edjames

Michael Reidel in today's NYPost announces that the London production of Company, directed by Marianne Elliott, will transfer to Broadway next fall! Gender-bending Sondheim revival is coming to Broadway By Michael Riedel November 1, 2018 | 8:54pm The ladies who lunch are booking a table in New York. The gender-bending revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” which won rave reviews in London, will open on Broadway next fall, several theater sources told The Post. Directed by Marianne Elliott, the whiz behind the Tony-winning “War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and last season’s revival of “Angels in America,” “Company” just extended its run in London until March. Unless you’ve got connections, tickets are impossible to come by. The twist here is that Bobby, the bachelor at the center of the show, is now Bobbie, a bachelorette, brilliantly played by Rosalie Craig. Although celebrated in London, she’s yet to make her Broadway debut. But she will next fall, in “Company,” leading a cast that includes Patti LuPone, who stops the show with her rendition of “The Ladies Who Lunch.” LuPone has done something only she could do: upstage Elaine Stritch, who originated the role and made that song her calling card. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone who caught LuPone in John Doyle’s 2005 revival of “Sweeney Todd.” I didn’t think anyone could match Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett. Then LuPone came out with her tuba — all the actors played instruments in that production — and walked off with a Tony nomination. LuPone has said that she’s through with musicals. She was exhausted after “War Paint,” valiantly struggling through the run with a bad hip (she had it replaced after the show closed). But she’s enjoyed working with Elliott, and will reprise the role in New York. LuPone has two Tonys: one for “Evita,” the other for the 2008 revival of “Gypsy.” There’s a third in her future for “Company.” Sondheim kept an eye on this revival, sources say, just to make sure the gender switch didn’t radically alter the tone and style of the show. He took a break from his new musical, based on the Luis Buñuel movies “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel,” to attend “Company” rehearsals in London. He suggested some changes and is said to be delighted to see it come to Broadway. A few critics have complained that this revival, which is set in the present, doesn’t quite capture the spirit of New York. That is a problem since “Company,” originally set in 1970, is the essence of sophisticated New York. But Elliott, sources say, is taking the criticisms into account and will inject more of the Big Apple into the Broadway production. I expect to see her huddled over her notes at the Grill in the Seagram Building, which represents the New York at the heart of “Company.”

Sounds like a dream assignment. You did not mention if this assignment came with a term/time limit (2,3 + years?). I say go for it. If indeed a dream of a lifetime to live and work in China then do it. I'm sure you and your partner will work out the details. I would not focus on being an "out, gay man' in China. First and foremost, be yourself, a professional businessman, a representative of your company and country. I would hate for you to, in later years, sit back back and have a "coulda, woulda, shoulda" moment. Have fun. Enjoy the experience. Good luck.

Saw this production last night. A wonderfully written and acted play! Smart, funny and on-topic in today's world where the media is clobbered by the right wing. About 80 minutes. No intermission.

NYPOST says: Elaine May leads a strong ensemble in heart-wrenching ‘Waverly Gallery’ By Joe Dziemianowicz October 25, 2018 | 10:52pm THEATER REVIEW THE WAVERLY GALLERY Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes, one intermission. 252 W. 45th St.; 212-239-6200. Old age isn’t for sissies. And as painful as that reality is, Kenneth Lonergan faces it head-on in “The Waverly Gallery,” his affecting, funny-sad memory play about the wrenching and rapid decline of his feisty grandmother. Granted, the play that opened Thursday night on Broadway sounds like a total Debbie Downer, or a disease-of-the-week flick you’ve already seen. It isn’t. You haven’t. Even in this early work — which played off-Broadway 18 years ago, long before Lonergan won an Oscar for “Manchester by the Sea” — his keen ear for dialogue is evident, as is his knack for coaxing humor, warmth and humanity from dark circumstances. In a brilliant stroke, Elaine May plays Gladys, a liberal lawyer and mover and shaker in her prime, now long past. It’s May’s first Broadway appearance in 50 years, since she and Mike Nichols first established themselves as an iconic comic duo. Now 86, she’s a petite and soft-spoken presence, whose wry, endearing performance recalls Ruth Gordon. It’s hard watching Gladys’ vigor and faculties fade within two years, beginning in 1989, when her hair turns from auburn to white, since dyeing it is the least of her concerns. Although May anchors the show, it feels more like an ensemble piece — even the curtain call is designed that way; there’s no solo bow. That works, as Gladys loses her memory and, slowly, herself. Her 20-something grandson, Daniel (Lucas Hedges), the playwright’s alter ego, bears the brunt of it. He lives on “the front lines,” down the hall from Gladys in an apartment building near the Greenwich Village art gallery she’s run for years. Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea,” “Boy Erased”) makes all the right moves as Daniel struggles not to blow his top when his grandmother asks the same questions over and over, or buzzes his doorbell late at night. Like Tom in “The Glass Menagerie,” Daniel steps in and out of scenes to comment on the proceedings, and his own shortcomings. Just as exasperated and heartsick is his mother, an Upper West Side doctor, played as naturally as breathing by Joan Allen. David Cromer, better known these days as the director of “The Band’s Visit,” is sympathetic as her clumsy, well-meaning husband. Michael Cera, in his third Lonergan play in four years, completes the cast as an artist Gladys takes under her wing. Cera sheds his trademark tics and impresses as a naive New Englander who knows that details are everything. Despite the interminable scene changes set against black-and-white video of the bygone New York of Gladys’ younger days, director Lila Neugebauer’s production boasts fine details of its own, including evocative sets and costumes true to the time, place and character. One small but essential detail comes when the four family members sit down for a meal. They face each other, not the audience, in what recalls a real group portrait. And that’s what “The Waverly Gallery” is all about.

