A (0:00)

Sa Foreign hello all you theater nerds both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And this is going to be a short episode today. It's going to be quick little update on some things that I saw. Truth be told, I probably don't need to do this episode, but I've been getting in the habit of releasing more content lately and there will be a break at some point this summer. So I figured why not kind of keep this streak of weekly episodes going until we hit the break and, you know, just have stuff out there in the ether, know what I mean? So I'm also gonna keep this short because I'm recording this literally the day before I'm releasing it. And tonight I got a last minute invitation to see Kids Cats the Jellicle Ball at the Perlman Arts center. And you better believe I will discuss that in a future episode. But I figured why not talk about something else? Today I did see Follies, the transport group's one night only concert of Follies at Carnegie hall with many, many Broadway performers. I also saw Titanic and Encores at City center, which I know I talked about a little bit in the Tonys episode with James Soule, but I figured I could talk about it a little bit more on this episode. I also saw here there are Blueberries at the New York Theatre Workshop which has just announced it's going to do an international tour in 2025. There are also rumors that they are planning to move to Broadway next season, or I guess this upcoming season that we just started. And today I saw Home at the Roundabout Theater Company at the Todd Haynes Theater Theater. So I figured why not start with the plays, kind of not necessarily get them out of the way. But you know, you all want to hear more about Follies and you want to hear more about Titanic and so we should probably just sort of get into that a little further. I also want to take the moment to read two reviews that we got. One was a five star review, one was a one star review. Our first real live one one star review for the podcast. We've gotten one star ratings before, but this is the first time someone's taken the time to fully write out a review and I want to give them their due. They took the time to write it, they made the effort to really write a cohesive thought and we Honor those. We honor the people who don't like us as well as do like us, because it's the only way we can grow. And I'm going to do it up front because on the off chance that the person who wrote this is still listening to this podcast, because if maybe they enjoy torturing themselves, I figure best to get this out of the way so they don't have to listen to the rest of the episode. They can listen to their handiwork now and then move on with their lives. So we'll do both. I'll do with the one star review first because it is also longer. And then we will close with the positivity of a five star review. All right, cue the Light in the piazza Overture music. One star. Exceptionally difficult to listen to. Starting with the positives, this podcast provides in depth conversations about Broadway. And most episodes are quite long relative to other podcasts. So it's a good background listen. That is actually something that a lot of people have told me. They like to listen to it while they're driving or they're doing errands or chores, which is honestly fair game. The negatives. Matt perpetually digresses to the point where you may find yourself saying get to the point. You may think that sometimes he also goes out of his way to be condescending towards shows, performers, artists he dislikes, often in a distasteful way that some will find off putting. I don't think I go out of my way, but you might find me condescending. I also don't know how you can dislike something and not sound totally condescending. You can sound bipartisan, but you can't sound positive when you don't like something or someone overall. If you're a Broadway fan who also enjoys the Real Housewives or other trash television, this may be the podcast for you, exclamation point. If not, I suggest you keep scrolling and look for another theater podcast. All right, that's what they have to say. Next up, five stars. And the title is just ads. Ads. Ads. This is the first time I've ever listened to a podcast and thought, I'm so glad this podcast has ads. You deserve it, Matt. Thank you so much, Kale. That was very kind of you. All right, those are our. Those are our two new reviews, you guys. You know, when I ask you to give us some new ratings or a review, you. You pull through. So if anybody wants to write some new reviews after that, you know, please do. We love to read them. So we'll start with home, because I Literally just saw it. And it's, to be honest, kind of slipping from my memory the longer it goes from my walking out of the theater. This is a revival of a play by, by Sam Art Williams. It premiered at the Cork Theater, now the James Earl Jones Theater, in 1980 after having an Off Broadway run from the at St. Mark's Playhouse. It was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company and the play was nominated for Best Play at the Tony Awards that year, as well as Best Actor in a play for Charles Brown. This is the first revival it's ever had and it's essentially, essentially just the life of a man named Zephus Miles. He's a young farmer, unclear exactly where he is from, but it chronicles his childhood to his later and adult life and talks about his childhood romance with a girl named Patty Mae Wells and sort of how they fall apart and then reconnect him refusing to fight in Vietnam and getting put into jail for it and then trying to make it in the big city and it kind of destroying him and him going back to his home. And it's a three person play. The actor playing Sephis Miles, who in this production is played by Torrey Kittles, he's very much the center of the show. It's all around him. And then there are two women who play all the other characters in Sephis's life. And that's, you know, family members, it's Patti Mae. It's. It's also men in his life. Anything down from, you know, a bus driver to a sex worker that he sort of romances for a while while he's still employed. And it's directed by Kenny Leon and, you know, it's not a terrible piece or production. It was very poorly attended. I will say that it was. I would say the theater is probably 60% full. And granted it's a Wednesday matinee, but I mean, this thing just opened and Roundabout has a subscriber base and it doesn't look good this early in the run to have such a half empty house. But mostly I just was sort of, you know, it's only 90 minutes, but I kind of felt the length of it. It's very much a play that is of its time. It's not necessarily experimental, but it is very presentational and theatrical. It's. It's less about scene work than it is about monologues. And just pontificating, I guess, is the best way I could describe it. And I want to remember that word because it's going to come in handy in a second. It Feels like it's more of a showcase for three actors than it is a play, really about anything, at least to me. There were people around me who were quite moved by it. And I think that's true of all art. Right. You know, somebody will really have a personal connection to something that you just feel so far away from. And it wasn't the subject matter. It really was the presentation of it. And also, maybe this was just a piece that didn't fit Kenny Leon's directing style. He's. I don't want to say a subtle director. He's not subtle. Maybe a little more nuanced. He doesn't really go for high theatricality. It's why I'm kind of surprised he's doing Our Town in the fall. That doesn't really seem like his vibe. And I think he's also directing Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in the spring, which is, again, also kind of odd. That's such a passionate play. And I don't really equate Kenny with that kind of stuff. Top Dog, Underdog might be the most passionate I've ever seen him direct anything. And even that I really equate to Corey Hawkins just bringing it to us. So this was, for me, this was a miss. It wasn't a devastating, laughable flop, but it was just very forgettable. As I said, I walked out of the theater and as I am talking to you now, it's slowly slipping from my brain. There is an actress named Story Ayres, I think is how you pronounce her name. It's S, T, O, R, I. And then her last name is spelled A, Y, E, R, S. And I thought she was very impressive with her versatility of different ages, different genders. No, different walks of life in. In home. And if no one was incredibly successful, I think that was maybe just due to the disconnect between director and material. But I did think that overall the actors did a good job. And I thought that story, personally, for me, was the MVP of the production. So way to go. The other show that I saw and why I'm mentioning pontificating was Here There are Blueberries, which was at the New York Theatre Workshop. I was brought to this, like, last week. I