Often when Rich and I go on vacation, we are on-the-go, non-stop starting first thing in the morning, visiting tourist attractions, museums, art galleries, shops and cafes and just walking around neighbourhoods absorbing history and culture. But by the evening when these establishments are closed and we are tired, there is not much for us to do. More likely than not, we would go out for an early meal or eat make or buy something to eat in our home swap or apartment and then relax "at home" for the rest of the night. But for this trip, we were in New York City and there is such a vibrant night-life that we ended up spending many evenings out on the town.
Many TV talk shows tape in Manhattan and we were hoping to score free tickets to one of them. Rich and I had attended a taping of Conan O'Brien on a previous trip to New York and had a good time. On this visit along with our friends Yim and Murray, the one show that we were really hoping to get tickets for was Last Week Tonight with John Oliver since we love his well-researched and hilarious social and political rants and thought he would have a heyday with the current political climate. Unfortunately the week we were in town was the only week that he was not taping! Instead we went into a lottery on the
1iota.com website for tickets to see the extremely popular Stephen Colbert and the slightly less popular Seth Meyers. It is quite the process to get tickets as there is a very small window between the tickets being not yet available and being sold out. About a week and a half before our trip, we were informed that we were booked for 4 tickets to Seth Meyers with no word from the Colbert show, which we figured we had not been selected for. Then the day before we were supposed to see Seth Meyers, we received an email indicating that 2 of our 4 tickets for Stephen Colbert were now available for the same day as Seth Meyers .. talk about last minute notice!
Evaluating our options, it was an easy decision to stick with the Seth Meyers show and forego the Colbert show for several reasons. First, the 4 of us wanted to watch a taping together. More importantly, the timing and conditions for going to Seth Meyers were much less restrictive than Colbert. The Seth Meyers taping required you to line up at 4:45pm for a 5:30 show and asked that you did not come earlier. This left us all morning and a large part of the afternoon to take part in other activities. By comparison, "tickets" to the Colbert show did not even guarantee your entry to the taping. It only gave you access to line up for the show, which is always oversold with entry granted on a first come first serve basis. It is recommended that you line up between 1-2pm or earlier to ensure that you actually get into the 5:30 taping. This would have wasted our entire day and was not worth it.
Upon arriving at Rockefeller Centre to line up for the taping of
Late Night With Seth Meyers, we were passed through metal detectors and then ushered into a waiting area called the "Peacock Lounge" where we were "prepped" for the show. We were warned numerous times not to take photos but were told that talk show staff would come around and take a souvenir photo for us. We were instructed to try to do something unusual in our photo and then post it on social media with the hashtag #LNSM for a chance to be upgraded for VIP seats at the front of the studio. We actually took two photos, hamming it up even more on the second one, but sadly we were not chosen for the upgrade. In retrospect, it seems the people were randomly chosen for the upgrade and it had nothing to do with the photos.. that was just a ploy to get us to promote the show on social media. While we waited to be let into the studio, we were given instructions on how to clap and cheer loudly on cue, a skill that would be called upon repeatedly throughout the taping.
Once actually in the studio, we were first entertained by a "warm-up" comedian who again took us through the motions of clapping when cued. As practice, we were prodded to clap wildly for the 8G house band led by Fred Armisen (former Saturday Night Live cast member with Seth Meyers), and then for the camera men and even the cue card guys. I was starting to feel like a trained seal. There were also warnings about not waving or staring straight into the TV cameras if they focused on us, but this seemed like a pointless caution since the cameras never turned to take a shot of the audience. I watched the show after we got home and there was only one or two brief shots of the audience all from the back or side views. So no 15 seconds of fame for us. Finally Seth Meyers came out to start his monologue and as instructed,
we gave him a rousing round of applause and cheering. As is wont for
all the talk show hosts these days, most of the opening jokes revolved
around politics and the Trump administration. Despite all the practice,
Seth only received tepid laughter and claps for most of the jokes in
his monologue and even a bit of a groan for one of them, causing him to
make a bit of a grimace.
He did receive a loud and genuine cheer when he announced his first guest, Scarlett Johannson, who was there to promote her new movie "Ghost in the Shell". Once again Johannson is in an action movie, playing a severely injured human whose brain is transplanted into a cyborg, turning her into the perfect soldier. She talked about training for the action sequences and then taking self defense courses in real life. The conversation veered towards how New York has changed over the years with Scarlett lamenting the loss of a shoe-lace store(?) and Meyers talking about Greenwich Village Sex Ghosts (?!?). I thought the interaction could have been funnier but it was exciting to see a beautiful movie star in person nonetheless.
Surprisingly the segment that I found the most entertaining was with the next guests, who I have not previously heard of before. They were Joe Scarborough & Mila Brzezinski, the co-hosts of the talk show "
Morning Joe" on MSNBC, which features interviews with top newsmakers and politicians and analysis of top stories. In the talk with Seth Meyers, they told the story of how they had been extremely hard on Donald Trump during the election, calling him a bigot, racist and needing of psychiatric help, but none of that fazed him. It was not until they claimed that Bernie Sanders and Chris Christie had better ratings than Trump that the President became so upset that un-followed them on Twitter.
