For many years, Rita and I have gone to New York over Memorial Day Weekend to binge on Broadway shows. An early treat to ourselves for our anniversary (June 6). Also the timing is between the Tony nominations and the Tony awards (held last night).
Then came Covid, and we got out of the habit. But now we are back, and 2023 was grand. Saw five Broadway shows. Toured the new Jackie Robinson Museum which opened in Lower Manhattan last September.
When we returned to KC, we saw the new documentary on Yogi Berra (It Ain’t Over). This combo of Robinson and Berra of course brings up the image of the legendary steal of home in the 1955 World Series by Jackie Robinson. Yogi was the catcher and was sure Robinson was out, and the reaction by Yogi is a classic (click here).
When Yogi and Jackie would meet after that, Yogi would exclaim “out” and Jackie would say “safe.” After Jackie died, the same friendly banter continued between Yogi and Jackie’s widow Rachel. When Yogi died in 2015…
It Ain’t Over: On a heads-up from Jim Polsinelli, Rita and I went to the Glenwood last week to see It Ain’t Over. It is wonderful. Funny. Poignant. Vintage film clips. Excellent interviews. Delightful sprinkling of Yogi-isms (like “It ain’t over till it’s over”).
All baseball fans should see this film (trailer here). Now also streaming on Amazon Prime ($4). Tip: Stay for the end credits – fun outtakes as they try to get to the movie being “over.”
Yogi Trivia: The promo above shows Yogi wearing his World Series rings. If he were a team, Yogi would be ranked third in World Series wins – Yankees (23), Cardinals (11), Yogi Berra (10), Red Sox (9) and A’s (9).
Jackie Robinson Museum: This new museum opened to the public last September. In a word, it is superb.
The museum collection includes more than 4,000 artifacts, most from the Robinson family’s personal collection. The exhibits cover his storied baseball career, but just as importantly, the museum serves as New York’s first with a focus on the Civil Rights Movement.
Kansas City visitors will appreciate the coverage given to Jackie’s year with the Monarchs.
In 2019, Rita and I met artist Kadir Nelson at an event at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Nelson is well known for his many paintings that have graced the covers of the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and other magazines. He is also a long-time chronicler of the Negro Leagues, including these 2010 postage stamps.
Nelson incorporated many of his Negro League paintings in a beautiful book titled We Are the Ship. One of the arresting pieces in the book is of Jackie Robinson in his early days with the Dodgers. So it was cool when Rita and I came upon the original painting at the Jackie Robinson Museum.
On Broadway: We saw five shows – two plays and three musicals. We were aware of the Tony nominations, especially Some Like It Hot, which had the most nominations. We had New York, New York on our radar because it was a collaboration of John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda. For the plays, we selected shows featuring actors we liked from performances in film and on television.
We did not see the two big winners at the Tonys last night – Best New Musical, Kimberly Akimbo, and Best New Play, Leopoldstadt.
But that’s okay. A good excuse to get back to New York soon.
Ham4Ham: Our other big Broadway entertainment was Ham4Ham, a live performance held outside the Richard Rodgers Theater where Hamilton has been playing since 2015. In the early years of Hamilton, there was a lottery system for last-minute tickets to the show. As fans waited outside the theater to see if they won, members of the cast would give brief “Ham4Ham” performances. The lottery was discontinued, but there are still occasional Ham4Ham performances with Lin-Manual Miranda hosting and featuring performers from other Broadway shows.
Anyone reading Hot Stove over the last few years will know that Rita and I are rabid fans of Hamilton and its creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. Rita follows Miranda on Instagram and often watches the Ham4Ham videos. So she was thrilled when she found that a Ham4Ham would be held during our trip. So on Friday afternoon, we gathered with hundreds of fans in front of the theater to see Miranda host artists from three shows – Shucked, Parade (Ben Platt doing a song) and Some Like It Hot. It makes for a fun 15 minutes (for those with time, click here for the video).
