Friday, April 29, 2016

I saw "Bright Star"




What I saw: "Bright Star" at the Cort Theater, on W 45th St between 6th and 7th Avenues





What I wore: Dirty jeans. A shirt of my mother's from the 80s. That Zara cardigan. The noisy boots. 


What I did beforehand:  ate a hamburger and drank a beer.





Who went with me: a lot of white people



How I got tickets: yesterday, using my phone, with special pricing 

Why I saw this show: I was promised bluegrass music


Where I sat: Row H, Seat 9, on the left, behind this woman with like a humungous head and pretty much giant hair that was blonde on the outside and caramel-nougat-colored on the inside and she had like fallen asleep on a train today or something so she had this total sort of bed-head in the back. Actually, it was like she had another face on the back of her head, and it was trying to see, and it was looking at me instead of the show.

Things that were sad: the woman next to me was crying in response to the last song; both of the women behind me were crying, too.

Things that were funny: that I went to a show billed for its sweetness and sentimentality

Things that were not funny: there was an unnecessary banjo joke, and a pretty tasteless joke about the use of "they" as a singular person pronoun.

What it is: a musical in two acts, with an intermission. Smooth, shiny and polished, with masterful staging and seamless transitions. The band is onstage, and the actors voices were amplified to near-perfection, although this night I witnessed three glitches.  

Who should see it: people who like their Broadway musicals flavored with American country music, people who like really, really happy endings, people who reminisce about an imaginary American past where the south was just a string of charming small towns, like precious pearls on a string, full of white, God-fearing people just trying to live respectably.



What I saw on the way home: people, cabs, an ambulance, trash.

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