think we saw it on Friday. Yeah, I think we saw Friday night. And first of all, this is an interesting thing to discuss because the performance we saw started very, very late. It was supposed to start at seven, and they didn't open up the theater until maybe five minutes past seven. It was very hot. This was as we were getting towards the breaking point of our heat wave in New York. And I'm sure we're going to get another one very soon. But we were talking like 95, 96 degrees with humidity, and they were having some of the lighting equipment and they were trying to figure out exactly how to fix it or what they could do. So we, as the audience was not brought in until 7:05. And we were all sat, and we got sat very quickly because we thought, okay, we got to get this thing started. What ended up happening was by 7:45, two members of New York Theatre Workshop came out and addressed us, telling us what the issue was, was that lighting equipment wasn't working earlier in the day and they thought they had fixed it. Turns out they didn't. And so they spent a good chunk of time trying to fix it. And when that clearly wasn't going to happen, they spoke with the company of actors to figure out how best to proceed. And they only had a few performances left, and they didn't want. They really couldn't cancel and then reschedule. They could cancel and refund, but they couldn't cancel and reschedule. So they told audience members that what they were going to do is they were going to do the show, but only with basic lighting, enough lighting that they could show projections that they needed to show because the whole play is centered around photographs. And so they needed to have these projections up and enough light that, you know, we could see everyone on stage. It just wasn't going to be the highly intricate, theatrically expressive lighting design that I guess they were used to. They said something along the lines, like 600 light cues. So we didn't get any of those. And there were a couple of rude people in the audience who were saying, well, are we going to get, you know, half off of our tickets today? And, you know, oh, we can't hear you. Speak slower. Speak up like that. Not in a helpful way, not in a disgruntled way, in a just nasty kind of way. And so the two people from New York Theatre Workshop told the audience, what we're going to do is, you know, we have your point of contact and we are going to offer you free tickets to our first production of next season as a thank you for your patience and your cooperation tonight, which everyone in the audience seemed to be okay with. Plus, that's sort of just the magic of live theater, right? Sometimes something crazy like this happens and you have to have a show must go on mentality. So we Saw a performance and pretty much no one else got to see. The acting and staging was all the same, but just the lighting design was different, which led to things just sort of either working better or working less. And it was just fascinating to watch the play itself. So it's, it's helmed by, I don't say, how you say his name. Moises. Moises Kaufman from the Tectonic Theater Project. He directed the Laramie Project. He directed Jane Fonda in 33 variations. He also directed Paradise Square. He directed the Heiress with Jessica Chastain. He's had his highs, he's had his lows. Haven't we all? And this is very similar to the Laramie Project. And what most interested me was that Kathleen Chalfont was in it and I love her. She was the original Hannah Pitt in Angels in America and George C. Wolfe's Angels in America and originated the premiere of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit. So she's just a master of acting. And I was really excited to see her on stage finally. The play itself is a true story about curators at the Holocaust Museum being sent photographs from Auschwitz. And two things about it are important. One is that they're actually aren't that many photographs of Auschwitz. The Nazis were very careful to, you know, hide as much about what the goings on there in those camps as possible. That was sort of one of the major breaking points of World War II, is that the world didn't really know about concentration camps and what was going on inside of them until towards the end of the war. And that really sort of pushed for the Allies winning the war in the end. So there's that, there's the fact that there aren't many actual photographs of Auschwitz, but then also not only these photographs, legitimate and truly of Auschwitz, but they are more of the Nazis and their comrades than they are of the actual prisoners in the inside of the camps. And it's. They're all very happy go lucky nonchalant photographs. You would think that these were like part of a travelogue if you didn't know where they were being photographed. Now some of you might be hearing this and going, this sounds very similar to the Zone of Interest, the Oscar winning movie by Jonathan Glazer. And you would be right. I do not know how long this project has been in development. I believe it was a Pulitzer finalist for drama this year. But in order for it to have qualified, it must have performed somewhere else. I think it performed somewhere else like a year ago, maybe Berkeley Rep. And I had not heard of it, really, until they started performances here. And I had seen the Zone of Interest back in December. And for those of you who did not see the Zone of Interest, that is hundred minute movie about the camp director of Auschwitz and his family living in their home right next door to the camps. And the thing about Zone of Interest is that it is, relatively speaking, a mundane film. It's the day to day of this family and the intimate conversations that they have and the dynamics of what's going on in the house and the politics of this man, the father and husband of the family, trying to rise up in the ranks of the Nazi party and trying to be taken seriously by Hitler, who we never meet. But while this is all happening, you just are always constantly reminded of what's on the other side of the wall. You never see it. You sometimes hear it very distantly. It's a very specific, very curated sound design. In Zone of Interest, there is a reason why they won best sound design at the Oscars, thank God, because it's. It was absolutely the rightful winner. But so you're always aware of that, of what's on the other side. And there's that tension, that underlying tension the entire time. But ultimately it shows you how these monsters are humans. But you still can't. You don't get fully taken in by it. You never think, oh, we would be friends in real life because you hear them casually drop awful sayings about Jewish people or just be really callous and unfair feeling in the middle of like a child's birthday party that they're throwing. And it's. It's a powerful, wonderful film. They also have this big coup towards the end that I don't want to spoil. I just, I highly recommend watching it. The Zone of Interest is. It's not a difficult sit. Like it's, it's not a tough watch. It's not Schindler's List precious, where like you need to kind of COVID your eyes from the screen. There's nothing punishing happening on screen. It's just a tough sit because of the constant tension and because you, the audience member, are always aware of what's on the other side of the wall here. There are Blueberries is similar, but it's from the perspective of all the curators and the tension in the play really is a determining if these photographs are real, whether they should display the photographs in the museum and trying to decipher who everyone is in these photographs, especially these young women who were recruited to work at the camps, but they didn't actually work in the camps themselves. They were like telephone operators and telegram deliverers and things like that. It was just in conjunction with Auschwitz. And a lot of the curators look at these 17, 18 year old girls and think to themselves, they must have been victims of propaganda. They probably didn't know what was going on. How could we ever know? And the long and the short of it is everyone in those photographs that you look at absolutely knew what was going on. That's what makes it even worse because they just look so carefree in the photographs. It looks like summer camp for adults. And you know, you want to believe that there were people there who didn't know or had morals about it. And every now and then you hear a story about someone in a photograph who left because they couldn't handle it anymore. They, they got there because they thought they could help the prisoners and they did, but. But ultimately it was too hard and they had to go and all these things. It's a very, I'm not going to say esoteric, it's not dense in any way, but it is a heady piece. If you're familiar with Laramie Project, it is a play about the murder and aftermath of the murder of Matthew Shepard. And I actually did it in high school and it was a very powerful