Quartet

Perkins, Cash, Elvis, & Jerry Lee

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Tuesday was our 42nd anniversary. I took Rita to NYC to see The MillionDollar Quartet. It's the romanticized story of the legendary 1956 reunion night in Sam Phillip's Sun Records. Apparently it really happened and the tape's finally been made into an album of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis jamming in front of the live mics. The story goes that it was the evening when Cash and Perkins told Phillips they were not going to renew their contracts.

The story's a thin reed to showcase actually five featured musicians and two backup players. How good is it? They made Rita scream when they whipped the audience into leaping frenzy. This is Broadway where America's very best theatrical talent work. If these people want to ignite a frenzy over a floor sweep... that audience will frenzy.

The five principals: Levi Kreis (Jerry Lee), Robert Britton Lyons (Carl Perkins), Lance Guest (Johnny Cash), Elizabeth Stanley (a fictional PC correct female edition) - and to a lesser extent Eddie Clendening (Elvis) are more electric than their amplifiers. Imagine the best concert you've seen - but stage it by top broadway directors, producers, lighters, sound engineers, and designers. Put it into a relatively small theater where every sight line is perfect... And you will get a sense of this thing.

Some months ago we enjoyed Jersey Boys on Broadway. This is its equal. It does not matter whether you like or hate rock-a-billy music. The theatricality of all of this is designed to slam you breathless. In fact, the last quarter of the show happens as a reprise. At a certain point, they drop all pretense of a drama, turn the stage into a concert hall, face the audience, and crank up the energy level to 11.

It is full frontal Broadway. BTW, the audience seemed to be wildly intergenerational. We were not the oldest couple and way far from the youngest. Its worth a trip to NYC. And, oh yeah. I booked the entire trip (except for Amtrak) through Broadway.com. We stayed at the Times Square Hilton, ate at Maison, and got center section, second row mezzanine seats (my favorite place to watch) from the company which I've used before and will exclusively use again.

It was a wonderful anniversary. Don't wait for your 42nd... call Broadway.com now (an unpaid testimonial). :-)

Hangin In Manhattan

Guess where I was last night... K?
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After The Times Square

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I'm re-studying expressionism. It demands complex, well planned images with parts that are worked by the artist to the point of distortion in order to communicate the feelings of the moment.

Here's Broadway, an explosion at night. Blasting color over every part of you... Throbbing with shocking energy. Noisy, fast, a cacophony of sheen. Too much to compute.. Too big to focus. Too massive to step back far enough. Neck hurting high and needling its way into the black curtain up there.... Puncturing it.

Broadway's a vertical thing at Times Square after the Times stupidly left the party.

Angels Play

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Perhaps someday I'll be able to find "WOW!" in another mountain vista. Michael Kimmelmen in The Accidental Masterpiece writes, "We are programmed now to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are therefore doomed to be disappointed when, invitably, we don't feel it."

I grow agape not at wind swept rocky peaks, but ones built by us. And New York City is all about what America once was about... BIG. It is large, robust, and muscular. It's buildings are comic-book brawny. When I think of Manhattan I think of structures which seem to hit their vanishing points before they get to their roofs. They puncture the sky, and sometimes even make it storm. And yet, people who live in cities like Lancaster, or New York... we don't look up. What happens to us, happens at street level. We have to be reminded about what's up there. Reminded to look at our vertical histories. And when we do, like tourists - we find a "WOW!" in the eye-poppingly, almost unnaturally gorgeous things that soar unsettling above our heads. Things which reach where angels play.

Prying Into Oysters

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Michael Kimmelman in his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece" argues that art has a higher purpose than just satisfying the senses. What he's tossing about is the idea that the philosopher David Hume proposed that beauty in art, as opposed to finding beauty naturally in a radiant vista, is dependent on reasoning and critical analysis. People may come around to seeing beauty in art through reasoned argument.

See, if you just look at something, these guys are thinking, and you go, "WOW!" well... you might be seeing something that's just stuck to the surface and it might be shallow. Beauty in art they figure is not solely decorative, nor is it there because the colors of the painting go with the couch. It should have a higher rational for being in art. Beauty in art has a function. A reason for being there. And we frequently have to work to pull it out. Coming at art without thinking is like going after the oyster without tools to tear at the shell.

So, thinking all those deep thoughts... I created this image from my trip to NYC last month. I wasn't after grandeur, or might. I just wanted to see if I could describe what people did to this spot of land. What I feel that people did to it. And since I am the world's greatest expert on my opinion about anything. Well here it is. Y'goddaproblem widdat?

Jersey Boys

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Forget... That's what you do when you haven't been to Broadway for some time. You forget that there's a filtration process and that the people whose product arrives on these stages are the very best that the American theater's got. The writers, directors, producers, musicians, and actors are all at the peak of their crafts and of their careers. So it comes as a startling astonishment to the people like me who get here every few years ... at just how good these people are.
Jersey Boys is about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It won the awards last year. So these are the best of the best who are working just now. The audience went panty-throwing nuts. Women were hooting, men were shouting, the place rocked. See the way this image explodes! Imagine the pounding melody behind it. And then listen for thousands of hands clapping, and their owners standing up and screaming. You don't have to imagine this... I was one of them. It is that good. This time, I'll try not to forget.

Crammed

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So how to get a feel for a typical street in Manhattan? Well, maybe there's no one 'typical' street, but at least, how about a grab of a scene that would resonate with a New Yorker? I've tried that a bunch of times. And one of the first things I noticed was overload. Details are everywhere. There's so much, in such sharp focus, in so many colors that the jumble actually becomes... Well, you know how your mind is hard wired to find patterns? New York at first fights that, and then it just imposes a different sense of pattern atop whatever you're used to. Here... look at this image. Do I have it? is that 'typical'? Can you hear the horn section?

Guess Where I Went?

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I told you we were going away for a couple of days. Anyone want to guess where? We were lucky to get there Sunday and return to Lancaster on Monday. Apparently Saturday in the city was an artic adventure with freezing temps and gale force winds off the Atlantic. But, as if switched off for our arrival, the breeze was gentle and the night temps in the high thirties. Over the next couple of days I'll share my impressions with you... But here's the explosion you expect... and this my friends is a Sunday night! A hair brighter on the Great White Way than Lancaster Square. Cool, eh?