Good reviews! NYTIMES SAYS: Review: Elaine May Might Break Your Heart in ‘Waverly Gallery’ By Ben Brantley From the moment Gladys Green opens her mouth — which is the moment that the curtain rises on Kenneth Lonergan’s wonderful play “The Waverly Gallery” at the Golden Theater — it’s clear that for this garrulous woman, idle conversation isn’t a time killer. It is a lifeline. An octogenarian New Yorker, former lawyer and perpetual hostess for whom schmoozing and kibitzing have always been as essential as breathing, Gladys operates on the principle that if she can just continue to talk, she can surely power through the thickening fog of her old age. That she has clearly already lost this battle makes her no less valiant. That it’s Elaine May who is giving life to Gladys’s war against time lends an extra power and poignancy to “The Waverly Gallery,” which opened on Thursday night under Lila Neugebauer’s fine-tuned direction. Long fabled as a director, script doctor and dramatist, Ms. May first became famous as a master of improvisational comedy, instantly inventing fully detailed, piquantly neurotic characters who always leaned slightly off-kilter. Her for such quick-sketch portraiture. And their appearance on Broadway together in the early 1960s is recalled by those who saw it as if they had been divine visitations, blazing and all too brief. One can imagine Gladys Green having attended “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” and saving the program. She might even have perceived a glimmer of her own vivacious self in that couple’s determined loquacity. In any case, the Gladys we meet in “The Waverly Gallery” — the title comes from the small rented Greenwich Village space where she shows art of dubious distinction — is conducting what might be called extreme improvisation. She’s bluffing, fabricating, groping for a direction in what must often seem like a void. Trying to convince her family and herself that she’s still capable of navigating the flux of urban life, Gladys always fills in the verbal gaps that confront her, even with words that may not be the right ones. At 86, Ms. May — in her first Broadway appearance in more than 50 years — turns out to be just the star to nail the rhythms, the comedy and the pathos of a woman who’s talking as fast as she can to keep her place in an increasingly unfamiliar world. First staged Off Broadway in 2000, with a very fine Eileen Heckart as Gladys, “The Waverly Gallery” was inspired by the final years of Mr. Lonergan’s own grandmother. It is a memory play in both its structure and its subject. Rendered through the retrospective gaze of Gladys’s grandson — Daniel (a first-rate Lucas Hedges), who lives down the hall from Gladys — it recalls Tennessee Williams’s guilt-drenched “The Glass Menagerie.” But Mr. Lonergan’s lens on the past is sharper and harsher. He is trying to capture, with almost clinical precision, the patterns of speech of a willful woman sliding into senility. At the same time, he is assessing the impact of such disjointedness on the helpless members of her family, who without even being aware of it sometimes find themselves adopting Gladys’s fragmented worldview. In other words, “The Waverly Gallery” is very much a group portrait, in which everyday life is distorted to the point of surrealism by the addled soul at its center. And Ms. Neugebauer has assembled a dream cast to embody the collective madness that seems to descend on those closest to Gladys. They include Gladys’s daughter (and Daniel’s mother), Ellen (Joan Allen, who wrenchingly combines filial devotion and resentment); her psychoanalyst husband Howard (an impeccably tactless David Cromer); and Don (Michael Cera, doing confident but clueless), a young painter from Massachusetts who stumbles into Gladys’s gallery one day and winds up showing — and living — there. Part of the painful pleasure of “The Waverly Gallery” is listening to how these characters listen to Gladys, and how, in responding to her, they come to question the reliability of their own words. As a screenwriter (“You Can Count on Me,” “Manchester by the Sea”) and dramatist (“This Is Our Youth,” “Lobby Hero”), Mr. Lonergan has always portrayed human communication as an imperfect compromise. “The Waverly Gallery” is his most literal presentation of that inadequacy. Gladys crams all silences with increasingly disconnected bits of autobiography and with peppy questions and catchphrases that she has probably used for decades. (“Got any coffee lying around?”) She’s so convinced that Daniel writes for a newspaper (he’s a speechwriter) that he no longer bothers to correct her. By the end, the identities of those around her blur with those of people long dead. But that doesn’t stop Gladys talking, even in her sleep. Daniel’s crystalline monologues of recollection aside, “The Waverly Gallery” often has the ostensible waywardness of recorded conversations. But no word is randomly chosen here, starting with Gladys’s opening line: “I never knew anything was the matter.” She’s talking about the end of Helen’s first marriage, to Daniel’s father, but it comes to suggest a more willful oblivion. And when she whimsically describes the loneliness of Ellen’s dog, who just wants a little attention, you know exactly what Gladys really means. Always stylishly dressed (Ann Roth did the costumes), Ms. May’s Gladys retains her coercive hostess’s charm. She ends most of her sentences with a practiced winning smile that now seems to be searching anxiously for affirmation. All the cast members function beautifully as quotidian detectives, looking for the patterns in the pieces. In a shattering moment, a teary Daniel hugs his mother tight, and you know that he’s wondering if his relationship with Ellen might one day mirror that of Ellen’s with Gladys. As near perfect as the performances are, the physical production occasionally lets them down. David Zinn’s urban set, with its vistas of the city beyond, weighs heavily on the playing area. And the intervals between scenes — which feature vintage street photography projections (by Tal Yarden) — feel ponderously long. Such objections dissolve as soon as Gladys and her clan reassemble into groupings that convey both claustrophobic intimacy and tragic, unbridgeable distance. Mr. Cera’s homey painter may be no Picasso. But in describing his domestic portraits and local landscapes, he sums up the essence of the play. “I tried to get the details right,” he says, “because that’s what you remember when you think about something, so I tried like hell to get them the way they are.” So did Mr. Lonergan. That’s what makes “The Waverly Gallery” a work of such hard, compassionate clarity.