experience for me at the age of 14. But you know, the play's material comes from Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater, either theater company or theater group, I can't remember which one it is, but they went to, I think it's Montana that they go to. And they interviewed, you know, Matthew Shepard's friends and they interviewed the friends of the, of the two murderers and everyone in the town and people in the state and all these things. And so the play itself is all these actors playing multiple roles speaking the actual words of the people that Kaufman and Tectonic interviewed. And obviously, no, they curate and they shift things around, but all. They never made up text. It's all interviewed text and like court transcripts and police reports and things like that. And here There are Blueberries is a very similar situation. It's possible that there's some playwriting in there, but it's. It mostly feels like text taken from interviews. And it's fascinating stuff, but I didn't find it terribly moving. And part of that might be because I had already been exposed to Zone of Interest, which is a. It's an active piece. It is actual storytelling of that time period and those people. Whereas here there are Blueberries are people in present or semi, present day taking it all in and analyzing it and talking to us about their analysis and the power of photographs and the power of memory and things like that. And it's a interesting exercise for a while. And they use the photographs well. But it starts to become a little redundant because it feels a bit like rinse and repeat as we get to each new. I wouldn't even call it plot point, but I guess story beat, character beat. And as I said, with Home, rather than it feeling like dramatic tension, a lot of the times it feels like pontificating. It feels like a company explaining things to us rather than expressing things to us. And that works for some people. It can work for me for a long time, but I can't have a whole play about it, especially with the subject matter. The best part of the play is towards the end when pretty much our main character changes gears and plays a new part. She plays a survivor of the Holocaust, the woman who first discovered these photographs. She was a prisoner and she discovered them like on her. On the day of liberation from the camps and explains and expresses what it was to arrive there, her time there and then what it was to find these photographs. Because most of her family were killed while they were there. And she never saw them again. But she. As it turns out, she's in these photographs. They're in these photographs. Many of them were taken the day that they arrived. And it's very powerful and very triggering, but it's very important. And it was, for me, the best part of the show. And I wished we had more of it. And I was reading some of the reviews after the fact that. And a lot of the reviews for Here There are. Blueberry said very similar things. You know, obviously important subject matter. Not the worst way to go about doing a show. It's worked for Kaufman in the past. But something about this one just feels dry. And it doesn't feel as powerful as it could be or as it should be. And if they do go to Broadway, Godspeed to them. Maybe it'll, you know, sell very well there. They had a successful run at New York Theater Workshop. It sold well for the most part. I know our performance was sold out. I don't think this. They ran longer than Merrily We Roll along. And they've been using in their press packets as they've been pitching to producers to raise money for a transfer. This is the highest grossing show in New York Theatre Workshops history. And I do think that is because, a, it's the longest run that they've had, so more tickets could be sold. But Also, fewer seats were taken up by subscribers for this one, so they could sell regular tickets at probably a higher price. Whereas Merrily was, I think, two months max, maybe a month and a half, and was mostly filled up with subscribers. Someone mentioned Rent the other day. Like, how could Rent not be the highest grossing production they've had? When you adjust for. Sorry, when you adjust for inflation. And the truth is, Rent actually didn't run very long at the New York Theater Workshop. I think it only ran a month, maybe five or six weeks. They didn't do any extensions because it was just going to Broadway immediately. It was too hot to stick around. They had to go, go, go, go, go. And you can listen to the Rent episode and hear more about that. Apologies for the audio quality. Adam sounds very far away and I sound very close. So it's. It's tough. I apologize. But you can hear about it in that episode. So here. There are Blueberries I know did well for New York Theatre Workshop overall. It was a successful financial production for them, even if the critical reception wasn't exactly what they wanted. But, you know, they have a Pulitzer finalist as a label. They've got a successful run as a label. If they can make it work for Broadway, I'm not going to complain. I'm always here for Broadway audiences flocking to see plays. This one just wasn't really for me. Again, as I said, it just felt a little too dry, a little too technical, and a little too at an arm's length. When it's analytical, when it's overly analytical like this, it's hard to get into it. And some people, they can just because of the subject matter. And I'll mention that as we get into the next few shows. I talk about. I just read what people write, what people say about shows that they go see. And sometimes it's just the personal connection you have with it for XYZ reasons. Or it can be that just the subject matter is so important to you that it doesn't matter what the piece is or how well it's done. There are. There are audience members out there that are just always going to go see a story about World War II or the Holocaust, and it's just going to. It's going to get them no matter what. And that's wonderful. That is material that speaks to them. I'm always a bit more about the execution than about the subject matter. I think that anything can be powerful and moving if done in a specific kind of way. It's not just about the. The plot for me. It's got to be about all the rest of it. But that's me. That's me in my, in my life. We are going to go on to our next two shows. We're going to go into Titanic at Encores for a little bit and then finally Follies at Carnegie Hall. But before we do that, let us take a quick break. And we're back. So I saw Titanic with my mom, Danny Tickton, Koplik, you all remember her from the London episode. We went to the first Friday performance. I believe that was their fourth show that they did. Encores has basically been doing two week runs for a while now, almost since the new regime post Covid. And I don't, I mean, listen, if it helps them with their finances, great. But it does kind of take a little bit away from the specialness of Encore is just that it's a very fleeting, lovely thing that happens in New York three times a year. You see a show done semi professionally and by that I just mean, you know, not fully formed sets and luxurious costumes. It's done in 10 days with Broadway actors and you're seeing a musical that you either will never see again or you'll just never see again on that scale. Titanic is a musical that I'm pretty sure we'll see again on Broadway at some point. We just will never see it with a 30 piece orchestra and a 32 person cast. It is going to be too expensive for a show like Titanic, which is ultimately a niche 90s musical. It ran just about two years in the 90s and won the Tony for best musical. But I don't think it ended up recouping. Its critical response was sort of mixed. And even though it gained an audience following and also by the way gained a lot of support from the huge hit that was the movie Titanic that came out later that year. The Broadway Titanic came out in I think April of 97 and then the movie version came out in December of 97. So it definitely helped that the Leo Kate romantic movie came out a few months later. Although I'm sure it confused audiences for a while. Where are Jack and Rose? Why aren't they on the ship? In the same way that I'm sure there are people going to Hell's Kitchen confused as to why Jay Z is not in the very end of the show. But so there had always been rumors that Titanic was going to come back to Broadway. People have been doing productions of it all around the world. In the uk, in Canada, there was one that was possibly going to come here I think that it either was the one that originated in the UK or originated at the Signature Theater in Virginia. It was going to do an out of town in either Los Angeles or Canada and then come here, and then that just didn't end up happening. And everyone was very excited about this. Titanic. This has been considered a solid season for Encores. Everyone's got their favorites. I would say my favorite of the season was probably Jelly's Last