That first night was pretty special.
The Mrs. and the teen thought we were starting our time in New York City at a hockey game in Brooklyn.
I sold it so very well. It was a Tony Award worthy performance.
Come From Away is set in Newfoundland and, as you maybe know if you know the musical, Newfoundlanders call themselves islanders, and we were seeing Come From Away the next night and the Red Wings were played the New York Islanders and…well, the little white lie told itself. I was merely the conduit for it.
Little did they know, I had only purchased a single ticket to see that hockey game. I had made secret, alternate Tuesday night plans for them.
I was running the script over and over again in my mind, bursting with glee to get to that very spot on that very night to say these very words to my wife and teen.
As we lingered in front of The Music Box Theatre, wishing for the chance to see Mike or Will or Laura or Noah or Kristolyn from Dear Evan Hansen enter through the stage door a bit before 6pm, I casually suggested, just a seemly offhand, from the hip idea, that the Mrs. and teen stick around there, you know, to grab a photo and snag an autograph or two.
I said that I should ride the 3 train for 30 minutes to Atlantic Ave alone because the Red Wings stink, those proper noun Islanders aren’t considerably better, the building will be half empty and I heard that, anyway, the building sucks for hockey.
Two bewildered faces stared back at me. Stay there? At the theater? Without you?
The Mrs. and the teen had their confusion turn to joy in short order as a I reached into my back left jeans pocket and produced a pair of tickets for the 7pm performance of Dear Evan Hansen.
My god I was so happy to see them so happy.
Fast forward to 10pm.
The Red Wings won a bizarre, entertaining game 6-3. Cool.
I sprinted to catch the train back to Manhattan and ran through Times Square just in time to watch Laura Dreyfuss, Noah Galvin and Rachel Bay Jones emerge from that same stage door to sign the waiting Playbills of the Mrs, the teen and about a hundred other fans waiting eagerly under street light on a delightfully mild December evening.
The next day, I got show my wife and the teen my favorite Piet Mondrian painting (below), Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso, Pollock, Monet, Seurat, Boccioni’s incredible Dynamism of a Soccer Player, and so much more at MoMA.
After a quick lunch somewhere, I really cannot recall, we three together caught the Wednesday matinee of the stirring The Band’s Visit at the Barrymore. It’s the frontrunner for this year’s Best Musical Tony Award, and for very good reason.
After that gorgeous musical, we wandered in and out of the Time Square Line Friends store a few times to ogle the cute but confusing we-have-no-idea-what-these-characters-are stuffed animals, indulged in cheesecake at Junior’s, and then escaped the cold for the 8pm performance of Come From Away, from a semi-private box stage right.
Still floating slightly off the ground from Come From Away’s rousing, remarkable, life-affirming songs and its true story, we are stronger together message, we waited outside in subfreezing temps for more Broadway stars to emerge.
We three, dressed completely inappropriately because apparently I cannot properly read a weather forecast, shivered and shook, struggling to hold our Playbills steady as damn near the entire cast of Come From Away signed and posed for photos with the smiling teen.
And then we hopped across 45th Street to watch the Dear Evan Hansen stars exit the Music Box Theatre once more time.
That night was pretty special too.
Watch Jen Colella perform “Me and the Sky”, the Come From Away song that sends shivers up my spine and the one the teen loves to sing the most.
Raising a Broadway music nerd isn’t the cheapest thing in the parenting world but we’ve gone nearly 14 years without desperate pleas for elusive dolls, pricey video games, and expensive stadium concerts by pop stars, so I’ll gladly query and re-query SeatGeek (as I do almost daily) for good-ish deals on the Broadway shows she’s obsessed with and I’ll gladly stand outside those Broadway theaters dressed in not nearly enough layers in winter so that she might see, talk to, take a photo with, and have her Playbills signed by the actors she sings along with every day of her life.
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