OK, so I finally broke down and saw this play last night. Warning! Bring a box of tissues! I still never got around to reading the original production reviews, so I went in "cold." My friend, who insisted I see it did not reveal much. Read Foxy's original review, I agree with him 100%. Good cast but the show is a tear jerker, and there are scenes that will stir your emotions and make you angry. An older gay woman sat next to me and she was practically hysterically crying. Her wife recently died and this play hit very close to home. That said, its a good production, a good cast and it's been on discounts (especially TDF) so if you have an opportunity to see it, urge you to do so.

Haven't seen a "hustler" in the Townhouse in years. Times have changed, everyone is hunting online or using Grinder.

Still Clubbing at 82 Paul Galluccio opened the Townhouse Bar in Manhattan nearly 30 years ago, after getting rejected by a doorman at another nightspot. Paul Galluccio, an owner of Townhouse, downstairs at the bar with the dancers Yoinel Aguilar and Troy Luzunaris Who says night life is only for the young? Certainly not Paul Galluccio, 82, the co-owner of Townhouse Bar, a well-appointed gay piano bar on East 58th Street that draws dapper gentlemen and their younger male admirers, some of whom are reputed to be on the hunt for sugar daddies. “I don’t want to retire,” Mr. Galluccio said on a recent Saturday night, when he arrived around 8 p.m., dressed in a striped Façonnable shirt, as he slowly climbed six steps of the front stoop. (He has arthritis.) “I love working. It’s a hobby, and I have so much fun every day.” Mr. Galluccio, who was visiting from his primary home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., sat in a brown leather lounge chair in the main room, which is bedecked with red-on-gold damask wallpaper, Tiffany-style hanging lights and framed architectural drawings. A pianist in the corner played “Over the Rainbow,” as a slightly balding man in his mid-30s, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, got up off his stool to sing along off-key. The Townhouse, which turns 30 next year, is also the rare gay bar that enforces a conservative dress code. Its website advises against baseball caps, gym wear, ripped clothing, oversize jeans and do-rags. (People of color have not always felt welcome there.) Mr. Galluccio scanned the crowd, which included a septuagenarian in a Polo shirt and pink pants chatting with a guy half his age, who wore sunglasses. There was also a group of men in their mid-30s, all wearing T-shirts and drinking martinis. “Look at those shoulders,” Mr. Galluccio said, noticing a 20-something guy with sandy blond hair and cargo shorts, sitting with an older man on the banquette. If the crowd seemed slightly younger than it used to be, that’s no accident. Mr. Galluccio has been courting those without AARP memberships. On weekend nights, the smaller lounge downstairs now features shirtless go-go boys of all races, writhing to European disco. “The older people don’t go out as much,” he said. “They move away or they’re dead. You need to bring in younger people.” “Our regular customers are in Palm Springs,” he added. “Or six feet under.” Mr. Galluccio did not set out to become a nightclub owner. Born and raised in Hawthorne, N.J., he dropped out of Hawthorne High School at 16 to pursue playing the clarinet, sax, flute and piano. That same year, he got sidelined into retail, and in 1960 he opened Paul Scott Ltd., a boutique in New Rochelle, N.Y., which forced him to turn down a job with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. He was married to a woman at the time, but he divorced her in 1972, after 12 years of marriage. (He considers his daughter, Pamela Galluccio Riccio, 51, a real estate agent who lives in Eastchester, N.Y., his best friend.) After the split, he went out clubbing a lot in Manhattan, at places like Adam’s Apple, a disco and restaurant on East 61st Street. “Guys and girls were picking me up,” he said. “Sometimes I liked the guy, sometimes the girl. But I preferred men. They don’t want to own you. Women right away say, ‘I want to get married.’” In 1988, while he was at a gay piano bar in the East 50s (he thinks it was called Regent East), he met and fell in love with a distinguished young man in the hotel business, with whom he had a 17-year relationship. (Mr. Galluccio would not name him, because he is not openly gay.) The two would go clubbing together. One night, Mr. Galluccio tried to go back to that bar himself and was ignored by the doorman. Infuriated, he decided to open a piano bar of his own. In 1989, he spotted an apartment building on East 58th Street that was for rent, and he and a business partner, Bob DeBenedictis, signed a lease and opened the Townhouse. “There were young guys who were attracted to older men and now knew where to find them,” Mr. Galluccio said. “Some were hustlers. We’d try to curtail that. We found out what was going on and said, ‘You’re not welcome here.’” “I wanted a place to bring my parents to,” he said. In fact, six months after it opened, he did so, and his father liked the place so much he joked about wanting to become a regular. Mr. Galluccio replied: “Dad, you’re not allowed unless I accompany you.” Mr. Galluccio now runs other nightclubs, as well as restaurants and hotels. In 1996, he opened Lips, a drag bar on East 56th Street that has offshoots in San Diego, Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale. “Ninety percent of our audience is straight: bachelorette parties, anniversaries, divorce parties,” he said. “I love seeing people laugh.” He is also a partner in the Westside Club, gay bathhouse in Chelsea, which opened in 1995. It remains open, despite the popularity of hookup apps like Grindr. “But people like to see what they’re getting in person,” Mr. Galluccio said. “We see things are starting to pick up again.” Despite his arthritis and advancing age, Mr. Galluccio isn’t out of commission himself. Not long ago, while he was shopping at a 7-Eleven in Fort Lauderdale, he noticed that a 32-year-old guy was cruising him. “We started going to dinner and movies,” he said with a twinkle. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/style/paul-galluccio-townhouse-gay-piano-bar.html

