Addendum and Requiem

Just so as not to seem like an abject snob (I am, I just don't want to SEEM like one),
my "cultural void" and "dumbed down New York" comments from the previous blog are due to the fact that Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs/Broadway Bound revival at The Nederlander closed after only six days.

Shock.

A New York where shows like Rock of Ages stretch on "Now and Forever", but where Neil Simon cannot keep a show open for more than a week confounds me. I have nothing specifically against Rock of Ages, mind you, but the zeitgeist seems to have distilled.

I cannot help but be despondent and nostalgic for Dorothys Parker and Kilgallen, Dick Cavett, Eric Sevaried, The Round Table... hell, even Prohibition had some things to write about. I worked an event at a museum recently where the main act was someone I had never heard of, singing (sort of) songs about anger, instant gratification and self-aggrandizement all while in a ball cap that covered her face and painted into a shiny, gold bustier so far up her butt, it looked more like traction than a corset and speakers spitting out distorted sound to a room full of hipster doofuses... that I was cleaning up after.

Okay...
I realize that simply keeping an online blog is a form of self-aggrandizement, and being anyone's Hazel is demanding at best, but I also remembered an event at Lincoln Center where Barbara Cook had to stop singing to tell her audience to stop talking.

I still love New York with my whole heart, but I wonder where we're all going... those of us who still love theatre and the alchemy it completes in the human spirit, when it works. (Thank god for Jude Law's current sold out Hamlet)

Is art imitating life, or is it simply marketing?