New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 5 (or, Spamalot, coconuts, and not much more)

My plan for the day centered around Spamalot, another item on my reasons to visit New York list. As the show is really popular, the only ticket I could get was for the Wednesday matinee. (Spamalot apparently has inexpensive standing room only tickets for sale the day of the show, complete with little plaques on the floor about where to stand, but even these tickets usually sell promptly bright and early in the morning. I didn't want to risk not going.)

Before the show, I planned to eat at Barney Greengrass, a jewish brunch place on the upper west side that I'd tried and failed to go to when I lived in Manhattan. (It was closed the day I went.) Barney Greengrass, nearly a century old, is a New York institution, a combination retail market and restaurant. It's subtitled "The Sturgeon King" and famous for salmon and (not surprisingly) sturgeon.

I ordered one of its most famous dishes, salmon scrambled with eggs and onions ($13). It was quite good with ample pieces of salmon (not skimping on the salmon as most salmon and egg scrambles seem to do) but was poorly presented, simply thrown onto a white plate with no decorations or sides. It came with a bagel or bialy and I, having eaten a number of bagels recently, ordered the (onion) bialy. Definitely eh. In all, the scramble was good enough to be worth the money, but I'd really expect more attention to the presentation given the $10+ price tag.

I left over an hour to get from the upper west side to the theater district for my show. This was way more than necessary -in fact I could probably walk there in forty minutes-, but it turned out to be a good thing. At the subway station, they announced that there was "an incident" on a southbound train at the 125th St station and all southbound trains were running express until 59th St. That meant the train would skip me, at 86th St. After some confusion -the station operator was confused and kept telling us the trains were running and would stop and we only learned not to listen to her after a few trains went by on the express track- I grabbed a northbound train to 125th and then transferred to a southbound one. I arrived at the Spamalot theater with more than fifteen minutes to spare and was greeted by a massive line. (They were very inefficient at letting people in.)

Looking at signs while in line I realized that Spamalot was the 2005 Best Musical Tony award winner. Two best musicals in two days!

My seats at Spamalot were poor. Like Avenue Q, I decided to be cheap and buy nose-bleed tickets, this time in part of the theater that said "partial view" but claimed it only matters in two scenes for a total of fifteen minutes. But these tickets were worse than that. They were in the balcony in the last row ten seats from the side, and the curvature of the ceiling restricted by view of things high on the stage. Admittedly I could see the main action in most scenes but I found myself repeatedly slouching to try to get the full effect of events on stages, including actors on castle walls, the really tall Knights Who Say "Ni" (on stilts), and the atmosphere conveyed by the scenery.

Spamalot was pretty good, but nowhere near as good as Avenue Q. Much of Spamalot's quality came from the scenes lifted entirely from the movie; most of these were simply re-enacted (without music). I didn't like that a sizable fraction of the show was devoted to broadway mockery with songs like The Song That Goes Like This ("Once in every show / There comes a song like this /It starts off soft and low / And ends up with a kiss"), You Won't Succeed On Broadway, Diva's Lament ("What ever happened to my part? / It was exciting at the start. / Now we're halfway through Act 2 / And I've had nothing yet to do."), and Twice In Every Show. It's not that these songs were bad -they weren't- it's just that they felt like a crutch to fill up time because the writers couldn't figure out how to make the show long enough just by using traditional Monty Python and The Holy Grail material.

They did have at least one case of very Monty-Python-esque humor (certainly more Monty Python than the broadway parody). For instance, the show started off with a song and dance about Finland that lasted until the narrator interrupted and corrected the actors about the topic of the musical. Going along with this theme, the playbill even had a few fake and very funny pages about the Finland musical that included amusing actors' names and humorous titles for songs.

Some scenes did stand out. The choreography in the I'm Not Dead Yet song and dance was great. I'm also impressed by the audience involvement. In particular, they had a member of the audience find the grail and bring it onstage near the last scene. In addition, at the end they had the whole audience stand up and sing and dance to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

Spamalot clearly knew its audience was much more male-dominated than most broadway ones -- there were lots of women singing and dancing throughout the show.

But perhaps the most interesting event of the day was not Spamalot or the subway incident (which I can't find any news about on the web -- there isn't enough local neighborhood-level reporting) was the coconut orchestra. Spamalot invited the whole audience to move to the courtyard by the theatre, gave them coconuts, and planned to (and did) set the Guinness World Record for the world's largest coconut orchestra.

I got my own set of coconuts (for free) (according to Spamalot's web site, a $15 value) and participated! It fun and fast. I'm surprised how easy it was to learn to play; I guess using percussion instruments to do a tune I've heard many times before isn't that hard. The whole event made minor news: playbill.com, broadwayworld.com.

Before heading home to Metuchen, I decided to spend a little time looking at coats at Macy's. Macy's, like Bloomingdale's, was also amazingly large: seven floors the size of city blocks. But the selection of coats of the type I desired was much smaller (although also cheaper). Of course, by charging $150 for a pair of stylishly ripped jeans, one can't claim Macy's is inexpensive as a whole.

Once back in Metuchen, I believe Bryson, Catherine, and I had dinner and played more settlers.

P.S. I took three sad pictures and one movie this day: one of the brunch place, and the rest of breaking the coconut orchestra record.