I guess it helps if you had an Irish grandmother like I did. lol Other I know who have seen this production have been very impressed and it will be a sure Tony contender next year. I have a ticket, which was hard to get, for late Nov. Today's NYTimes gives it a great review... Review: A Thrilling ‘Ferryman’ Serves Up a Glorious Harvest Feast No matter what sort of spread you’ve planned for your Thanksgiving dinner, it won’t be a patch on the glorious feast that has been laid out at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. That’s where Jez Butterworth’s thrilling new play “The Ferryman” opened on Sunday night, with a generosity of substance and spirit rarely seen on the stage anymore. There is, for the record, a whopping celebratory meal at the center of this endlessly vibrant work, directed with sweeping passion and meticulous care by Sam Mendes. Its main course is a goose, which has figured as a living creature in earlier scenes, and the repast appears to be more than enough to feed the 17 revelers gathered at an overladen table in rural Northern Ireland in 1981. But the real sustenance provided here comes from the sheer abundance within a work that picked up most of the awards on offer during its London run last year. This is theater as charged and cluttered and expansive as life itself. And the three and a quarter hours and 21 speaking parts required to tell its story — which is at once a shivery suspenser, a hearthside family portrait, a political tragedy and a journey across mythic seas — barely seem long enough to contain all it has to give us. The last time a new drama with this breadth of scope and and ambition appeared was seven years ago. That was Mr. Butterworth’s “Jerusalem,” in which a small-time, middle-aged country drug dealer (played by a monumental Mark Rylance) became a majestic emblem of an ancient, heroic England. With “The Ferryman,” Mr. Butterworth is again assessing the chokehold of a nation’s past on its present. But now it is Northern Ireland at the height of the politically fraught period known as the Troubles. (We hear radio reports of the dying Irish Republican hunger strikers in the Maze prison.) And he mines the folksy clichés of Irish archetypes — as garrulous, drink-loving, pugilistic souls — to find the crueler patterns of a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance. If this sounds forbidding, rest assured that “The Ferryman,” which stars the magnetic Paddy Considine as the head of a ginormous family, never feels remotely polemical. Even more than “Jerusalem,” it revels in the addictive power of artfully unfolded narratives. And I mean all kinds of narratives: classical epics and homey fairy tales, barroom ballads and chronicles of hopeless love, multigenerational family sagas and ghost stories with a body count. Most of the action may be confined to a room in a farmhouse, which — as rendered in Rob Howell’s splendid set, with eloquent lighting (Peter Mumford) and sound (Nick Powell) — exhales an air of hard-won comfort under siege. Yet, like a James Joyce short story in which the everyday and the eternal live cheek by jowl, “The Ferryman” seems to sprawl over an entire, divided country. We are specifically in the overflowing home of Quinn Carney (Mr. Considine, in a superb, anchoring performance), whose domain improbably accommodates his seven children (ages 9 months to 16), his invalid wife, Mary (Genevieve O’Reilly), and his misanthropic, staunchly Irish republican aunt and Virgil-quoting uncle, both of whom are called Pat (pricelessly portrayed by Dearbhla Molloy and Mark Lambert). Living under the same roof are his sister-in-law, Caitlin (Laura Donnelly, in a heart-stopping performance that won her the Olivier Award), and her understandably broody adolescent son, Oisin (Rob Malone). Then there’s Quinn’s overgrown, childlike (and English-born) handyman, Tom Kettle (Justin Edwards). And because it is harvest day, their ranks are swelled by three young strapping male relatives, the Corcoran boys. But wait! I haven’t mentioned the unwelcome visitors who show up at nightfall, casting dark shadows on the glowing Carney homestead: a craven priest, Father Horrigan (Charles Dale), and the courtly, sinister Irish republican kingpin Mr. Muldoon (Stuart Graham) and his henchmen (Dean Ashton and Glenn Speers), whom we have already met in the play’s ominous prologue, set in a graffiti-sprayed back alley in the nearby city of Derry. As unlikely as it seems, you’ll have no trouble keeping these characters apart. Each bristles with vivid specificity, even those in nonspeaking parts, like the infant Bobby, a feral rabbit and the aforementioned goose. Mr. Butterworth has taken pains to define every one of them, and the cast repays him with performances that blaze unconditionally in the moment. Of equal importance, this being a play about the Irish, are the living dead, the absent souls who exist not only as scrupulously maintained memories but as catalysts in an increasingly eventful plot. Among them are the late family patriarch, whose black-and-white portrait looms as a benediction and a curse, and his romantically remembered brother, who was killed by British troops during the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916. But of most immediate importance is Caitlin’s missing husband, Seamus, whose eerily well-preserved, 10-years-dead body is discovered in a bog shortly before the play begins. The news will shatter the cozy, vigilantly guarded order of the Carney household and drag shadowy deceptions into the harsh light. This process is achieved through a propulsive plot that never stops churning forward even as it keeps looking backward, conjuring a cyclical nightmare of history from which no one escapes. Yet the story also embraces a multitude of exuberantly full individual scenes, of a number and richness rarely seen outside of Shakespeare. Mr. Mendes, who has become world famous as the director of James Bond blockbusters (and brilliantly staged the New York-bound “The Lehman Trilogy”), here endows these vignettes with a master craftsman’s artisanal detail. There is, for instance, that astonishing scene that introduces us to Quinn and Caitlin, alone in the early hours of the harvest day, dancing to “Street Fighting Man” with such exhilarated abandon that a lampshade catches fire. Or the very different arias of histories ancient and living delivered by Uncle and Aunt Pat. Or any of the moments when the usually senescent Aunt Maggie Far Away (Fionnula Flanagan) swerves into focus, with visions of those baleful spirits, the banshees, that feel all too real. I can’t shake the memory of the cinematic image that concludes the first act, in which a solemn young man creeps in from the shadows to stare at the suspended carcass of a slaughtered goose, as if in mortal kinship. And I must mention the five excellent young actors — Fra Fee, Niall Wright, Tom Glynn-Carney, Conor MacNeill and Michael Quinton McArthur — who bring such force to a fraternal drinking session that it turns into an anatomy of a civil war. And yes, there is indeed one of those rousing, classically Irish scenes of celebratory song and dance. It occurs amid the great harvest dinner, and it has three distinct phases. It begins with sprightly Celtic fiddle music and show-off knees-up and step-dancing moves. Then the music is changed, brusquely, to contemporary rock , and the mood turns frantically, dangerously sensual. Finally, there is an a cappella performance of the Irish song of rebellion and it is performed with an anger that wakens the senses as it freezes the blood. The warring feelings embodied by these three, very different numbers are, you realize, all genetically encoded in every one of the characters here. By the end of this magnificent drama, Mr. Butterworth has connected the contradictions with a skill that takes the breath away. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/theater/the-ferryman-review-broadway-jez-butterworth.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&action=click&contentCollection=arts&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

