To emerge from the subway blinking into the bright lights of 42nd Street, you wouldn’t even think there was a Broadway theatre strike on: the three Broadway theatres that are in fact on this rejuvenated (and somewhat homogenised) stretch now are all open for business. That’s because they all fall out of the control of the three main chains that dominate Broadway, the Shuberts, Nederlanders and Jujamcyns, so have all made separate negotiations with the unions.
It has given Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein one of its unexpected breaks: in the wake of the often hostile reviews it opened to, it is now one of the few large-scale musicals actually running. But it’s therefore all the more ironic that, having set up tickets to see it as my first show in town last night, I got to the box office to discover that my seats weren’t there. I’ve yet to discover where the problem lay, but I had an e-mail from the press agent the night before confirming I was “all set” for last night. Though a friend waspishly noted yesterday that this is “the one show on Broadway where its the audiences who are picketing afterwards, complaining about what they’ve had to sit through”, I did want to see it again: I saw it in previews when Roger Bart was out, and want to be review it, too.
But it wasn’t to be. Still, I got a lesson in box office officiousness that would give the West End Whingers (http://westendwhingers.wordpress.com/) something to whinge about! (It’s high time for a Broadway Whingers equivalent, except that its already being written every minute on http://www.talkinbroadway.com/allthatchat).
The box office person concerned — she would only give her name as Michelle — told me to wait on one side until the company manager paid her nightly visit to the box office, and they would try to contact the PR concerned. When she finally arrived half an hour later, with only 15 minutes to go before curtain up, I was simply told there was nothing that could be done: the order hadn’t been received by the box office, and neither did they have a cellphone contact for the PR, only his assistant. When I called that number, it simply went to voicemail.
You can’t expect PRs to be on duty all the time, especially at the start of a holiday period. But since offices won’t re-open now until Monday, re-arranging seeing the show will have to wait until then. Meanwhile, I have lost a slot. And even though there are sadly few Broadway shows to see, I am making up for it by scheduling plenty of Off-Broadway and cabaret shows instead.
Wandering around the rest of the theatre district after this abortive trip was an even more depressing sight: this should have been the start of a bumper weekend for Broadway, but almost every other theatre was dark.
My God! Did it ever occur to a drama critic
that he could BUY a ticket and not get
arrested. If he really wanted to see the
show he could have.
Mark has often told us about buying tickets - most recently a batch of them for War Horse at the National. And he blogged here about having spent $50 to see YF at an early preview when the PR people wouldn't accomadate him. (Mark I think they just don't want you to see the show). I have to assume that having previously seen YF without Roger Bart, the idea of spending anywhere from $70 in the upper balcony to $450 in premium orchestra seats would simply be a wasteful (not mention masochistic)move - no matter how weak the dollar is at this point. To see a bad show such as Young Frankenstein once is unfortunate; to pay and see it a second time would be insanity.