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window: We chose this play because it starred two of our favorite actors. We saw Oscar Isaac at the Telluride Film Festival in 2013 when he was there to promote his breakout film, Inside Llewyn Davis. He was terrific in that Coen brothers film and has gone on to many major roles. We became big fans of Rachel Brosnahan during her five seasons playing the title role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
The play is by Lorraine Hansberry whose only other staged play was Raisin in the Sun. The Sign was last on Broadway in 1972.
The play revolves around a political sign hung from the window in the Greenwich Village apartment of Sidney and Iris Brustein (Isaac and Brosnahan). Issues arise regarding race, homosexuality, political corruption, suicide and other issues that still resonate 60 years after the play was written. Or as the sign at the right of the marquee says, “Lorraine Hansberry’s nearly forgotten play resurfaces current as ever.”
Two thumbs up from Rita and Lonnie. Video interviews and clips here.
Summer, 1976: We chose this play because it co-stars Laura Linney, another actor we have seen at Telluride. In 2012, this was in my report to friends after the film festival:
We got off to a good start while lunching on Wednesday at an outdoor restaurant in downtown Telluride. Rita locked eyes with a woman walking down the sidewalk and it was actress Laura Linney. Rita asked her if she had a movie at the festival and Laura was very coy on the subject. One of the quirks of Telluride is that you don’t get the list of about 40 films until Thursday before the Friday start.
Linney was indeed in the festival, playing Daisy, the distant cousin and potential love interest of Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. Below, Rita’s photo of Linney that year.
Summer, 1976, has a two-person cast, Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht. They portray two very different women who become friends because their young daughters like playing together. The ebb and flow of their relationship is scripted with terrific writing that is perfectly delivered by the two actresses. Two thumbs up. Clips here.
Some Like It Hot: Based on the 1959 movie of the same name, this musical was the most-nominated show this year – 13 Tony nominations. It won four.
Rita and I thought it was excellent – the staging, the singing and the dancing were all top notch. More on this in Lonnie’s Jukebox below.
New York, New York: John Kander and Fred Ebb are legends on Broadway, including two musicals I’m happy to see multiple times – Cabaret and Chicago. They also wrote songs for movies, most famously “New York, New York,” the title song for the 1977 Martin Scorsese movie.
Fred Ebb died in 2004, but John Kander is still going strong at 96. His newest musical is loosely based on the movie, and the story is told through songs from earlier Kander and Ebb works plus new material with input on the lyrics from Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Rita and I enjoyed John Kander’s love letter to New York, especially the rousing title song finale when the audience stood and joined the cast in singing “If I can make it there…”. Rita now claims she has sung on Broadway. Worth the price of admission.
At the Tonys last night, John Kander received a special award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater.
Six: On Sunday night, most of the theaters are dark. We tried to get tickets to Shucked, but it was sold out. So we took a flyer on Six, which we knew was a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII. What we did not know is that the format is a very loud rock concert with hard-to-understand (for us) lyrics. The crowd was generally younger than the normal Broadway mix, and they obviously knew more about the show. They cheered a lot. We were glad when it was over.
Central Park Tower: After our last trip to New York (2019), I posted a Hot Stove about the shows we saw. I also included a photo of a condo tower nearing completion on 57th Street, just south of Central Park. The property is called Central Park Tower, and the developer is my client Gary Barnett (Extell Development Company).
I started working on this project in 2005 (with great help from Lisa Haines and other Polsinelli attorneys). The first step was the purchase of a building housing the original New York Hard Rock Cafe with its iconic Cadillac tail-fin canopy. Hard Rock had announced its planned move to Times Square and Gary thought the block was ripe for a major assemblage.
Over the years, Gary acquired development rights totaling over 800,000 square feet. Construction of the 131-floor building was commenced in 2013 and completed in 2020. The first six floors are occupied by Nordstrom’s, and the floors above are residential condo units. It is the second tallest building in New York (One World Trade Center is #1). Central Park Tower is in the middle of this photo.