A friend of mine highly recommends it. I'm holding off, for now. Its been on TDF, and no doubt is available at TKTS.

I noticed this TV ad, too. I think its creepy, especially since Jimmy passed in 2010!

Le Cou Cou and Vacluse are excellent, however they are probably not in your price range. Take a look at Zagat's guide... https://www.zagat.com You might try a brassiere such as Brasserie Congnac or perhaps Chez Josephine. Both are reasonably priced. https://ny.eater.com/maps/best-french-bistro-brasserie-nyc Good luck and enjoy.

Multi-nominated TV star, Kerry Washington returns to Broadway in an exciting and riveting drama, An American Son. I saw a preview performance last night and was engrossed in the drama for the full 90 minutes. The story of an African-American mother, and Caucasian father, who are at the police station in Miami, following the disappearance of their just-turned 18 year old son. The son, Jamal, has been gone for almost a day without any contact. His Mother frantically leaves messages and texts on his cellphone. Sitting in the waiting room at the precinct, she tries desperately to get a young police officer to provide some information about his whereabouts. The information comes slowly over a period of several hours, and racial tensions begin to fly as she and the officer get into battle of words and emotions. The father, and FBI agent, arrives and thing continue to spiral downhill and he, too, is full of emotion and rage. When the African-American detective finally shows up with some much needed information about Jamal, more drama ensues. This is one of those plays where no one should give away the ending, so I won't provide any spoiler alerts. Definitely a powerhouse production and recommended.

NYTimes liked it... Review: A Three-Way Smackdown Over ‘The Lifespan of a Fact’ When the journalist John D’Agatta wrote a play called “The Lifetime of a Fact” in 2003, he couldn’t have known that it would one day become a terrifically engaging Broadway drama starring a boy wizard. Please note that there are six to eight mistakes in that sentence, depending on what you consider a mistake. For one thing, “D’Agata” has only one “T.” The show that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, starring Daniel Radcliffe along with Bobby Cannavale and Cherry Jones, is not a drama but a topical comedy, and it’s called “The Lifespan of a Fact” — not the “Lifetime.” Also, the play wasn’t written in 2003, or by Mr. D’Agata; rather, it was written, more recently, by a threesome whose official credit I would prefer to omit because, well, I just find it clumsy: Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell. If you think that’s lordly of me, wait until you get a whiff of the play’s ripe caricature of Mr. D’Agata, especially as inhabited by the swaggering Mr. Cannavale. “I’m not interested in accuracy,” he crows. “I’m interested in truth.” Which is why he doesn’t consider himself a journalist (that’s mistake No. 6) but rather a lyric essayist, for whom atmosphere takes precedence over facts and rhythm over reliability. So does that mean he can just make stuff up, or fudge details, as I have been doing? “The Lifespan of a Fact” is based on a book of the same name that Mr. D’Agata wrote with Jim Fingal in 2012. That book, in turn, was based on an argument that began when Mr. Fingal, as a young intern, was assigned to fact-check an article — sorry, essay — that Mr. D’Agata had written about a teenager’s suicide at a Las Vegas resort in 2002. As portrayed deliciously here by Mr. Radcliffe, who has now put the boy wizard persona well behind him, the character of Fingal is D’Agata’s spiritual and physical opposite: scruffy, small, awkward and perseverant. He is a mosquito to Mr. Cannavale’s lion. Assigned by the editor of a glossy New York magazine to fact-check the 15-page essay, he produces a 130-page spreadsheet outlining his queries. Some address tangible if arguable details: Were the resort’s paving bricks red, or, less interestingly, brown? Some are epistemological: How could D’Agata have known what he couldn’t have witnessed? And some suggest that the author has trespassed deep into the territory of flat-out fiction. Never more than now, with accusations of fake news flying, have these questions bedeviled writers — whether journalists or essayists or critics. Mistakes and lies and opinions are interchangeable with facts in the Twitterverse, creating a nimbus of doubt (and opportunities for “artistic” embellishment) around everything. This apparently affects playwrights, too. The New York glossy that’s set to publish D’Agata’s essay in “The Lifespan of a Fact” is not where the real Mr. Fingal interned. He worked for a magazine called The Believer — then based in San Francisco — to which the essay was submitted after Harper’s Magazine rejected it because of factual inaccuracies. That’s assuming you believe accounts by The New York Times and The Daily Beast. And The Believer’s checking process, which in reality stretched to seven years, gets compressed in the play to a five-day ordeal with a looming deadline at the printer. Which wouldn’t matter except that, to anyone in publishing, the idea of plugging so many gaping factual holes in so little time seems ludicrous. We can at least be grateful for one of the authors’ liberties: the invention of Emily Penrose, the fair but tough-minded editor of the magazine. Without her, “The Lifespan of a Fact” would just be two sides of an unchanging argument, repeated with variations ad infinitum. Actually, that’s what it is anyway, but Penrose, serving as the fulcrum of the argument, gives it nuance and real-world meaning. She sees publishing in the context of a deteriorating ecosystem of knowledge, with enormous political and societal implications. The role also gives Ms. Jones the rare chance to shine in lighter material than her customary Broadway assignments. Having her way with snappy, curse-speckled dialogue, she suggests a blend of Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, the sparring editor and reporter from “The Front Page.” That she is also, like those archetypally male characters, a totally professional creature makes this the rare play in which the female apex of the triangle is not a romantic figure. I give “The Lifespan of a Fact” big Bechdel points for this but also some engagement demerits. Foreclosing on every attempt Fingal makes to suss out details of her personal life, she forecloses on us as well. If that’s dry, the dryness is in some ways a fascinating choice. There used to be a genre of Broadway comedy meant to be topical but not emotional. Plays like “Take Her, She’s Mine,” “Fair Game” and “Norman, Is That You?” treated current social issues — the generation gap, divorce, gay liberation and such — as touchstones for an evening’s light entertainment, and were welcome as such. So is this one. But “The Lifespan of a Fact” clearly wants to be more than that, even if its raw material isn’t strong enough for drama. (For one thing, the original essay, eventually titled “What Happens There” and excerpted in the dialogue, is so purple it hardly seems worth the fuss.) The authors compensate by inflating D’Agata’s supposed artistry to Didion-like proportions and Fingal’s tenacity to mania. Though compression and exaggeration are key writing tools — I’m using them now — they are perhaps more suspicious in a play about the dangers of compression and exaggeration than in the kind of boulevard comedies that “The Lifespan of a Fact” otherwise resembles. Here they serve to disguise the “fact” that the variously conjoined authors never solved the problem of how to keep the conflict moving toward some climax — any more than D’Agata and Fingal ever agree on a definition of truth. After 95 minutes of plausible arguments on each side, the play ends with a shrug. They’re both right! And both wrong. So was I mistaken — or just selectively truthful — in calling “The Lifespan of a Fact” “terrifically engaging” just 20 paragraphs ago? It might have been more accurate, if less marquee-ready, to have written “terrifically engaging but not as smart as it thinks.” That this doesn’t much matter as the play pingpongs along is the result of a terrific comic staging by Leigh Silverman. With its cast, its dead-on timing, its perfect set by Mimi Lien and sound design by Palmer Hefferan, it would probably nail its laughs even without the dialogue. It’s what you call a good time. Of course, I can’t prove that.

Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing, worth some $345 million, and nobody won Tuesday night’s Mega Millions drawing, so it will be an official record, likely in excess of $900 million, when the next drawing is held Friday night. The jackpot has been growing since it was last won in July in California. The previous record was $656 million, shared by winners in 2012 in three states. Good luck!!!

Avalon, for someone who spends a lot of time surfing the web and this site, you don't seem to appreciate the time and effort members spend trying to provide you with good advice and help. (Just MY Opinion, and yes, I know the "implied tone") When you post the details of your life and the challenges you face with many obstacles, there is an assumption on the part of many on this message board that you are seeking assistance. Is that not the case? If not, I have a few other suggestions for you which I will not post right now (lol). You are eligible for transportation, to and from doctors and other vital services that you desperately need. Medicare has many, many benefits available to you. Have you called the Medicare hotline. The operators are full of wonderful advice. I've already given you my best possible advice in many other posts and it comes from experience dealing with my elderly parents, my neighbor, and my deceased lover, who was on Medicaid and other social services. We have several elderly tenants in my building and we've gotten them assistance, such as Meals-On-Wheels and they have all benefited greatly from these programs and one, in particular, after a rather long and intensive hospital/rehab stay now is up and about, and receiving home care. She fought everyone along the way but we proved her wrong. So do you want help or not? Why are you so reluctant to seek help outside the four walls of you apartment? Are you that afraid? And, no, not wanting to be a burden on others doesn't fly with me as an excuse. Believe it or not, you are already a burden. (whoops! there I go again with that implied tone) Take a look at this site and let us know if you've done anything. We don't know what state, city or county you're in, so we rely on you to do some work. My apologies to my fellow Message Board members who may think I've been too rough. https://www.longtermcarelink.net/a7-transportation_services.htm good luck!

