Well, dear readers, the first two Kritzerland New York shows are done and I have to say that I was very pleased with them and especially with our two audiences. It’s different in LA – everyone knows us and have since the very first show. Here, very few know what we do in LA and I had no idea of how any of the patter would land, but it landed as well here as in New York, and when something didn’t land as well I built on it, which I love doing. The first show had I don’t know how many people but it did seem as if the entire downstairs section was full (there’s a balcony level but no one was up there. So, we probably had sixty or seventy people there. I can always kind of gauge how things will go, patter-wise, from whatever joke I make following my standard “I have to explain that I am elderly and must read from the paper” line. I went through all of the show patters and chose my two favorites. The one last night had to do with my Don Knotts impression of him playing Tevye in Fiddler. It got such a big laugh at the first show I knew we were going to be all right. And because it did, I added two more Don Knotts roles, Harold Hill and The King in The King and I. Everyone in the show did a grand, grand job. In the first show, I think there was only one lyric flub and lovely Lisa Livesay covered it in such a way that no one even knew. Little Hadley Miller went up on her verse of Let’s Get Together in the sound check, so I suspected she might during the show – in the first show it was absolutely perfect and went better than it did when we performed it in LA. In the second show, she did go up but covered it well and it got a laugh, and then, for fun, I went up on the first line of my verse, and from then on it was great. Dan Callaway, I have to say, is doing the best work in these shows that he’s ever done in our shows, and he’s done a lot of them. Lisa is always pure heaven. I skipped a song by accident, but we just did it one song late and everyone was right there. Jenna Lea Rosen sang her little heart out – her heart is actually big and her voice is even bigger – she was great. Sami was equally great in her duet with Jenna and her big solo of Sherman Brothers nonsense words. Sarah Uriarte Berry was fighting a cold, but you’d have never known it – she was terrific. Evan Buckley Harris did great in his two numbers. And Madison Claire Parks wowed everyone with her one and only number – it took a while for her to find it, but I gave her very specific direction and she took it and ran with it and brought the house down. And Richard was just his usual wonderful self in his guest section, and then we had way too much fun doing Two Roads. We had some fun people at show one – Tom Schumacher, head of Disney Theatricals, and several other Disney players. We had the legendary Marni Nixon, too. And, of course, we had our haineshisway.com contingent, and it was just wonderful to see them all. And FJL, KevinH and vixmom all stayed for the second show.
The attendance for the second show was obviously less, but it was more than I was expecting. The club has an interesting layout so that even if you have a light crowd it doesn’t look like it. I’m guessing we had thirty-five or forty folks there. The show went well and I’m happy to say the old voice held up. But doing two shows like this back to back is a killer for me – I just never shut up for the show, plus singing the two songs in this one – and only about twenty minutes between shows. Yikes. Choreographer Peggy Hickey was with us (The Gentleman’s Guide to Murder), and the associate director of Les Miz and Mary Poppins was there, too, and a very nice guy. Everyone from both audiences were so very nice and positive, and actually several said they were going to come back for tonight’s show, so that’s good. I have the feeling the word of mouth will be wonderful – I do know that Gene Castle, who booked us, was getting lots and lots of nice compliments on the show. And Chris Denny did a great job playing and Adryan Russ was her usual organized self so everything went swimmingly.
After, we went to an Eyetalian jernt a couple of blocks away – I had some spaghetti and meatballs, basically my first food of the day. We were joined by my pal Angel Reda, who’s in Chicago on Broadway.
Prior to all that, I slept till eleven, walked a mile-and-a-half while they cleaned the room, then came back and relaxed.
Today, I will hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep, and I do hope my voice will be in good shape, so do send some excellent vibes and xylophones. Then I’ll hopefully print out my boarding pass, take a walk, maybe have some pretzels or something, then pack what I can. At around four-fifteen I’ll mosey on over to The Triad and we’ll have a bit of a sound check and our ensemble will run their numbers for the sound guy. The sound guy, by the way, was just great. Then we’ll do the seven o’clock show, which will hopefully have a decent crowd now that the word is out, then we do our nine o’clock show and hopefully that will have at least as many as we did last night for that show. Then we’ll eat, then I’ll finish packing, take something down for the hotel to ship, then sleep as much as I can, and then we shall be on our way to the airport early in the morning, and then we shall be on our way back to LA.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, relax, walk, print a boarding pass, relax, and then it’s sound check and two shows. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy that the first two shows went well.