Celebrity Sighting of the Day: actor Christian Slater, currently, but not for long, starring as Tom in the current Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, coming out of a bodega at the corner of 9th Avenue and 54th Street with a couple of bags of groceries and turning west onto 54th Street. Good to know we have the gentleman as a neighbour...run, ladies, run!
And I'm back from dinner and seeing the Broadway production of All Shook Up at the Palace Theatre again with my parents and their friends, a wonderful family visiting from South Africa. Dinner was at a favorite place of mine, The Hourglass Tavern. Mmmm...
All Shook Up was just as much fun as the last time I saw it. Jonathan Hadary was out of the show tonight and Michael X. Martin was on as Jim. I love Hadary, but I think Martin was even better in this particular role. I just believed it more from Martin than Hadary is all.
One thing I noticed even more than before was that blue suede shoes really do clash with absolutely everything. Why would anyone want such footwear?
After the show, we went to the stage door where Charlene, my new friend from bowling met us and gave us a royal tour of the Palace Theatre's backstage areas. She showed us some of the dressing rooms (which seem almost randomly laid out with no rhyme or reason), the green room, the wardrobe areas and the wings and stage. It was way cool.
The staircases leading from the basement areas to the stage are narrow and the one stage right is especially trecherous. I can't imagine how the women in the company do it at speed in heels. Of course, they are probably well used to it by now.
The wings at the Palace look like the funnest (and I know that's not a word) attic ever. The set pieces are strung up from the walls and the flies and there are bikes, motorcycles, and other props and set pieces everywhere. Everything used in this show is something you'd want to touch and play with and I was worried that the small child in our group would damage something. No problems though.
The only cast members we saw were Leah Hocking, as she was running about and Sharon Wilkins, who had guest in her dressing room. When we returned to the street, star Cheyenne Jackson was working the crowd, signing autographs and posing for pictures. If the size of the crowd (kept at bay by those metal crowd-control fences) is any indication, Jackson was at it for some time. But he seemed in his element and loving every minute of it. Be still my heart...
I was surprised to learn that his hair in the show is a wig. He likes to wear his real hair short and apparently his own hair isn't very co-operative when it comes to curling in just the right way as is necessary for the show. And it was amusing to note that HIS after-performance hair is no better than MY after-performance hair, meaning that it was sticking up weirdly in odd places and generally looked like he'd recently removed a wig. Hee...
So all-in-all a fun evening. Everyone enjoyed the show and the backstage tour was the icing on the cake. Whoo-Hoo!