Back on Broadway is Stockard Channing, one of my favorite actress. I last saw her in Other Desert Cities and of course, her recurring TV roles in The Good Wife. She returns in this London import by author Alexi Campbell. I have a ticket next month and eagerly look forward to seeing this based on the good review it received it today's NYTimes. Now at The Roundabout's Laura Pels theater. Review: Stockard Channing Is a Mother to Remember in ‘Apologia’ Stockard Channing wields weapons of deflection like a master samurai in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s “Apologia,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan. The pre-emptive put-down, the obscuring fog of abstraction, the barbed aside, the motorized monologue — such are the tools expertly deployed by Ms. Channing’s character, a celebrated art historian who has trained herself to live on the defensive. Her name is Kristin Miller, and she is described by the more temperate of her two sons as “a bloody nightmare.” Since it is Kristin who is the host of the birthday celebration (hers) at the play’s center, and since it is Ms. Channing who is portraying her, you can expect it to become an Olympic event for the hurling of slings and arrows of high wit and low cunning. But anyone who has followed Ms. Channing’s four sparkling decades on the New York stage — from her Tony-winning turn in Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” (1985) to her portrait of a Hollywood wife with a secret in Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” (2011) — knows that there’s always more to her interpretations than her fabled way with an epigram. A sharp tongue invariably guards a fragile heart in the Channing portrait gallery, which is what makes her work so affecting. That means that Kristin and Ms. Channing are a perfect match. And her performance in “Apologia,” a Roundabout Theater Company production directed a bit stiffly by Daniel Aukin, goes some distance in disguising the labored exposition of a work that never quite achieves a natural flow or moves you as much as it should. Not that “Apologia,” which I saw with Ms. Channing last year in London, doesn’t have a lot to say that is worth listening to. As in his best-known previous work, “The Pride” (2008), a diptych of two generations of gay men, Mr. Campbell is exploring the toll exacted on those who travel roads not usually taken in convention-clogged lands. In “Apologia,” that’s “the traditionally male-dominated bastion of art history,” as Kristin’s dear friend Hugh (John Tillinger) puts it in a birthday toast. He also praises her, with tongue only partly in cheek, as “Pioneer of Arts and Letters, Champion of the Voiceless and Redemptive Savior of the Western world.” The American-born Kristin came of age in the late 1960s amid the youth-fueled political protests of Western Europe, and she adheres rigidly to the ideals of that era. The younger guests at her birthday party are judged by those standards and found seriously wanting. They include her two British sons, Peter, a banker, and Simon, a writer (both played convincingly by an agile Hugh Dancy) and the women in their lives: Trudi (Talene Monahon), Peter’s chirpy American fiancée; and Claire (Megalyn Echikunwoke), the actress who lives with Peter. That Trudi is a devout Christian and Claire the star of a soap opera become subjects of Kristin’s withering dismissals. But as insults and recriminations turn a festive occasion into the birthday dinner from hell, it becomes clear that Kristin’s attacks on the values of those around her are in part smoke screens for her own most vulnerable spot. That would be her failings as her mother. She has recently published an autobiography, which shares the title of Mr. Campbell’s play, and her sons find it all too revealing that it does not include a single mention of them. Kristin was separated from her sons by their father when the boys were 9 and 7, and Peter and the mentally unstable Simon have never forgiven her. Or as Simon, who shows up after the party has crashed and burned (and after Mr. Dancy’s other character has conveniently gone to bed), puts it: “I woke up one morning and realized that pretty much everything we are and everything we do is a response against you.” How does a mother respond to such an annihilating accusation? In Kristin’s case, by shutting down, by changing the subject, by going as numb as she possibly can. This scene, which begins the second act and is the play’s most stirring, both cruelly and compassionately lays bare the mechanics of one woman’s defense system. Mr. Campbell is posing exciting and enduringly relevant questions here, about the price for women of achieving and sustaining professional success in a male-dominated world that sees motherhood as sacred. If Kristin has become a monster, she has perhaps had little choice. Celebrity makes at least semi-monsters of most of its possessors, but men still seem to wear that status far more comfortably than women. The layers of Ms. Channing’s interpretation, with its core of lacerating anguish, are more intriguing than the plot that builds to an anticlimactic reveal. Kristin explains to the unsophisticated Trudi (it would be with an “i”) that the word apologia means “a formal, written defense of one’s opinions or conduct,” adding it is “not to be confused with apology.” All the characters wind up presenting their own apologias, often with descriptions of pasts that explain their present. When someone says, “Did I ever tell you about my father?,” you wince in anticipation of the monologue you just know is going to follow. Dane Laffrey’s set (expressively lighted by Bradley King), a mixture of country comfort and academic obsession, creates a natural environment for the examination of these specimens of humanity. And Anita Yavich’s costumes are always subtly, sociologically appropriate. Yet the dialogue only rarely feels organic. And though Ms. Monahon and Ms. Echikunwoke are very good, they don’t disguise the schematic roles of their characters. Mr. Tillinger, best known as a director, is delightful as that hoary staple of contemporary comedy, the outspoken gay best friend. But it is Ms. Channing’s complex, contradictory Kristin who keeps us thinking long after the play is over. And the wordless, gut-deep howl with which she concludes “Apologia” is more wrenching and revelatory than any of the carefully arranged words that precede it.

As per the original post, I saw this production at Second Stage last fall. I thought it was great then and after seeing it again last night, I still think it's terrific. Now on Broadway with the original Second Stage cast, this historic gay play still resonates with the audience. The young woman behind me gasped and chuckled her way throughout, although, not so much as to be annoying. As I previously wrote, they (author, Harvey Fierstein and director, Moises Kaufman) have worked successfully to trim the script and improve the flow. The cast is, well, superb. This time around, I really enjoyed Mercedes Rhuel in her role and the others in cast, especially cutie Michael Rosen are very good. Most of all, it's Michael Urie who shines as Arnold. This is a tour-de-force performance and one that should not be missed. He is wonderful.

Best to get a personal recommendation. Ask your neighbors. Also, doormen are a great source f this info. Be careful! NYC papers recently reported... Boozy maid who passed out on floor allegedly pulled same stunt more than once A cleaning lady passed out drunk on the kitchen floor of the Brooklyn apartment she was hired to clean. The maid who drank a Williamsburg woman’s vodka and passed out on her kitchen floorhas pulled the same stunt before — and more than once. “[she was] nude waist down, lying on the couch on the verge of being asleep,” Nicholas Gomes said of the scene he came home to in March 2016 after hiring Joanna Oltuszewska to clean his Manhattan apartment. Gomes, who found Oltuszewska via Yelp, says he had a similar experience to Brooklyn’s Genevieve Snow, whose story about finding the cleaner facedown in her kitchen made The Post’s front page. Gomes said Oltuszewska did actually clean most of his Kips Bay pad — until she “got to the bar cart” and found his blackberry brandy. SEE ALSO Worst maid ever drank my booze, wrecked my home and passed out on the floor He found her pantsless near two smashed MacBooks; she claimed her boyfriend had come by and assaulted her. But Gomes says the doorman and security cameras showed no one else entered. “She just stared at me confused, and I called the cops as I told her it was OK, I was getting her a friend to take her home,” Gomes said. He says Oltuszewska took a plea deal for disorderly conduct and agreed to pay him $2,000 in restitution — but he only ever received $400 and has since given up trying to chase her down. He’s not alone. A Midwood, Brooklyn, woman had a disastrous session with the maid in January 2017. “When I came home that day, I noticed the garbage in the hallway on the floor of my building and it smelled terribly and was like, ‘What is that?’ ” said the woman, who would only give her name as Jennifer C. “I went into the apartment and it looked like nothing had been cleaned and a bottle of mostly drunk wine was gone.” Jennifer says she also tried to get her money back but Oltuszewska stopped responding to messages. Another couple on the Upper West Side say they hired Oltuszewska in December 2017 and the maid not only helped herself to their whiskey — but also left blood and urine stains across the house. “Joanna, here is a picture of our rug, our coat closet where she made a mess, the glass of whiskey she poured for herself, and the only ‘work’ she did in the two and a half hours she was here which was to load our dishwasher in a bizarre and hugely messy way,” the wife wrote in an email to Oltuszewska afterward. They, too, say they tried to get her to pay for the damage but say she stopped responding to their messages. Oltuszewska did not respond to requests for comment. https://nypost.com/2018/10/08/boozy-maid-who-passed-out-on-floor-allegedly-pulled-same-stunt-more-than-once/