Jam. It was very much uneven, but the highs of that production were so high for me that it's not that I forgive the lows so much as it's like it's Encores. There's always gonna be a bump or two in the production just because A, it's done so fast and B, part of its purpose is you are presenting imperfect works. It's fun to see shows that have merit, even if they maybe aren't entirely revivable anymore. There are sort of these very luxurious, very fleeting research projects, I would say. And for me, that's always just been a lot of fun. I don't ever desire to see High Button Shoes again in my life. But I'm glad I got to see it at Encores at the scale that I saw it, because now I can say that I've seen it and I can have an informed opinion about it, or at least a more. More informed opinion about it. Things like into the woods and Oliver are not really encore shows. But to be fair to Lear and the artistic team at Encores, that has been a complaint for a while now as we've continued with Encores, there are fewer and fewer shows that meet the original criteria. And I know that when they did Follies in, I think it was 2007, that got a lot of complaints because that had already had a revival, Bye Bye Birdie, when that was done, even though it didn't have a Broadway revival at that point, it was considered a popular enough show that it didn't make sense to do it. Every high school in America does Bye Bye Birdie. They did a pajama game, and people thought that was kind of a cop out. So something like Deerworld from last year, that was absolutely a great choice for Encores because we're never going to see Deerworld ever again, and not that we necessarily should. When you watched it at Encores, you understood why it hadn't been done again. There were a lot of wonderful moments in the score. It was cute enough. It's based off of a play that makes no sense. And so the stage show doesn't totally make sense and it's kind of choppy, but they did a lovely job with it. And that's sort of the beauty of Encores is when they do a really good job with an incredibly flawed show, you have the best time and also know this isn't going to go anywhere. When a show used to transfer from Encores, it was because it was just too special for it to only last the five days that it was there. Chicago was never meant to transfer. It just was too special. Wonderful Town with Donna Murphy, it just was too special. Apple Tree with Kristin Chenoweth, which I saw and it remains the best encore show I've seen. Those were all shows where we were reminded as an audience, oh, this material is better than we remembered it and it works in this setting. Plus we have a star who is so perfectly fitted to it. This is, this is too much of an event. And I have a pretty good authority that Encores now is trying to make one show per season transfer to Broadway. Obviously they can't make that happen all the time. And I don't know if you can count the gala presentation they do in the fall. Maybe you can. I don't know. Because if you, if you do, then they've had one transfer per season. They had into the woods, then Parade, and now Once Upon a Mattress. So we'll see what happens next year. But Titanic for me, while Jellies was probably my favorite of the three, Titanic was what felt the most like old school encores. It was very much a presentational production. It was not big on staging or set or costumes. Everyone was mostly in cocktail attire or semi formal attire that was more modern day than it was of the early 1900s. In fact, I would say it was all modern, relatively modern than early 1900s. And there was a lot of facing forward and holding binders. It was more about the material and crafting nuanced and well rounded performances from everyone, which I think was the correct choice on Anne Kaufman's part. They really leaned into what the positive of Titanic is, which is the score, which is usually what you want the positive to be for your Encores production. Right? It's. It's about the music. It's about hearing the music in as wonderful and as lush a scenario as possible. And they added a few pieces to the orchestra for this titanic at encores, 30 pieces. And as opposed to, I think 26, 25 or 26. In the original Broadway production, it was a cast of 32 with many wonderful people in it. Some performances may be a little more Successful for me than others. But I don't blame any of the actors. This is where for me, I think that the praise that this production got might have been a little overblown, just because I was not moved by Titanic. And again, it's because I think the script is kind of weak. It is. I said it on the Tony's episode. It's Grand Hotel on a ship. It's 90 characters with a million plot lines and very few of them resolve, which is fine. You know, a ship is going down, you can't really resolve all of those plot lines. But also, I didn't really care about a lot of the characters because we just spend so little time with any of them. They're all introduced and then they disperse. And sometimes it's like almost an hour until you see a character again and you forget that they were on stage. And many of those characters don't have a big song, which you don't need a big song. But for 2,200 people watching a two and a half hour show, you need things to sort of hold on to for characters. Oh, okay. They're the couple that wants to get married. Oh, they're the couple that are kind of at odds about class. Oh, those are the three Kates. And one of them is pregnant. But, like, what are the other two like? No one can tell you. And I will also say, I think where the encore staging was probably a hindrance to the material was in the second act when the ship was going down, because it didn't feel as urgent. You didn't feel the stakes of the ship going down, at least to me, when everyone was getting into the lifeboats. It felt very. It didn't feel precarious, it didn't feel rushed, it didn't feel urgent. It felt very diplomatic and like we had all the time in the world. And when all the men are sort of sitting on the deck waiting for the ship to go down, obviously they can't tilt the stage, but it sort of looks like everyone's sitting there waiting for something to happen. And it was sweet and it was quiet, but it wasn't moving. To me, I don't know, maybe I'm just dead inside because I had read so many reviews and I had heard so many people come back from it going, oh, my God. I sobbed the moment the opening song happened. I was weeping. And when the finale happened, I was weeping and I was more of the thinking of I wasn't weeping, but I was. I was impressed and I was enjoying the scope and the sound of this Titanic. It's truly what I want Encores to really do more of. Not these prototypes for Broadway transfers. I don't. It does a. It makes the transfers less special. Half of them are not really necessary or worth it. But also it puts pressure on each encore showing of, oh, is this going to transfer? And if it doesn't transfer, does that mean it wasn't good? Like, lighting the piazza was quite good. I know they wanted it to transfer. I don't think it's going to anymore. It's been a full year at this point. The momentum is dead. That doesn't negate the fact that that piazza at Encores was quite good. Dear World never going anywhere doesn't mean Dear World was bad. Dear World was my favorite of all the encore shows last year. Jellies probably can't transfer because it just didn't sell well. And also, it wasn't for me watching it. It didn't feel like a pre Broadway tryout. It felt like a company and a team wanted to put on the best version of Jellies they could do in 10 days because they liked the material so much. And they didn't fail. They. They did as well as they could in the confines of their situation. And I think that's. But I think that's still like the magic of Encores. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be lovely and fleeting. It comes to an end, as do all things. And sometimes you can just have the lovely thing that lasted for two weeks, be the lovely thing that lasted for two weeks and move on and add it to the list of wonderful things that you saw. I don't understand people's need for grandizing production. So that way you can maybe feel like you were in the room of something really special or you were in the room of something before it caught on to become special. Like, everybody wants to be at the Public during Hamilton. Everyone wants to be at the Public during A Chorus Line. Everybody wants to be at New York Theatre Workshop during Rent. They want to say, I saw this before it became big, and I knew even then that this was a thing. And a lot of things are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful things that don't move anywhere. And I think that's just as special, if not more so, because you're one of a fewer number of people that got to see it. And you can hold on to the memory and you can have bragging rights, but also I think that that can mess with our heads sometimes and perhaps make us think more highly of something in the moment than we will looking back on it. When people use words like glorious, transcendent, heaven, otherworldly, I tend to not roll my eyes, but I just go, okay. Because those are very big words, very specific words that I've just heard far too often about so many things that I found perfectly pleasant, perfectly nice. And they've just become trigger words for me. In the same way that when people say, oh, this show isn't trying to be groundbreaking, it's trying to be fun. I've always said that is code for the show is not well written. Even if that's not what the person telling you this is realizing they're saying. But that is the code for it. When people say transcendent, when people say glorious, it often just means it was big, it was lush, and a lot of people need that. We don't get that sound very often on Broadway anymore, usually just for revivals and even then, quite rarely. I will also say with Titanic because it is a very epic 90s score. Titanic was written in that time where Broadway writers were trying to compete with the mega musical still. So we have these big, big sounding musicals like Titanic and Ragtime and Secret Garden and Sideshow that just epic, epic, epic. Singing all the time. All the time, always. And it employs a lot of very classical sounding voices. And for that I am grateful. We had a number of beautiful sopranos on that stage singing stunningly. And for that, we're always going to be grateful for this production of Titanic. So thank you and Godspeed. Titanic, that's me. And my most classical of singing voices. Last one. Moving on Faliz at Carnegie Hall. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with the transport group and their concerts that they do every year. They pick a musical, they get a big slew of Broadway actors to do it. And what the thinking usually is is one actor gets to do a song. No actor is usually cast as one role. Sometimes they do that. Like, I know they did that with Nine last year. I think they did that with Promises, Promises as well. But like they've also done Baby, and I think they even did hello Again as a sort of encore performance of their actual production of hello Again that they did. Don't quote me on that, though. But this was a more epic event for them because they had never really had a home for these concerts. They did it in sort of various theaters. I think they did it at Merkin hall last year for nine, and this year they did it at Carnegie Hall. And from what I understand, this is going to be their new home for these concerts. And they wanted it to be as epic of an event as possible. So first off, we had a full blown 30 piece orchestra doing the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations. We had a choir of what looked like 50, 50 or 60 voices of amateur singers in this choir. And they all did a lovely job. And then a long slew of actors. And in between doing the entire song list from Follies. And in between we had Ted Chapin, who used to be the head of the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization, but most famously in my mind wrote the book Everything Was Possible, which was about the creation of Follies because Ted was a gopher on that original production. He did it for course credit at school and he was joined by Kurt Peterson, who was the original young Ben in Follies on Broadway. And I've actually met Kurt a few times because as I've mentioned, I used to take voice lessons from Victoria Mallory, who was in the original production of Follies. And she and Kurt dated a little bit. And then she went on to do the original production of A Little Night Music. And Victoria would teach outside of Kurt's voice studios. Kurt has a number of voice studios on the second floor of a building on 7th Avenue. And in the hallway in between all the studios are all of the memorabilia from his shows. So he's got. And Kurt's also a producer. He produced the very first Sondheim tribute concert, which for those of you who know, it's the Scrabble Sondheim concert that they did on the Shubert stage right after A little Night Music had opened. But so there are photos of all of that. There's photos of Follies, there's photos of on the Town, which I believe he was fired from out of town, but he has photos of that and photos of Angela Lansbury and Gypsy, which I believe he co produced, and Dames at Sea, which he was in, and photos from Deerworld, which he was in, and west side Story, which he was in. But all these things. But so I. I always loved when I was there looking at all the Follies photos. But so Kurt and Ted were the co hosts of this. And what they would mostly do was give a little context for each song and then sometimes provide a little fun fact about the song or the show. And honestly, I gotta say, I also, I did not buy my ticket for this. I was invited sort of last minute and I so which I was very grateful and lucky for this wasn't really something I was planning on going to, but when the opportunity came. I wasn't gonna say no. So keep in mind, I'm not someone who's coming into this with having purchased a very expensive ticket weeks in advance and was, you know, sitting with anticipation and high judgment when I got there. I went in just expecting a fun night and I, I got it overall. So when I sort of give nitpicks, just know that I'm not really coming down on this concert at all. It was overall a very, very fun evening and I even had a post on Instagram about it that you can read some of the highlights that I wrote. But you know, it's a one night only concert and no one's really getting paid or paid much. And so there's not a lot of rehearsal time. Some people are going to command their songs a little bit better than others. There are going to be flubs and it's not going to be the most tight of events. There's going to be some dead air and maybe some things that the people who arranged the concert thought would be more interesting than they actually were. But this is just takeaways, you know, it's like I, I know I speak for myself and everyone around me in the high, high balcony of Carnegie Hall. We were all really interested in some of the backstage facts. Those were the things we wanted to hear more of about how Victoria Mallory got her job in the ensemble and how Elphil Chete, who originated Broadway Baby, hated Fifi d', Orsay who originated a Paris, and how Fifi never remembered her lyrics and ever. But we wanted, we wanted more stuff like that. They really. I would have loved it if they had talked the tidbit about how Losing My Mind was supposed to be a duet for Phyllis and sally in Act 2, or I guess in the original production it was done without an intermission, but it was supposed to be for them during the Loveland sequence. And as they were learning it on like day one, Alexis Smith turned to them and she said, so Dorothy Collins or Sally is very much a singer. I am very much not. I can sing on pitch, but I'm not a singer. And this is a song. So give her this and give me a separate number. And I'm not like really a dancer, but I got nice legs and I can jump around a bit. And that's what led to Phyllis's Folly's number Uptown Downtown, which then became Story of Lucy and Jesse and in some cases abba. And underneath that was never mentioned or anything like that. And I would have loved it if we had included it Rather than giving context for the songs. Because it was 3,500 people who all knew the context of all of these songs. We did not need to be told what's about to happen before In Buddy's Eyes, you know what I mean? So highlights for me, the two most successful performances of the evening were Christine Ebersole doing In Buddy's Eyes, which is exactly what you imagined it to be. I think I called it. Pouring buttered perfection all over the song. Just that woman's voice is caramel and it's. It sounds effortless. It's stunning. It. All these years later, it's still clear as a bell. It hasn't aged a day. And in some respects, she actually would have been a wonderful Sally. She's unfortunately too old for it now, but 15 years ago, like around the time of Grey Gardens, she would have been a fantastic Sally. And it's a shame we never got her to do that because it's right in her vocal wheelhouse and I know she can act the thing. She definitely shares some mental waves with Sally Durant Plummer. But it was a stunning in my print, in my opinion, pitch perfect performance of In Buddy's Eyes. The next one for me was Kate Baldwin doing Losing My Mind. A very high key of Losing My Mind, by the way, and coming out looking absolutely stunning. A lot of the women that night were wearing just full on Miss America ball gowns and for that we. We give them grace. Kate came out and just. It was truly effortless and lovely. I don't know what you all consider to be the best Losing My Mind. I'm an original person. I'm a traditionalist that way. I'll never get Dorothy Collins's version out of my mind. I also do love Maren Mazes from the Sondheim Birthday