Manhattan Memories: A Musical & A Novel

Men enjoying the sunshine
“Princess” in Central Park
Flags, Stonewall National Monument

We are back home from New York. Today’s post includes the fabulous performance of Ragtime we attended and a historical novel that is peculiarly relevant for today.

PROPULSIVE MUSICAL

Ragtime (Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center)

Spurred by its great reviews, we got matinee tickets for Ragtime.  It was a memorable experience, probably the best Broadway musical I’ve ever seen. Based on E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same name, it’s a whirlwind tour of the early 20th century featuring historic figures like Booker T. Washington, Houdini, activist Emma Goldman, and vaudeville performer Evelyn Nesbit.  They provide historical context, some comic relief, and the occasional moral voice.  A timeline of this period provides key events linked to these and other historic figures in the play.

The real crux of the drama, however, lies with three intersecting family groups: a rich white couple with a young son and her adult brother; Black jazz pianist Coalhouse Walker, washerwoman Sarah, his paramour, and their infant; and Tateh, a poor Jewish immigrant from Latvia who arrives with his young daughter.  It’s an explosive time marked by new music (ragtime with its lively beat), immigrants seeking a better life, new inventions like the automobile, and changing roles and relationships in society.  Race drives conflict here, and while the setting is a hundred years ago, the issues and the injustice are eerily timely for today’s time and place.  

The Beaumont is theater in the round with a thrust stage and a center section that rotates, giving the entire audience good sight-lines.  The music and dancing are spirited and wonderful, but there are also somber solos and soulful ballads. The production has received 11 Tony Award nominations with winners to be announced in early June.  Performances run through August 2nd.  (Cast photo from nytimes.com)

RECENT READING: 1960’s WOMEN EXPAND THEIR HORIZONS

The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

Author Bostwick (atlantahistorycenter.com)

Marie Bostwick had barely come into the world in 1963, while I was a teenager well into high school and thinking ahead to leaving the family nest.  I even had a part-time job in the city library.  Despite her relative youth (compared to my age), Bostwick has captured what it was like in the early 1960’s to be a stifled wife and mother with little recourse for employment or intellectual stimulation.  

On a whim, Margaret Ryan, decides to start a book club with three other friends.  The sophisticated and more worldly, Charlotte, a new acquaintance, suggests they read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.  Thus, the Bettys book club is born.  Friedan’s book was just the first of many to challenge these women’s tightly held and long inculcated views on what their roles in society were expected to be.  

Margaret likes to write and was good at it in college, Vic had been a wartime nurse, Charlotte is full of wild energy and aspires to be a respected painter, while Bitsy wanted to be a vet, but married young and now works with the horses in her husband’s vet practice.  Margaret and Charlotte each have several children, while Vic is already the mother of six.  Their husbands range from hard-working and caring to patronizing and are mostly clueless about their wives’ frustrations.

Over the course of a year, these four women deal with setbacks and putdowns and small successes with grit and determination.  How Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book and changes in society expand their worldview and the opportunities open to them make for a heartfelt, occasionally funny, and very satisfying novel.  

Women have come a long way since 1963; now the challenge is to keep some men in power from turning the clock back 50+ years!  Any woman of a certain age will find something in common with this delightful foursome.  Highly recommended! (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Manhattan Moments: Indulgence–Fashion, Art, Gold

EXTREME CLOTHING

Costume Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute)

Colorful caftans

The Costume Institute at the Met Museum has new space on the main floor.  It’s spacious and easy to locate and a real plus for visitors; the old space was so tucked away it almost required crumbs to navigate to and from.  Costume Art is the inaugural exhibition and focuses on the interplay between clothing and the human body.  

Patterned body suit
19th century corset
Gown with a bustle

Overall, I found the exhibit a mix of weird, wonderful, grotesque, and fascinating.  Each costume is paired with a piece of art from the museum’s collection, sometimes a small pen and ink sketch.  It’s easy to overlook the accompanying art, and only occasionally did I really pay attention to it.  

In some dresses, you see how the body’s organs and circulatory system have been studied and designed on clothing over the years.  There are also examples of what the bustle on a women’s dress did to enhance the buttocks, along with numerous styles of maternity garments.  

Beautiful contemporary gown incorporating ostrich feathers and glass slides

A few of the gowns are beautiful, but this exhibit focuses more on aspects of design, construction, unusual materials and techniques than on sheer beauty.  The exhibit is so large that trying to seeing everything is overwhelming.  I didn’t love it, but I’m glad we saw it.

