The Good Team.

I did an interview with The Good Folks over at The Good Team.

In fact, I did the first interview with The Good Folks over at The Good Team.

Read it.  Learn some things about me.

Check back in with them in the future.  Learn some things about other people.

Some Yankee Stuff.

I’m stealing these from Baseball Musings, which pulls them all from other spots (which I’ll note as well):

*The Indians signed Carl Pavano, which I mention mainly for this line from BM:

If Pavano pitches great and Sabathia ends up injured for most of the season, I suspect a lot of Yankees fans will be sore from banging their heads against a wall.

And such is the life of a Yankee fan.

*Thoughts from the Mark Teixeira unveiling:

*Said he used to wear a Yankees hat to Orioles games in Baltimore as a kid, which was not a popular stance of course, because he loved Don Mattingly.
*Will wear No. 25. Grew up wearing 23 for Mattingly, but that’s been retired by the Yankees.

That’s a pretty good way to endear yourself to us Yankee fans.  Would be better if Donnie was still on the team, but we’ll take it.  I’m looking forward to this season.

January 6th’s New Thing(s).

1/6: Two new things, even though one wasn’t really new.  First, I had Peruvian food at Coco Roco on Smith Street (I’ve been there before, but not for years).  It was damn good.  Then I ended up at Comix to watch a friend of a friend do some stand-up.  The whole line-up of comics was pretty damn funny, and then, lo and behold, Judah Friedlander just showed up to do an extended set.  Good times.

Tonight, Under The Radar.

Under The Radar.

Under The Radar opens tonight, and Alexis at the Voice has a good preview:

Though Russell boasts a long and thriving relationship with solo performance, he confesses an ambivalence toward the form. “I always try to avoid one-person shows,” he says—he’s surprised and “kind of embarrassed” to discover just how many he’s programmed in this year’s festival. Yet he has ensured plenty of variety within the genre: Little commonality exists between Gare St. Lazare’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s First Love; Bamuthi Joseph’s dance-driven monologue; Lee Breuer’s puppet plays Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto; Dargel’s ballads concerning elective amputation; Jim Fletcher’s performance of Tim Etchell’s orgy of declarative sentences, Sight Is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First; and Lemon Andersen’s confessional County of Kings: The Beautiful Struggle, in which he invites audiences to “watch me deal with ridicule and shame . . . by turning myself into the king of poetry spit fame.”

I will be on hand pretty much every night of the festival, making sure the LuEsther Lounge (aka the afterparty–aka the FREE afterparty) runs smoothly.

You should come.  Tickets to each show at The Public are $15, which is ridiculous and unheard of for the quality you’re going to get.  The shows are crazy, inventive, beautiful, everything.  I’m not selling this to you — just come see it.

The Truth About The Shows That Closed, Part Two.

Here’s part two. Go back and read part one. I’m not linking it.

‘HAIRSPRAY,’ closed Sunday — Monster hit, and deservedly so. Spawned a far less successful retread (I mean Crybaby – and retread is unnecessarily harsh, sorry) and a not-nearly-as-good movie (although Amanda Bynes was super adorable, as always). Made $265 million on Broadway alone, not to mention the tours and everything else. Ran for six and a half years. You can certainly say that this show could have run longer in more ideal conditions (especially since they could bring in any number of stars {I saw George Wendt, Naturi Naughton, and Tevin Effing Campell} to keep it going), and you might be tempted to call it a victim, but it’s not the kind of victim you spend much time crying over. Tracy had a great run.

‘IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS,’ closed Sunday — Limited run, huge hit, possible future life. Exceeded expectations. No victim.

‘LIZA’S AT THE PALACE,’ closed Sunday — Limited run, big hit, extended twice. Could have run as long as the theater stayed available and her body could hold out, I’m sure. Still, I might call this one a slight victim; some weeks they only sold about 80% capacity when you might have expected this to be completely sold out. It’s a moneymaker though, and not a surprise closing — if anything, those two extensions buck the trend.

‘THE NEW MEL BROOKS MUSICAL YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN,’ closed Sunday — You can call this a victim, and it was, on some level. If the economy was better, it might not have closed. The writing had been on the since the Times review came out. The show’s troubled history has been well-documented, and the closing notice really came as no surprise. If this show is a victim of anything, it’s the success The Producers: all anyone wanted (and would accept) from it was to be as good or better as the biggest hit in recent Broadway history. It wasn’t. Still, they held on for over a year, and although they probably lost a ton of money (the show was astoundingly expensive to run each week), they’ve got a national tour announced for the fall. Closing was inevitable. Not a victim.

‘SLAVA’S SNOWSHOW,’ closed Sunday — This show didn’t sell all that well, from what I can tell, staying between 60-80% for much of its run. I’d say that they could have done better with more stability in the economy, but you definitely can’t say that the closing is a result of the economy: it was a limited run. This show had been successful Off-Broadway for years (and internationally for more than a decade), and the Broadway run probably didn’t break any financial backs. We can call it a moderate victim, and assume it won’t be back next year.

‘SPAMALOT,’ closes on Jan. 11. — $175 million dollars grossed. Recouped in six months. Ran for almost four years. Ongoing national tour with the kind of show that can pop in another name (Richard Chamberlain! Gary Beech! Clay Aiken!) and sell tickets in Cleveland and beyond. Certainly a victim — there’s no reason to believe that this show couldn’t have wrung out a few more years under ideal economic conditions — but not a particularly sad one.

‘SPRING AWAKENING,’ closes on Jan. 18. — I really should see this before it closes — I won’t get to, but I should. Somehow, this one flew entirely under the radar for me, even when it was the hottest show in town. You can imagine this show running longer, but then again, most folks wouldn’t have imagined it lasting this long in the first place, not to mention the national and international tours. It made its money back over a year ago, and was probably (speculation here) hurt somewhat by In The Heights and Passing Strange (although it’s hard to believe that the latter’s ticket sales put a dent in anybody’s profits). This is a victim, yes, but one that had already outperformed original expectations.

Let me take a second to explain why I think the outperformed expectations label is relevant. There’s this expectation in the United States that things can always grow, that business can always be better. It’s part of what got us into this whole economic mess in the first place. You can’t expect that every Broadway show is going to run forever. Shows close all the time — there are only so many ticket buyers to go around. So while it’s easy to say that all these shows would have stuck around without the economic downturn, it’s not realistic. Many, if not most, had long runs and were running their course. It’s impossible to say what would have happened otherwise, but it’s worth noting the shows that were financial successes when forced to shut down.

‘13,’ closed Sunday — If there’s a real victim in all this, I’d say it’s this show. In an ideal world, this show could have done exactly what it hoped to: capitalize on High School Musical and Hannah Montana and the entire tween culture of singing and dancing and precocious yet entirely chaste “rocking.” In an ideal world, they would have been the only such show in town (Wicked sort of fits that bill and Shrek might have bitten into that market, but Grease and Hairspray were a little too risque to really count), and they’d have tapped into the kind of repeat business that turns unassuming properties into monster megahits. But these aren’t ideal times, and the reviews weren’t great, and the buzz never got going. Tickets weren’t moving (around 50% capacity when they announced the closing date), and the kids just never started loving it the way they would have had to for the show to have legs. It’s hard to say that 13 would have been a huge hit (again, the reviews weren’t great, or to be more specific, the Times review wasn’t great), but it’s not at all difficult to imagine that it could.

So what have we learned? Some of these shows would have closed anyway. Some of these shows had long fruitful runs. Some of these shows were always planning to close, and some closed just a bit earlier than expected.

And what does that mean?  The hell if I know.