concert. If you watch the video of Victoria Clarke at either Encores or when the show moved to Los Angeles, Victoria Clarke does a stunning Losing My Mind. I'm not the biggest fan of Bernadette's Sally and of her Losing My Mind. It's a little. At that point, it's when I feel like Bernadette's isms take over and the things that we love about her in into the woods and Song and Dance and Brandi Cinderella take over and define her rather than being a part of her, which is why I don't really love her Sally or her Losing My Mind. There's also Judith Ivy doing it at the roundabout in 2001, but we don't talk about that much. We don't Talk about Bruno. But so depending on what you want, you're Losing my Mind to be like, at the very least, Kate Baldwin gave a perfectly sung version, maybe in a higher key than some people are used to, but it fit her register like a glove. And it was simple, it was direct, it was dropped in. And that is also, for me, always going to be. The best version of Losing my Mind is when you don't play the tragedy, you play it like the torch song that it is, and you let the song do the work. There's one moment where you really can kind of break through with your emotion. Like you're, you're feeling it as a torch song singer, right? Like you're, it's, it's very. A hard on sleeve kind of acting style, but you're not actually playing broken, you're playing a lounge singer being broken. And the one moment I feel like where you can kind of break through and be a person is the final. You said you loved me or were you just being kind? That's, it's like it's written to break there. And I always felt that Dorothy Collins did such a wonderful moment that she took a breath before she got to it. The loved is always sort of like right at the top of her register. And so some performances, it wasn't really held for very long. Sometimes it was more like of a pop up. Sometimes she'd be a little under it, but it was still okay. And Kate, you know, Kate has never been under a day in her life. Kate hits everything on the mark, on pitch and. But she also doesn't oversell it, which I appreciate. When you're as vocally gifted as she is, a song like, a song like Losing my Mind, it's very easy to overdo it. It's like when opera singers do send in the clowns, it's like, no, no, no. Just simple, simple, simple, simple. As Howard Ashman told Jodi Benson, when recording part of your world, it's a monologue set to music. And I think that's the best way to think about it, which is why she and Ebersol were my two favorites. But there were other highlights. A lot of people were really, really into Jennifer Holiday's I'm Still Here. And Lord knows, first of all, Lord knows, at least I was there, but Lord knows that I was happy as a clam to watch Jennifer Holliday do that song live. That's something I can say that I witnessed. It was, however, almost nine minutes long. That's a song that usually clocks in at about Five, maybe five and a half minutes with Jennifer Holiday. It clocked in at almost nine, so that is four extra minutes. That is how slow she took it. And a lot of people said that they really enjoyed that. They thought it was a cool interpretation to make it almost like a bluesy lounge singer. I was more of the mind frame of. I don't know. I feel like she's got something slow cooking in the back and she's got time on her hands, so she's making this go as long as possible so she doesn't have to wait for her steak to cook. But she did give it the Jennifer Holliday oomph. And she also, you know, didn't really add a lot of vocal pyrotechnics to it. She kind of sang it as written, which I was really surprised by. Follies is not a score for me where I really want a lot of vocal tricks, because most of those songs are pastiche of a specific era where you can't really do that. You can embody it, you can have fun with it, but when you around with the melody so much that it's almost unrecognizable, that's when you kind of are leaning away from the. From the Follies that I find the most effective. Which actually leads me to Broadway Baby for a quick second. Long story short, with Jennifer, I thought she was very fun. She. She did a good job. That was not the number for me that I wanted to stand for. I wanted to stand for in Buddy's Eyes, and I wanted to stand for another number. But she got a big, very unanimous standing ovation from the crowd, and who am I to take that away from her? I did think she did a fun job, but I talked about vocal pyrotechnics for a second, and they did the whole Follies trio. The Rain on the Roof into a Parry, into Broadway Baby, and Rain on the Roof was. It was Clea Blackhurst and Jim Caruso, I'm pretty sure. And they actually were really good. They were. They were note perfect, word perfect, and they weren't trying to make it that they were stealing the spotlight. They knew what that song was supposed to do, and they did it very well. And Isabel Keating, who I enjoy, was kind of a little underwhelming in Au Paris, that's all. That's a tough song to pull over if you don't have that sort of sardonic French edge to you already. Like, Lilian Mentavecchi is still my favorite version of Au Perry, which you can hear in the 1985 Lincoln center concert recording, the one that has Barbara Cook and Lee Remick, which is. First of all, that was my introduction to Follies. And two, that was actually the. The version of Follies that they performed at Carnegie Hall. They did, you know, certain text cuts and things like that for this Follies, including Dimitri Weissman's speech at the beginning, which was done by Tony winner Hal Linden. But Adrian Lennox, Tony winner Adrian Lennox did Broadway Baby, and I love Adrienne. She's a Tony winner for Doubt. I also saw her in After Midnight, which she was Tony nominated for, rightfully so. She was also in Kiss Me Kate and sang another open in another show and was so good. But everyone in that Kiss Me Kate was just phenomenal. That was no flops. And we have another Kiss Me Kate alum in this Carnegie hall production as well. Adrian, first of all, was an incredible voice, sounded healthy and stunning, and I'm. I'm just so happy for her. She did start to go off the rails with Broadway Baby For Me in the second half of the song. It felt a bit like she wanted to make it her own. She wanted to do riffs, but she didn't really test run any of them, so a lot of them didn't work. And there's no shame in trying. But I feel like when you're doing something like this, when you're at Carnegie hall and it's Follies, you might want to get one or two more test runs in you and confirm what riffs and runs are going to work and maybe when you should just sing it as is and then you can do your thing. Before you go in front of 3,500 people, 2,000 of whom are very judgmental homosexuals, who are going to go on podcasts like this one and say to you, I think another rehearsal would have been. Would have been good there. The evening kind of got off to a not rocky but trepidatious start because we had Katie Finner and Mark Kudish doing Don't Look At Me, the very first song, Song of Follies. That's like character based because we did the prologue with no dialogue, just the orchestra. And then we did Beautiful Girls, which was very well sung. And. And all the women came on to, you know, as sort of like their, hello, I'm in the show tonight, and you'll find out what I'm singing in just a moment. And it was a lot of fun. But we get to the first book song. Don't Look At Me. And Katie Finran, who, again, good. Was in very good voice that night, was playing very fast and loose with the rhythms. And that is a song where you really can't do that. It's short, but it's very intricate and it's very specific. And I got very, very, very nervous and I'm sure many others did as well. Markudish, of course, was not perfect and it was upsetting that Mark Kudisch was relegated to that one bit because Don't Look At Me is really more Sally song. And Ben comes in at the very, very end of that. And it's just very luxurious star casting to put Mark Kudish for the bend track of Don't Look At Me. Then we also got into Waiting for the Girls Upstairs. And if we were a little trepidatious with. With Katie Finneran, there was another hiccup with this one. So Tom Sesma was our buddy for Waiting for the Girls Upstairs. And Tom brings it to every ball. He is a professional. He is a. He is an actor with a capital A. I got to see him in Dead Outlaw this year. He was so good. And I saw him in man of no Importance last year. He was so good. I saw him in Sweeney Todd, as Sweeney Todd, and he was fantastic. Fantastic in that. I feel like he's sort of the secret weapon in the New York musical theater scene. And it's time that we give him a really big Broadway break because he deserves it. He's just so good and so consistent and professional and just. And just a wonderful dude. And he got us off to a good start on Waiting for the Girls Upstairs. And then we had, in addition to him, a mini Falsettos reunion. We