It is sad that you do not recognize the severity of your situation and do so little to help yourself. You need to call Social Services in your city/town. There are so many benefits you could take advantage of. You need to set up an interview. You don't need to make any commitments but listen and ask questions. You should not purchase a walker on your own. A licensed physical therapist should help you decide what make.model is correct you your size and weight and adjust it to fit your needs. You are probably eligible for home health care and can have someone come in on a daily basis to help you with routine tasks, such as bathing, cooking and cleaning. (this would also provide you with daily human interaction, so you're not sitting alone pounding on the keyboard.) They will also assist you in getting to and from a doctors office and other much needed care. Good luck, the next step is up to you. Make that call!

Here is the latest news from Tim on his never ending quest for the right spot... IMPORTANT - Major News and Updates - PLEASE READ!! Ever feel like you're living in the Twilight Zone? Ya #metoo...This has been yet another wild week behind the scenes with late night meetings and conference calls from Japan (literally), with one half of the Spunk team. You'll have to ask them if it was the better half! Here is everything you need to know, Aunt Laurie style, with bullet points, overused highlights, and some bad grammar to boot. - Spunk/Adonis are NO LONGER at Rocky's Saturdays We're quite happy with the couple of months we put together there, but we always kind of intended for that venue to be a bridge to bigger and better things. We're very grateful to Lou and his staff who were some of the best people we've ever worked with. We all had fun, put together successful events, and it's not beyond the scope of reality that we may do an event there at some point in the future. - Adonis Returns to Evolve Starting Next Weekend 10/20 For Our 9-Year Anniversary! Yes, you read it right! Mark the date- Next SATURDAY 10/20 is our 9-Year Anniversary and we are reuniting with our Mother Club Evolve(221 E. 58th St) to celebrate and will be there ongoing for SATURDAYS. - More News Coming Soon... In an effort to not confuse anyone (more me than you), we'll leave you with this for now and MORE coming soon. The Spunk/Adonispartnership is still strong as ever and we're HARD at work behind the scenes contemplating all sorts of NEW and exciting moves. As always, I/we genuinely thank everyone for the support from NYC and beyond. This is a very crazy business in more ways than one, but like feral bitches, we always end up on TOP... DON'T FORGET TO GO SUPPORT THE BOYS OF SPUNK TONIGHT @ MONSTER!!

Yes, already posted. Check this thread for more info... https://www.companyofmen.org/threads/stage-version-of-network-starring-bryan-cranston-sets-broadway-opening.140345/

MadeMan Barbershop In Chelsea located at 23rd St and 7th Avenue.... 2 locations, 169/170 W 23rd St, right across the street from each other and a third location at 23rd and Broadway, 10E 23rd St. Reasonable prices. About $30 for a regular cut, but they offer discounts for seniors/students, Check website for more detail. Unless you have a specific barber in mind, you can walk-in. https://www.mademanbarber.com BarberBart is indeed a great place but expensive. $50 for a haircut, request Eddie. Greta u, good barber. Make an appointment. They book up fast. Bart charges $55. Bart is the hunk in the first chair! LOL

Arguably one of the best female singers from the UK. Blonde, blue eyed soul at its best! DUSTY SPRINGFIELD

http://www.theatregold.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/the-waverly-gallery-broadway-theatregold.jpg The Waverly Gallery is a play by Kenneth Lonergan. It is considered a “memory play”. The show, first produced Off-Broadway in 2000, follows a grandson watching his grandmother slowly die from Alzheimer’s disease. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2001. Dramatic. Compelling and extremely well-acted! Much like last year's tour de force performance by Glenda Jackson, venerable Elaine May takes the stage by force in her role as Gladys. Real life Elaine and Gladys are the same age, 86. Gladys owns a small art gallery in Greenwich Village but in Act 1, she is showing signs of Alzheimers. Her family checks on her frequently, but she is becoming a handful, plagued with bouts of forgetfulness and repetitive questions/stories. Gladys' grandson (Lucas Hedges) lives next door to her, and her daughter/son-in-law live on the upper West side. Her grandson bears the brunt of grandma's disease and he tries to keep and eye on her. A struggling artist (Michael Cera) arrives and Gladys provides him with the gallery space he needs to display his work, for a brief period of time, he provides a much needed distraction for Gladys. Gladys finally descends into the awfulness and cruelty of Alzheimers, and the family must make some hard decisions for her care and well being. For those who have gone through this disease with loved ones, it hits home, and rings true. Tony to Elaine for her magnificent performance!!! Bravo!!! Great supporting cast.