Four days before our 2023 return to New York, Rita and I were watching CBS Sunday Morning. Jane Pauley, who usually appears on the show in her studio, was instead in the penthouse of a building overlooking Central Park. We guessed it might be Central Park Tower and soon found out that was the case (video clip here). During the rest of the show, there were several other views from her perch in the sky.
When Rita and I got to New York, my client added a nice anniversary present (42 years). On Saturday night, six days after Jane’s broadcast, Rita and I dined in the private restaurant on the 100th floor of Central Park Tower.
Mimi’s On 2nd Avenue: After dinner on the 100th floor, Rita and I returned to earth and went crosstown to Mimi’s, an Italian restaurant and piano bar recommended by Steve Paul. His cousin Laurie is the bartender (below). The piano player Aaron sang tunes ranging from Ray Charles to Billy Joel to Tina Turner to Arlo Guthrie. Fun finish to quite the Saturday night in Manhattan.
CBS Sunday Morning Bonus: Two weeks after Jane Pauley reported from her perch in the sky, we saw her back on earth reporting on The Book of Charlie. The book was reviewed in a recent Hot Stove and is about Kansas Citian Charlie White who lived to 109. Authored by David Von Drehle, the book has been in the top-five of the NYT best-seller list the past two weeks. The 6.5-minute CBS segment (click here) is well done and includes an interview with Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper whose mother Mary Ann Cooper was Charlie’s girl-friend during his years as a centenarian.
Lonnie’s Jukebox (1) – Some Like It Hot Edition: In the spring of 1959, I was a senior in high school and saw the movie Some Like It Hot. It starred Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, and it was a hoot. Today, Curtis and Lemmon dressed in drag would possibly cause objections in some states.
Some Like It Hot – Film trailer (1959).
Some Like It Hot – Clips of songs by Marilyn Monroe in the movie.
Some Like It Hot – Final scene of the movie. Jack Lemmon is in drag confessing to his wealthy suitor that he is a man. Classic final line. [Baseball Trivia: The wealthy suitor is played by Joe E. Brown who as a youth was a professional baseball player, and from 1932 to 1935, he was a part owner of the minor league Kansas City Blues.]
The Broadway show closely follows the story line of the movie, but with song and dance added for the stage musical.
Some Like It Hot – Clips from the Broadway show (2022).
“You Coulda Knocked Me Over With a Feather” by J. Harrison Ghee in the Broadway show. The song directly addresses the gender-bending role played by Jack Lemon in the movie. We saw this performed twice because Ghee was the featured artist from the show in the Ham4Ham event. Last night, Ghee became the first openly nonbinary performer to win a Tony for Best Leading Actor in a musical.
Lonnie’s Jukebox (2) – New York, New York Edition: A totally different song titled “New York, New York” was in a 1944 Broadway musical titled On the Town. The show has had several revivals, and Rita and I saw it on Broadway in 2014.
The best known version of that song is from the 1949 movie based on the play…
“New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down…New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!!
As for the Kander and Ebb song, it was first used in the Martin Scorsese film New York, New York, starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. Kander and Ebb’s first try at the title song for the movie was rejected by De Niro. The composers quickly rewrote the song and created a classic (see this 3-minute clip of Kander discussing the De Niro rejection).
Theme from “New York, New York” by Liza Minnelli from the 1977 movie. Start spreading the news…I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep…Come on, come through, New York, New York.
Theme from “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra (1980). Sinatra has sung both songs titled “New York, New York,” first in the 1949 movie On The Town, and then 31 years later recording what is likely the best known of the Kander and Ebb version (it is played at Yankee Stadium after Yankee wins).
New York, New York – Trailer for the Broadway show.
Rita and I can’t wait to get back.
Chiefs at the White House: Three guys wearing sunglasses.
