The last time I gave a Broadway report I boasted of having seen 7 shows in 12 days. That was nothing compared to this year’s Broadway Blowout - 6 shows in 6 days. Following are reviews of some of the hottest tickets on Broadway and advice on where not to sit. Because where you sit can really make a difference. Read on.

THE NETWORK

If you were around in 1976, you may remember the movie, The Network. It starred Peter Finch as Howard Beale, an aging prime-time news anchor who famously exhorts his audience to stand up and shout out, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That line is on the American Film Institute’s list of Top 100 movie quotes and members of the audience get to shout it out in the current Broadway adaptation of The Network, starring Bryan Cranston. Bryan Cranston was good and the rest of the cast was good and the story is good but what really set The Network apart from being just another Broadway play was its incorporation of live video.

The set is a TV studio and there are crew members with hand-held cameras wandering about on stage, and that video is projected on screens placed about the theater. And it’s a good thing they are there because, without those video feeds, about a third of the audience wouldn’t be able to see about a third of the play. From where we sat, we could not see the control booth at all, and relied on the video feeds to see what was happening in there. Here’s the view from my seat:

Note the bar and dining area to the right of the stage. Apparently the people who sat there paid $500 each for the privilege, so the least the theater could do was serve them a meal which they ate during the play. I personally would not want to sit down there because I would be so nervous about spilling my drink or dropping my fork that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the play. But there is no denying that they had a better view of that control booth than we did.

The Network is currently scheduled to close on June 8th, so there is still time for you to see it. But if you don’t get a ticket, you can still be a part of the play. About 3/4 of the way through, two of the characters actually leave the theater and walk down the street outside, and it is all captured on live video which appears on that big screen shown above. New Yorkers walking down the street pass them and look at them, causing the audience to snicker with each encounter. I think it would be really fun to wait outside the theater until the actors come out and, when they do the big long smooch, walk by and say, “Get a room!” I think the audience would think that is hilarious. BTW, one of the actors who walks outside is Tony Goldwyn, who you may remember played President Fitzgerald Grant on Scandal.

The Network runs 2 hours without an intermission, so take care of toileting and refreshment needs before hand. The bottom line: Sit in the middle or on the right, not on the left side. If you’re loaded and hungry, pay $500 and sit on the stage, just be careful not to drop your fork and don’t drink too much.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Everyone seems to have heard about the new Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which stars Jeff Daniels and is running through October 2019 (which seems like a very long run for a play). The cool thing about this adaptation is that it is written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men (one of my very favorite movies) and created The West Wing. He also created the TV series, The Newsroom which also stars Jeff Daniels, making me wonder if Aaron Sorkin wrote his Atticus Finch role with Jeff Daniels in mind.

People either really want to see this play or really DON’T want to see it. I really wanted to see it because I always want to see what people are talking about. My cousin Anne really does NOT want to see it because she doesn’t want to taint her fond recollection of the book and the movie. My friend Deborah, who is a theater aficionado from WAY back, texted me, “I just can’t accept the idea of adults playing the kids.” I didn’t know what she was talking about until I opened the Playbill. Check this out:

How weird is it that the actress who plays Scout is 41? Honestly, she didn’t look a day over 30 dressed in overalls and, later, as a ham, but that’s still a lot older than Scout, who is 9 at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird (the novel). It probably would have been a challenge for a child to have played Scout, because Scout was the storyteller, and it was a big role. Plus, when children are in these plays, they have to have three or four of them in rotation. Risky business. I really loved the way Gideon Glick played Dill and, by the time the play was over I had honestly forgotten they were adults. So I would say it worked.

An interesting bit of trivia is that my sister Norah is friendly with Mary Badham who played Scout in the movie. I met her at a party at Norah’s house once and was just enthralled to talk to her. I thought it very odd that no one else gave a shit that she was the REAL BADASS SCOUT from the movie. It just made me shake my head and wonder, as I do all too often, what is wrong with people today?

This is my view of To Kill a Mockingbird. The jurors sat on the back of the stage on the right, behind all those lights.

To Kill a Mockingbird runs 2 hours and 35 minutes and has an intermission. Don’t sit on the far right side, which is where my sister Janelle and I sat in the Mezzanine, having surrendered the really good Orchestra seats to our daughters. We are selfless mothers who always eat the broken cookies and give the good seats to our children. Because we are givers, Janelle and I were not aware that there actually were people sitting in the juror’s box until the actors came out to take a bow and we thought, “Who in the hell are all of those people?” According to our daughters, we didn’t miss a thing not being able to see the jurors. But we did miss seeing Sir Paul McCartney who, obviously, got a good Orchestra seat. My daughter Lawler has a very keen eye for celebrity sightings and submitted this photo as evidence, even though it is about as convincing as photographic evidence of Bigfoot.

MY FAIR LADY

I was left to my own devices on Sunday, so I headed down to TKTS to stand in line for a ticket for a matinee. I hadn’t seen the My Fair Lady revival because tickets were really hard to get the last time I was there (translation: hideously expensive). It was nominated for 10 Tony Awards last year and Rosalie and Lawler said it was fantastic, so I chose that.

