We broke the “Never on Sunday” rule to take in the Paul Taylor Dance Company this afternoon. Better to say that I broke the rule when I bought the tickets in January. All I knew when I bought the tickets was that I wanted to see “Arden Court.” I couldn’t have told you why. It may have been a snapshot of the dance that was printed in a brochure several years ago; it may have been something that somebody said. According to this year’s brochure, “Arden Court” would be given three times, and the other two dates were for one reason or another impossible. So I broke the rule against doing things on Sundays and bought tickets for this afternoon’s performance. The result was not repentance, but a new rule.

Once a quarter, more or less, we’ll break the “Never on Sunday” rule and go to some matinee or other. Sunday matinees are usually at three in the afternoon; that leaves plenty of time for a late lunch — and for box-office crawling. Here’s how box-office crawling works:

Kathleen fills a few dozen large Post-It notes with information about plays that we want to see. (There are lots at the moment, more than we can afford to see.) Then she organizes the notes. Watching Kathleen organize her notes, this morning, took me straight back to law school, when I spent hours watching Kathleen revise her course summaries, always in the direction of fewer, more concentrated sentences. And my jaw dropped when I imagined what law school must be like now that Post-It notes have been invented. We didn’t have them. They had just gone on the market, and weren’t doing well, when we showed up in South Bend in the late summer of 1977. Even worse, the personal computer didn’t exist, either. I’m quite sure that Kathleen would not have used a computer to organize her summaries. For her, the hand-writing is everything.

We left the house this afternoon with information about no fewer than eleven shows. We started out at the Nederlander Theatre, on 41st Street, and finished up at the Shubert, on 44th, buying tickets to Guys & Dolls, The Philanthropist, Waiting for Godot, The God of Carnage, and Blithe Spirit. That adds up to ten tickets, but in fact we bought a baker’s dozen, for we’re taking Ms NOLA and M le Neveu to the Loesser musical, and a law school friend (and regular DB reader — we really must find an alias for her) will fly up in April to see the Beckett, which she claims to find “entertaining.” We wanted to buy tickets to Impressionism, which will star Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons (incontournable!), but the box office was closed. I will not name the plays that we crossed off our list as we weighed and considered, nor those that, in view of longer runs, we thought we might safely postpone booking at this time.

We don’t know a thing about The Philanthropist, but Matthew Broderick, who is always very good in the movies, has never failed to wow us in the theatre. Those of you who saw him in the film version of The Producers only don’t know what you missed, and I’m afraid that I’m not gifted enough to tell you. I can only make the matter more confusing by bringing up Cherry Jones, who works a similar magic in person but whose film work does not suggest, as his does, the wonders of her presence onstage. How about this: Matthew Broderick in the movies is a designer cologne; Matthew Broderick onstage is the designer’s made-to-measure suit.

The God of Carnage is the latest bitter-smart comedy by Yasmina Reza to reach Broadway. We have still not recovered from watching Alan Alda wield a red felt-tipped pen, in Art… As fans of James Gandolfini when — for his endearing performance in Get Shorty, to be precise — we will not be seeing the show to catch a whiff of The Sopranos. As for Blithe Spirit, which will star the redoubtable Mame herself (Angela Lansbury) and bad-boy toff Rupert Everett, Kathleen thought that she had bought a pair of tickets online, but it turned out that the sale was not completed. Her credit card was not charged, and we never got any tickets. The need to start from scratch was one reason for crawling from box-office to box-office on a wintry afternoon.

There were other good reasons: you save as much as $30 per ticket in ridiculous add-on fees charged by the online outfits (who shall go nameless, but you know who they are). And you can see exactly where you’ll be sitting, because a human being points at a chart and tells you. You don’t have to watch the mail for “inconspicuous” envelopes containing valuable real property. (The rental of four seats to a Broadway musical costs as much as a good apartment in most markets — sadly not ours.) I’d puff a bit about the healthy exercise &c, but everyone knows that 90% of Broadway’s theatres are located on four adjacent blocks. And, when were through the the crawl, and had our quick lunch (at the Times Square branch of Brooklyn Diner), we had to walk twelve whole blocks uptown to City Center — only twelve.

And when we came out of City Center after the delightful dances — I was quite right about “Arden Court,” if for no known reason — it was still daylight.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Weekend Update, Yorkville High Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.