had Stephen Bogardus playing Ben, who was the original wizard in Falsettos. We had Caralee Carmelo and we had Barbara Walsh. And they were in the Broadway production of Falsettos as well. Barbara Walsh was Trina and Carolee Carmelo was. Oh, God, what's the character's name? Betsy Wolf played her in the revival. It's the kosher cater. Kosher caterers. God, what's her name? What's her name? It's not. It is Cordelia. God damn it. That took me far too long to remember Cordelia. So we had that mini Falsettos reunion. And after Tom Sesma, Barbara Walsh just flat out messes up her first solo. Instead of singing Waiting around for the boys downstairs Stalling as long as we dared she went Waiting upstairs for the boys. Sorry. Waiting downstairs for the boys downstairs Daring as long as we dared. And Carolee, God bless her, stood there with like a beauty pageant grin on, being like, what the fuck is happening? And then eventually Barbara got back on track and Carolee could do her moment and just fully belting, fussing around with our hair. A line that has always been done in head voice, because that's the voice type that usually gets cast as Sally. And Carolee is like, I got it in my chest. Don't worry. We're doing it in chest voice. And that's what you hire Carolee Carmela to do. It was just very. Everyone just kind of leaned back in their chairs for a second because it's a line you have heard for years one way. And then Carolee comes on and does her thing, and it's just. It's exactly what you expect at that point. And things kind of got better from there. And Julie Benko was, I think, young Phyllis in Waiting for the Girls Upstairs. And we also had Gray Henson in that Friend of the pod. Gray Henson and Alexander Gemignani did a really lovely road. You'd didn't take a song that makes my dad cry. Another major highlight for me was who's that Woman? Which is the really big showstopper of Follies. It's otherwise known as the Mirror number. And it is women from the reunion singing an old production number that they did. And the humor of it in the actual show is that the woman who sings the solo who's that Woman doesn't have a big part in the rest of Follies. She's got a couple of lines here and there, but mostly she's very much a supporting role. Even, I would argue, just a featured role. She doesn't come prominently into the rest of the plot. She's a featured role, and that's her one big moment. And our actual leads, Phyllis and Sally and even our secondary lead, Carlotta, they all dance backup for her because they weren't solo stars. Carlotta was for a little bit, but, like, Sally and Phyllis were chorus girls, and they were chorus girls in the Mirror number. So it's always fun when you do a production of Follies and you have, like, Jan Maxwell and Bernadette Peters doing backup. When you have Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey doing backup, Alexis Smith and Dorothy Collins doing backup. Because everyone played different parts or did sang different songs. We didn't really have that for who's that Woman. What we had was, first of all, Tony winner Karen Ziemba leading the way and Tony winner Michelle Pak as One of the backup dancer singers for the Follies number, there was also Marco Sappington and a few other people I can't quite remember right now, but you know, these women all over the age of 50, some over the age of 70, doing the original Michael Bennett choreography of who's that woman? Which is 1000% one of the most famous numbers in all of musical theater. A song that most choreographers don't even want to touch. Just want to do the original choreography. Because in addition to the women doing the number, and it's very intelligently crafted as a pastiche number of that era, it then has a trick on you where the women's younger counterparts, their ghosts, show up behind them doing the number in reverse. If the Follies women are facing us, the audience, the ghosts are facing the back of the stage like it's the audience and doing the whole thing as a mirror and they're wearing like shards of glasses as mirrors on their dresses. And eventually, as the number progresses, the women and their ghosts start weaving in and out and dancing together and creating these shapes together and mirroring their. Their ghost counterparts. And it's just. It's just so. First of all, it's thrilling. It's also beautiful and heart wrenching. But it's just a wonderful, wonderful number. And I will say, those women fucking crushed it. They did it so well. Truly the first real standing ovation of the night. Very much deserved. And it's what ended the first part of the concert. And I wonder if it hadn't been intermission, what would have happened? Because we just wouldn't stop applauding. It was so thrilling to see that number done again and done so well, because we haven't seen that choreography on stage, I think, since the original. The Roundabout revival was choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, and then the Bernadette Peters revival was choreographed by Warren Carlisle. The Paper Mill production, I think. I think that was done by Jerry Mitchell, but he. I think he did the original Michael Bennett choreography for who's that Woman? And you can watch it on YouTube. You can watch that version. You can also watch it being done on the Olivier Awards, which is the original Bennett choreography. And there's a home video of the original production where you can watch it. It's obviously not the best quality. You don't get all the intricacies of the dancing, but you get a good sense of the aura of that production and you do get to see that dancing. So that was a major, major highlight for me. We also had Michael Baress, Tony nominee for Kiss me Kate. Come on. To do the Right Girl. And he did a very nice job. The Right Girl is a really tough song to do out of context. You really do need the whole show to build up to it. And you need a set. I think Michael did a lot of the original choreography, but the original choreography for the Right Girl was done on Boris Aronson's multi tiered set. So Gene Nelson, the original buddy, was jumping from platform to platform and swinging around poles, as well as tap dancing furiously in the middle of the stage and all these other things. And Michael was doing all of that, but on a flat surface. So it just. The choreography didn't pop in the way that I think it could have. And it wasn't anything he did so much as that. It's just an uphill battle where you. The best case scenario isn't so much that you succeed as you don't fail. And he sang it well, he acted it well, he danced it well. It's just a hard number to do out of context. It's like doing the day off from Sunday in the park with George at a concert. It's like. It works in the show, but when you watch it out of. Out of the show, you just go, okay, Good fun times. He got a wonderful round of applause. And I think part of it is because we all love him. He's such a talented man, such a sexy man, too. My God. Watch any clips of him from that Kiss me, Kate, and I swear to God, your sexuality will be reborn. I know mine was when I saw it. And we were just all very thrilled to see him back on stage and doing something he's so good at. But, yeah, that's. That's just always been a song for me that just doesn't work when it's not in Follies. Of course. There's one more kiss. They did Loveland, which the orchestra sounded lovely, the choir sounded good. There are couplets that are spoken in Loveland, like to Lover's Eyes. I don't know them off the top of my head, but it's things like that. It's people doing almost the love haikus. And they have these two gentlemen from the choir come out and do them. And one of them messed up his last two sonnets. The second to last one, he just. I think he repeated a line that he wasn't supposed to repeat. And then the very last one, which it's supposed to be, two lovers are like lovebirds if parted they will swoon and die. That one I know for sure. Especially Because I think. I think Elaine Stritch did that sonnet for the Lincoln center concert, and he forgot the end of it completely. So he just said two lovers are like lovebirds, and then just stood there and waited for it to be over. And sometimes stage fright really does get the better of you, and it's a shame. But, you know, you hope that he won't let it go to his head too much after this, and he can just enjoy the fact that he did this concert. And we moved on from there. We went into the youe're Gonna Love Tomorrow, Love Will See Us through, which was sung by the Kimberly Akimbo Quartet. I found them to be really enjoyable, but also, I'm a sucker for Kimberly. Santino Fontana came out and did Buddy's Blues. Did a really, really, really good Buddy's Blues. That man is a talented motherfucker. We then, of course, had Ms. Baldwin doing losing My Mind. We had Alexandra Billings doing the Story of Lucy and Jesse. And again, for a number that really needs choreography to help sell it. It is a dance piece. Alexandra really sold it. Like, just twirled around that stage on her own. It was. It was like. I think what I wrote online was that it was the don't come for me unless I twirl for you energy. I also got just like if Lena Horne were Maria in Sound of Music. Just like the vigor and the flashiness and the diva Dom with which that. Which Lena Horne would twirl on that alp. That is how I sort of would describe Alexandra Billings as twirling in this. And then, of course, Kurt Peterson came out from behind his podium to do the final number live. Laugh Love. Going from younger Ben to older Ben, and he was very, very powerful in it. It was a very special night. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't. I wouldn't say it was legendary. Oh, I even forgot. I forgot Nikki, Renee Daniels and normally was doing Too Many Mornings, which was gorgeous. The two have incredible singing voices. They were so well matched with each other. And on that song, it was. It was just so, so good. Again, as I said, I wouldn't call it legendary. I think there were not quite enough phenomenal performances for it to be one of those nights that people will talk about forever. But I think there was enough great in there. That'll be a night that will be referred to consistently. And I am very lucky that I got to go. Thank you, Jeffrey, for bringing me along. And we both ran into a lot of people we knew, and that was really cool. Saw Friend of The pod, Tyler Joseph Ellis there. And also, fun fact, when I was there, I got stopped outside of Carnegie hall after the concert, someone came up to me and said, oh, I really love your podcast. I think you said your name was James. I think you said that. Apologies if I'm incorrect. This was almost a week ago and a lot of life has happened since then, but I think you said your name was James, and I was really appreciative of that. Thank you so much for telling me that. And then a couple of you actually DM'd me afterwards and said, I thought I saw you, but I didn't want to bother you, so I didn't come up to you guys. If you see me at a show, if you see me at a restaurant or wherever, like, by all means, say something. I, I am always surprised if anyone clocks me, A, I don't think that I'm famous, and B, whoever really gets recognized facially for. For a podcast, you know, But I know my mom gets a real kick out of it when she hears or even sees me get stopped by somebody. I've had friends with me when that happens. I actually, I was on a walk with a guy on a date and the guy was nice, but the date was nothing. And I got stopped by somebody for the podcast and it was like 30 minutes after, he was like, oh, so you do a Broadway podcast? Like, anything come of that? And then 30 minutes later, somebody was like, oh, hey, like your Broadway Breakdown. I love that podcast. Granted, it was. It was Hell's Kitchen that we were walking through, so it was more likely than not that somebody around there was gonna have listened to the podcast. But still, it was a very, very well timed recognition. So any, any of you, if any of you listen to this podcast and you think you see me and you want to say hi, please do. I would love to say hi. I'd love to say hi to all of you. That actually reminds me, I wanted to ask you all this. You all reach out to me after episodes and ask questions, or you give tidbits that you know about a show that I've just covered. And I'm so grateful for it. I've also had a couple of you reach out to me recently. New listeners to the podcast from the UK and from Argentina and some other places, telling me how you don't have a lot of people in your life who are big on theater, not even just musical theater, but like, theater, and that you really enjoy listening to the podcast because you feel connected to the scene and you feel like you're listening in on a friendly conversation, and I appreciate that so much and it really means the world to me. I wonder if there's a way we, as Broadway breakdown uncultured group could communicate. I know there's like Reddit and people can do Reddit threads, but I feel like that's a recipe for disaster, right? I don't. Maybe we don't do that. Maybe there's. Are there other ways to do sort of group chats? Because I would love it if you guys could all connect with each other. You're also very smart, you're also very kind, and you really do care about theater and want to learn more or things that you know that maybe other people don't know and memorabilia you want to share. I feel like that would be really wonderful for everyone to connect and, and, and get to know each other and learn from each other and celebrate with each other and even maybe have a platform to be like, hey guys, this episode, Matt said this about XYZ and I totally disagree with him. Anyone else? Like, I know Matt really disliked Hell's Kitchen, but I thought it kind of slapped Anyone else agree with me or don't. I would love it if, if that could happen. Because as much as I appreciate the messages you guys send me, I think you should be talking to each other. I think that's where the discourse really can come in. I benefit greatly from hearing all of your points of view, but I think you all could benefit from hearing each other's points of view, not just me. And I. I would love to make that happen. So if anyone has any ideas, let me know. Obviously Reddit is an option, but I feel like there's something else we could do. I'm also interested looking into because I had a friend who listens to the podcast recently talk about doing something along the lines of like a call in episode, like a live call in episode. I'm not sure how I can make that happen. I'll have to talk to Broadway Podcast Network, but I might be able to get them to make me an email address so you guys could write in questions for future episodes or requests for future episodes and we can read those on the podcast when we do recordings down the line. Just things to think about right now I think the number one thing to take away is a. More reviews, please. You guys are really good at them. And I know, I know a few of you when I shared the one star review on Instagram, were upset on my behalf, which I appreciate, but people are allowed to say how they feel, but I want us to think about doing some kind of community podcast chat. Whether it's Reddit or some other website, I don't know. If anyone has any ideas, please send it my way and we can figure it out and we'll talk about it in a future episode because I want you guys to connect. I'm sure some of you are connecting already and just not telling me, but I feel like there are a lot of you who don't realize that you could really make some fun friends here. When you reach out to me, talk about how you don't have really anyone in your regular life who is into theater. And I know there. There's a large number of you who listen to this podcast. And I think getting to know some of you, some of you getting to know each other would be really nice, really sweet. You don't have to be friends with everybody, obviously, but you never know who you might meet and strike up a friendship with or maybe more. And that's it for now. Thank you so much, guys, for listening to this sort of meandering episode of Broadway Breakdown and definitely the shortest one we've had in a very long time and will have for a very long time. Make sure to join us next week. We have a very fun interview with Ben west, who just wrote a new book called the American Musical, Exploration of an Art Form. I'm pretty sure that's the full title, but it's a. It's a history book on the genesis of the American musical. Going all the way back from minstrel shows and going through vaudeville and burlesque and reviews and jazz and ragtime and finding how all these things connect to the formula of the musical that we know today. It's a really good episode. It'll be next week. And then we have a new problematic episode after that. Maybe one more problematic episode after that. Problematic Episode. Tbd. Definitely an episode to talk about. Jellicle Ball. Cats. The Jellicle Ball. That's absolutely happening. Don't you worry your pretty little heads. And they'll take a little break in the summer before we get to the new series, which will be very fun. But yeah, in that time, you know, write some reviews and let me know about this group chat of sorts if we can find a way to make that happen. I would like you guys to. To connect. I'm going to close this out with Ms. Kate Baldwin, who just did the lovely, the loveliest job with Losing My Mind. We won't be closing out with her Losing My Mind. We'll find something else for her to close us out with. But we are going to close out with Kate Baldwin. And that's it for now. You guys have a great rest of your week and we will see you in seven days. Take it away, Kate. Bye. Free in Texas the last frontier is Texas and unlike here, there's a great unknown just waiting there for those who wish to dream and dare your Texas big as all New England cross New Jersey and New.