I had wondered if I would be a little bored by it, given that I have seen the movie so many times. To the contrary - I was utterly enthralled and nearly cried when it was over just because it was such a heavenly experience.

The ticket agent had warned me that Laura Benanti, whom you have seen on TV and who won a Tony for her performance in the revival of Gypsy, would not be in the cast that day, but I was a little horrified when I discovered my Playbill was stuffed full of understudy replacement notices:

It says a lot for the depth of the cast that I thought they were all fantastic. My Eliza Doolittle had an amazing voice and it was wonderful seeing Eliza Doolittle actually singing, rather than being dubbed, as poor Audrey Hepburn was in the movie. I was very fortunate that Harry Hadden-Paton WAS on duty in the role of Henry Higgins that day. You would know him as a love interest of Lady Edith on Downton Abbey. I couldn’t imagine that anyone could adequately fill Rex Harrison’s shoes, but he did. I have always wondered whether Rex Harrison just couldn’t sing, or whether the Henry Higgins role is meant to be mostly spoken. Harry Hadden-Paton sang much more than Rex Harrison, but there was still a lot of that talk-singing, so the jury is still out on that (or at least out of view). Danny Burstein was also fantastic as Alfred P. Doolittle which I appreciated, because that role was never my favorite in the movie and when that actor would start to sing “Get Me to the Church On Time” I would always go for a bathroom break. So the fact that I actually enjoyed that role for the first time speaks volumes. It’s all just so different live.

My Fair Lady is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center and I don’t think there is a bad seat in the house, although the outside edges might have some difficulty seeing the whole set. And the set is one of the greatest things about this show. I found a video called Harry’s House Tour on YouTube that shows the set. Please take a look because it is really cool how it rotates and the actors walk from one room to the next as it turns.

My Fair Lady’s run has been extended until September 15, 2019 and I can tell you without hesitation that it is worth a special trip to New York just to see it. I wouldn’t hesitate to see again.

HAMILTON

This was actually the second time I have seen Hamilton and I enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the second time. We had a different actor (Austin Scott) playing Hamilton this time and he was fantastic. He was a great singer and had a real charismatic stage presence. Sadly, we had the same actor playing Lafayette/Jefferson this time as last (James Monroe Inglehart). He won a Tony for his portrayal of the Genie in Aladdin, and I don’t doubt that he was good in that role, but I think he is ill-suited for the dual role of Lafayette and Jefferson. As Lafayette, he performs the ridiculously fast rap, “Guns and Ships” and was always difficult to understand. He is, shall we say, “full figured” and I think he would have been better in the role of Hercules Mulligan/James Madison. Just sayin.

But more to the point: I know you don’t give a shit what I think of Hamilton because everyone knows it’s a great show. You really just want to know more about how to get tickets. The easiest way is to get the millennial in your house to do it because they were born knowing how. But if you don’t have a millennial in your house, here’s how it works:

There is a digital $10 lottery you can enter using this link. It opens two days before the performance and closes at 9am one day before the performance. That’s all well and good for people who live in New York or can drop everything and get there at a moment’s notice, but for those of us who need to plan, you will have to buy tickets online. Ticketmaster is currently selling tickets for performances from now until Nov. 10, 2019. At this point, they are ALL verified resale tickets and the cheapest is about $310 for a seat you don’t really want to sit in. For a halfway decent seat you will pay at least $400.

The other option is to wait for the next new block of tickets to come out for performance dates far in the future. Go to the Hamilton website and enter your email to “join the revolution” and subscribe. Then go to youngestsister and do the same thing, because if you can subscribe to the Hamilton website you can damn well subscribe to my informative blog. Watch for email notifications from them about a new block of tickets being released. Based on past history, it appears that new blocks are released in May and November. When a new block was released last May, I registered as a Ticketmaster Verified Fan, which helps them to determine that I am a human being and not a bot. Verified fans are selected at random to receive an access code that allows them to buy tickets during the presale period. On May 18, 2018, I was one of those lucky verified fans who was able to buy four tickets for a performance on March 5, 2019. We paid $235 for each of our Orchestra tickets using this method. By comparison, tickets to performances in August in the same row as ours are going for $649.

I just downloaded the Hamilton app, which looks like another good way to get notifications of new ticket blocks as well as to enter the daily lottery. By the way, the lottery isn’t just available in New York. It is also available for performances in Chicago, London, San Francisco, Tampa, Cincinnati, Detroit and New Orleans. On the home screen they ask you if you want to receive notifications for news, lottery and more, so I enabled that. But I am at least as excited about the karaoke feature, which lets you pick a song, sing along and record it. Loyal readers know that I know more than a little bit about Hamilton karaoke.

As far as where you should sit, the Orchestra section has stadium-style seating, so even the Rear Orchestra has a pretty good view. The only thing I would stay away from is Rear Mezzanine and try to get seats closer to the center than the outside if you want to be able to see all the dancers.

