On New York time (and times)….

Getting off the plane at JFK, I started chatting to the man who had been sitting in the row in front of me across the aisle, and he turned out to the Welsh actor Robert Blythe, who was coming across here to see his daughter Rhian appearing in Blink at 59E59 Theater as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway season there. (I’m heading there this Friday myself to see the New Perspectives production of Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man again that I’ve seen before in both Worcester and at Greenwich).

Later that evening, I arranged to meet my friend Bill Rosenfield - a one-time New Yorker who now actually lives in London but was over here for a bit himself - to see a play at Lincoln Center together; and afterwards, I popped into the After Party, a weekly late night Broadway “open mike” cabaret party at the Westbank Cafe on West 42nd Street, where I ran into London theatre enthusiast (and sometime blogger) Sean Rillo - who has been here all week and had, at my personal insistence, just seen Passing Strange that he was going to pass on (but was glad he hadn’t). Sean signed on to sing “If I Was a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof later in the evening, but now it was my time to pass - before I passed out - and I left before it was his turn.

On Saturday, I lunched with my composer friend Dana P Rowe (whose The Witches of Eastwick is being revived for a UK tour soon), then we saw The Country Girl together; last night, I saw Saved at Playwrights’ Horizons, a new musical with book and lyrics co-written by Dana’s Witches writing partner, John Dempsey, so these two dates were linked, too! And on Saturday night, the intimate gathering for Karen Akers’ late night show at the Algonquin included my London colleague Ruth Leon and actress Sian Phillips (currently appearing in Les Liaisons Dangereuses over here). My own guest was James Gavin, a writer whose book Intimate Nights is the definitive history of American cabaret. And yesterday, I had one of those odd bits of déjà vu that living a transatlantic theatre life can cause: only on Tuesday I had stood next to Neil LaBute at the West End opening of his play Fat Pig, and yesterday afternoon he was mingling outside the Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street, where his latest play Reasons to be Pretty was receiving its final press preview before opening on Tuesday.

But besides the people, what about the plays? Since Saved and Reasons to be Pretty are yet to open, I cannot comment on either yet; but A New Century at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theatre that I saw on Friday was the latest outrageously funny, deliciously “in-joke” comedy from Paul Rudnick. I realise that I may spoil the impact of hearing it for yourself if you see it, but since Ben Brantley has already done so in his New York Times review, I’ll repeat one of them. You may be sitting next to someone who is gay in the theatre, Mr Charles tells us from the stage; and offers this useful primer for identifying him: “He’s saving his Playbill. And he’s awake!” (It’s not an infallible guide, of course; one leading gay drama critic of a London paper may or may not save his programmes, but he’s regularly asleep). And the title, it turns out, references another New York institution: the discount clothing store Century 21, located Downtown beside what is now Ground Zero. I have been making my pilgrimages there for years - and on the fateful day that the Towers fell, I have to admit that I immediately wondered what happened to it. Some of the photographs of the site the next day showed it to be covered in dust but still standing; and it was one of the first places to re-open once the immediate environs were cleared.

The Clifford Odets classic The Country Girl is also a play of and about the theatre; and if Mike Nichols’ production had a famously rocky preview period, intimately chronicled by Michael Riedel in the New York Post as I previously wrote here, it has settled down into something very respectable, even quietly moving. Maybe the law of negative expectation applied - not expecting much, I enjoyed it more - but there are also some unexpected resonances to both those difficulties and the venue it is playing at. As Michael Musto put it in his weekly Village Voice column, “Adding more fascination to [this] revival, Morgan Freeman —who plays a man who has trouble remembering his lines—supposedly had trouble remembering his lines”.

But in the play, too, Peter Gallagher’s director character Bernie Dodd talks of the performance that inspired him to pursue a life in the theatre: it was Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie — which he saw eight times, he says - that did it. And on the backstage walls of the theatre of the play he is now directing, there’s a faded poster for it that shows it had played at the Royale (though in fact that was its transfer house, as it had originally opened at the now long-demolished Playhouse Theatre, which was razed to build onto the Rockefeller Center). Though the Royale is now sadly renamed the Bernard Jacobs Theatre (after the late luminary of the Shubert Organisation) so that particular piece of theatre history is lost, the Royale/Jacobs is where The Country Girl is now playing.