancelled, or just something. Right up until the house
lights went out, it didn’t feel real that we were actually going to see this
play. But, spoiler: we did, and it was totally amazing. If you don’t know
anything about Hamilton, described as simply as possible it’s a rap musical about
the life of U.S. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Sounds ludicrous when you
boil it down, but it’s brilliant. Go check out the White House performance of My Shot and you’ll get it pretty immediately.
I've listened to the soundtrack dozens of times, watched the PBS documentary on the
play, read Hamilton: The Revolution, and watched pretty much any available
Hamilton footage on YouTube. Which made me (obviously) very familiar with the
musical, but also very attached to
the original cast. So I worried I’d be constantly comparing the current cast
with the original lineup. But that didn’t occupy me too much. I admit I really
missed Leslie Odom Jr. The actor playing Burr had a fantastic voice, and made
the role surprisingly funny, but I missed the seriousness and the intensity.
And of course I would have preferred Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton, but at
least in that case I was more interested than disappointed in the choices made
by either actor. Beyond those two, I wasn’t making as many comparisons as I
expected. What struck me early on in the show was how quickly the play moves.
There is no fat in that production whatsoever. I can’t imagine what it would be
like to walk in blind – knowing nothing about it, never having heard a line. What
would I come away with as my favourite song or scene? How damn much of it would
I have missed? It’s probably best experienced in extremes: you know absolutely
nothing or you know absolutely everything.
I don’t know what else to say about it. I’m the last in a million-person line
of people who’ve already raved about it. What can I say except those million
people ahead of me were all absolutely right.
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