THE FERRYMAN

The Ferryman is the only play on Broadway that you need to train for. This behemoth of a performance has a running time of 3 hours and 15 minutes and includes one 15 minute intermission and a second short break. I considered carbo-loading and took a full bottle of water with me. I was careful to walk around at every break so as to avoid DVTs.

Critics are calling it the “play of the century,” which seems a little over-the-top at this point, given that we are only 20 years into it. I was so horrified by the length of the play, along with the fact that the website offers a study guide called a Timeline of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, that I was reluctant to go. I never studied for a history test in my life; why would I study to watch a play? A trio of 20-something boys handing out flyers in the TKTS line assured me that they didn’t know much about Northern Ireland yet they understood it and that it didn’t seem like three hours. They arrogantly threw around sentences like, “Are you familiar with Jez Butterworth? He is a GENIUS,” and “This is such an important genre for our time.” Indubitably. As my friend Betty always says, I don’t want to die ignorant. So I bought a ticket.

It was very good. I’m not ready to call it the “play of the century” because that award would go to the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Disgraced, which is certainly the best play I have ever seen. I do have some recommendations that would have made viewing it a better experience for me.

# 1. Rent a headset. Deciphering Irish brogues is difficult under the best of circumstances. I expect it would help to be able to hear them well.

#2. Familiarize yourself with the term “banshee.”

#3. Review the Greek myth about Charon, the ferryman of Hades who delivers souls across the River Styx because, if you didn’t do # 1, you might miss that whole soliloquy and you will have to look # 2 and # 3 up when you get home to make sense of the ending.

I sat in the Mezzanine in what I thought was a very good seat but I can’t help but wonder if I might have been able to hear better if I had been in the Orchestra. But don’t get TOO close to the stage because there is real fire and a couple of live animals in this play and I wouldn’t want to be in the wrong place if something went awry. Goose poop can be hard to get out of your clothes.

This is the stage before the play began. The two actors were just hanging out there for about 5 minutes before it began, reading and smoking a cigarette.

AIN’T TOO PROUD

Janelle recommended Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations to Lawler and me because she had seen it when it was on a regional tour, before it hit Broadway, and thought it was entertaining. She later back-pedaled a little, saying she hoped we would like it because it wasn’t AMAZING but was fun, so I started to get worried.

It was the perfect thing to see for the last show of the trip, and a perfect follow up to The Ferryman, which I had left just three hours earlier. For me it was a triumph just to be able to understand every word they said. Ain’t Too Proud tells the story of The Temptations from the point of view of Otis Williams, one of its first members. The Temptations have a pretty dicey history of fast living and rotating members, so the story is very compelling. It goes without saying that the music is great and the dancing is fantastic. I think this show is going to be around for a while - like Dream Girls with testosterone. It is most definitely worth seeing, particularly if you are in the mood to leave the theater with a big smile on your face. It has, hands down, the best ending I have ever seen in a musical. I understood every word they said and I didn’t have to look anything up afterward, although I am still a little curious about whether Barry Gordy really has a pedantic speech pattern or whether that was just the actor. Sometimes it’s fun just to wonder.

The set employed both a revolving turntable and a conveyer belt, which you can just see in front of the pre-show stage. We were in the Mezzanine and I don’t think there is a bad seat in the house. A lot of the action takes place in the front of the stage.

Janelle turned me on to an interview with the real Otis Williams on CBS Sunday morning. It has some good clips from the show. See it here.

Ain’t Too Proud is still in previews and has been really well received. If you want to see it, you might think about getting your tickets right now.

BONUS REVIEW:

HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD, PARTS ONE AND TWO

Full disclosure: I did not see this, but I know people who did, so thought I might as well share their take on it. Janelle and my niece, Rosalie, had been booked to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two for a long time. Lawler and I took a pass because it just didn’t interest us and tickets were hideously expensive back when we planned this trip. Plus, the total running time of both parts is 5 hours and 15 minutes, which makes The Ferryman look like a novelette.

Janelle is a very busy person, what with going to water aerobics and playing bridge, but she managed to dictate a text message to me whilst walking her Jack Russell, who happens to be named Scout. She thought it seemed like a big undertaking seeing both parts in one day, but that it really wasn’t at all and they definitely belong together. They saw Part 1 at 2:00 and Part 2 at 7:30, with time in between for dinner at a Shake Shack. She warns that the show is made for adults, not children, and that small children should not go. Note that these are plays, not musicals. They include good music and dancing, just not singing. She says if you haven’t read any of the books, you should read a precis (which is the erudite term for summary) before you see the show.

As for where to sit, they sat in the Orchestra section but suggest that maybe Mezzanine seats would be even more fun because some of the flying swished right over the Mezzanine. The bottom line is that they really liked it and said it is worth seeing. I doubt that Janelle would have chosen to go to see this epic-length double feature, but it was Rosalie’s birthday and, being the kind of mother who eats broken cookies and surrenders the best seats, she could hardly say no.

6 Days - 6 Plays