A Much Needed Detour To New York

One of the first things that a person who has touring experience does when getting a tour itinerary is to look for any long travel days. Unfortunately it is inevitable on a bus and truck tour, but there are ways around it. If given permission, it is possible for us to fly (on our own dime) to avoid long bus travel days. So a long time ago someone looked at the schedule and saw that we played New Haven, CT followed by Davenport, IA with two days of bus travel in between. Well given how close New Haven and New York are, most of those who live in New York made plans to spend those two bus days in New York and fly in the morning of the first show in Davenport. Two days in NYC sounded like fun to me so I made arrangements to do the same.

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As it turns out, I was very glad that it did. Beauty and the Beast has quite a lot of challenging piccolo playing in the flute book and it had taken its toll on my piccolo. I got my piccolo back in college so I had been playing on it for something like 13 years at that point. In all of that time, I had changed a couple of pads but never got a full repad. Since I was starting to have problems with it during the show, I took the piccolo apart in Columbia to discover that most of the pads had torn skins. Or in other words, it needed a full repad. Well having done repair work, I knew that to get a full repad would take being without my instrument for several days, but that was impossible until I had a long enough break. Since I was already going to be in New York with two days off, I got the name of a good repair technician and made arrangements to have him patch up my instrument as much as possible to tide me over until I could get the full job done.

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So what did I do in New York? Why the normal things: shows, friends, and cupcakes!

Crumbs is still my favorite!


If you are an obsessive show seer like myself, then you discover there are two problematic performance times in the potential show schedule: Sunday night and Monday night. The majority of shows do not play either of those times so if you happen to want to see a show during those times you have slim pickings. That happened to me Monday night. I chose to see an Off Broadway play called The Tempermentals. It was okay, but I probably would have better enjoyed seeing The Phantom of the Opera for the 39th time!

The show that I saw Tuesday night was an Off Broadway musical called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. It basically was the story of Andrew Jackson's rise from soldier to president told through the world of emo rock music. Well I was not so sure how I would like the emo music, but it turned out to be an interesting show. The music is really simplistic and repetitive, but it worked in the context of the show. The story was told in a very satirical and silly way so the overall package worked for me. The show is actually moving to Broadway so it will be interesting to see how to fares.

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Here is a sample of the other shows I was not able to see.

Another Monday night option would have been Next to Normal.

I had no interest in a Frank Sinatra dance show, but this marquee at the Marquis was new from the last time I was in NYC.

I love A Little Night Music and would normally jump at the chance to see a Broadway revival of the show especially with Angela Lansbury. Sadly this revival uses a severely reduced orchestra, and I refuse to support a production like that.