The final guest was celebrity chef Mario Batali who would be cooking a dish containing razor clams and shrimps. This made me really excited since it was almost 7:30pm at this point and we were starving. I was hoping it would be like one of the shows by Oprah or Ellen where everyone in the audience gets something--in this case, a taste of the food prepared on stage would have been great! Alas, while the crew swarmed around the meal after the show, there was no offerings for the hard-working audience who had clapped vigorously when prompted for over an hour.
The other obvious thing to do in New York is to see a Broadway show, especially if you are theatre buffs like Rich and I are. In particular I love live stage musicals and so the plan was to pick one to watch. We have already watched most of the older musicals currently on
Broadway, such as Wicked, Lion King, or Avenue Q. We were looking for
something new, fun and uplifting that we had not watched before. We were a bit put off by the extremely high prices for a Broadway musical, especially relative to all the excellent shows that we are able to watch in Toronto for much less money (and in Canadian dollars!). We considered School of Rock, the musical based on the 2003 Jack Black comedy about a musician who pretends to be a substitute teacher and turns his students into a rock band. But the cheaper seats ($79-$99 US) were already sold out and we could only find tickets for $149 US or more. That comes to over $200 Canadian! This seemed too much money to spend on a single show. Instead we chose
Groundhog Day the Musical, based on the 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray and Andie McDowell about a jaded reporter ironically named Phil, who is sent to
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the story of whether his namesake groundhog sees his shadow. Through unexplained circumstances, Phil the reporter ends up reliving the same day over and over again, leading to hilarious situations as he learns to take advantage of his advanced knowledge of what would happen in the day, including how to woo his female TV producer Rita.
There are many websites selling Broadway tickets but
you need to be careful since some of them charge hefty service charges,
sometimes up to 40% of the ticket price. The site to use seems to be telecharge.com
which sells tickets directly from the theatres and only charges a flat
$10 per ticket. Unfortunately telecharge was not selling tickets for
Groundhog Day but we got redirected to Ticketmaster, which was still
relatively reasonable compared to some of the other ticket resellers. Since the show was still in previews, we were able to get pretty good seats in row H centre mezzanine of the August Wilson Theatre to watch Groundhog Day the Musical for just $87 US per ticket plus tax and service charges.
This musical had originated in London's West End and received excellent reviews there, so it seemed like a good choice. Danny Rubin who created the original movie script also wrote the book for the musical, so the plot points followed quite closely but were expanded to incorporate the songs and musical numbers. The lyrics and score were written by Tim Minchin who previously wrote the hit musical Matilda and has shown a knack for capturing the tone of dark comedy.
One of the darkest but also funniest sequences in the show is a feat of staging and choreography. Phil falls into a depression after having to repeat the events of the same day again and again. In a long singing montage, he tries various ways to kill himself in order to end the cycle, including shooting himself in the head, electrocuting himself in the bathtub with a plugged in coffee maker and jumping off a high building. In each case, the day resets and he ends up back in bed. Through slight-of-hand trickery, you think you are watching Phil commit his latest suicide attempt on one side of the stage, when magically he appears back in his bed on the other side. I watched carefully and still fell for it three or four times.
Other great piece of staging occurs after Phil realizes that there are no long lasting consequences to any of his actions since anything he does in one iteration of a day would be reset in the next. Knowing this, he relinquishes himself to all types of indiscretions including overeating, boozing and womanizing, culminating in a high speed car chase with police through the little town of Punxsutawney. The sequence is accomplished using techniques of "Black Light Theatre". Actors entirely covered in black wardrobe hold up florescent cut-outs of houses as well as Phil's truck and the police cars in pursuit. As the vehicles weave up and down and around the row of houses, the illusion of watching a flattened version of a car chase is reinforced by dialogue and sound effects.
Groundhog Day the Musical is funny, heartwarming and nostalgic (having watched the movie years ago) and everything we had hoped for in a night of entertainment. The songs ranged from witty to touching to ironic with just enough repetition in the beginning of the show to drive home the situation of Phil reliving the same day over and over again. Given the suicide scenes, some implied sex scenes and swearing, I was a bit concerned about the row of fairly young children that were sitting in the audience behind us. But they seemed content each cuddling their souvenir groundhog plush toy.
With the steep prices for Broadway shows, we only purchased tickets to one show but we did have a chance win tickets to another. A daily lottery was being held by BroadwayDirect for the chance to purchase 2 tickets to
Hamilton the Musical for only $10 each. You were not guaranteed what seats you get, so for all we knew, they could have been obstructed vision behind a pole. You submit your entry each day, usually starting at 8am, and once the window for entry closed, 46 tickets would be sold to the randomly selected winning submissions. Win or lose, you would get an email immediately after the close of the daily draw to inform you of the results. The chance of winning was minuscule since over 100,000 people entered each day, but it allowed us excitement for the few brief hours per day while there was still a chance of success. Needless to say, none of us won but we certainly had fun trying.
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