PRIVATE ART—AN UNEXPECTED TREAT

Sotheby’s New York

Several years ago, the Chief Penguin and I visited Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Center to see art from private collections that was going to be sold at auction.  Last week, our son suggested we visit Sotheby’s to view some outstanding works before their upcoming auction sales.  Sotheby’s now owns the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, former home of the Whitney Museum, and for several years the temporary site of the Frick Museum.  This grand space has been divided up into many smaller galleries.  During public hours, anyone can walk in and wander the rooms, quietly oh-ing and aah-ing over previously unseen works. 

Homme a la pipe (Modigliani)

 Nearly everything is part of a private collection, and each has a description and an estimated auction price.  Being close to works that may command bids in the tens and twenties of millions might provoke a gasp or two.  In fact, the stunning Mark Rothko painting below (8 feet in height) this week topped that auction sale at $85.8 million.

Brown and Blacks in Red (Rothko)

We toured all five floors and saw works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Modigliani, Renoir, John Singer Sargent, Gustav Klimt, Magritte, and others. I especially liked the man with his pipe and the gorgeous Klimt portrait too.

La Seance du Matin, Matisse
Klimt portrait
Pinks of Cherry Blossoms, Alma Thomas
Le Compotier, Magritte
Monhegan Lighthouse, Hopper

Plus a small Edward Hopper painting of the lighthouse on Monhegan Island, Maine, a scene spot we’ve visited.

WATCHING: GOLD AND GREED

The Gold (Masterpiece Theater)

Boyce flanked by detectives Tony & Nicki (theguardian.com)

The largest heist of gold ever took place in November 1983.  Gold worth about 26 million pounds was stolen from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport, London, in what became known as the Brink’s-Mat robbery.   First aired on BBC in 2023, and then offered on PBS in 2025, The Gold is a series about this astonishing feat and the detectives assigned to find out where the gold went and who had it.  

This semi-documentary is not action-packed, but rather portrays a dogged, diligent process of following up questionable leads, finding trails that have grown cold, arresting slippery characters, and then not always having enough solid evidence yet to charge them.  It’s also a study of the criminal lowlife of some south London and Kent neighborhoods, of bent cops who provide protection, and of a lawyer and others sucked in by the chance of making easy money with little effort.  There are lots of characters involved and many strands that aren’t initially tied together.

Hugh Bonneville of Lord Grantham fame in Downton Abbey plays Brian Boyce, the tenacious overall head of the investigation. We watched all six episodes, thinking everything would be resolved, only to discover that Season 2 won’t be available here until later this year.  I found the series fascinating despite its low production quality. 

Note: All photos by JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Manhattan Moments: Drama, Art, & Food

THEATER: AN AMERICAN CLASSIC

Death of a Salesman (Broadway, Winter Garden Theatre)

Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, was written in 1948 and has been presented in theaters and on television and as a film many times since.  I vividly recall seeing Lee J. Cobb in the title role with Mildred Dunnock as his wife Linda in the 1966 TV production.  And I have always had a special fondness for Arthur Miller’s work, partly because in the 1930’s, he was my grandfather’s student in an English class at the University of Michigan.  

Miller and My Grandfather

Out of the 50 students in that class, Grandpa felt certain that Arthur Miller had a future career as a writer.  As an undergraduate, Miller entered and won a prestigious Hopwood Award for his creative writing.  In the classroom, my grandfather was best known and appreciated for his caring mentoring of his students.  Later, he became dean of students and then Secretary of the University.

Growing up, my family made many visits to Ann Arbor. I always enjoyed seeing and hearing from my grandfather what was new on the campus. And I reveled in time spent perusing the shelves of his overstuffed home study. Stacks of books and magazines and newspapers (Saturday Review and Manchester Guardian) were piled on the floor, and the entire surface of his desk was always covered. For me, it was like being in heaven surrounded by all that reading material!

Death of a Salesman 2026

This past week, the Chief Penguin and I went to see the newest production of Death of a Salesman starring Nathan Lane as Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as Linda.  Nathan Lane has an extensive set of credits for theater, movies, and TV.  Most recently, he played the theatrical and bombastic Ward McAllister, arbiter of high society, in the TV series, The Gilded Age, which I watched in its entirety.  The C. P. and I have also had the pleasure of seeing Laurie Metcalf on stage in Three Tall Women and A Doll’s House, Part 2.  Ben Ahlers’ Broadway debut as Willy’s son Hoppy was a pleasant surprise.  Ahlers plays footman and clockmaker Jack Trotter in The Gilded Age.

This production is a powerful one of memories, flashbacks, and unfulfilled dreams.  The set is spare consisting mostly of a red sedan and a few tables and chairs.  It has an empty, eerie quality, reflecting perhaps the hollowness of the family’s quest for success.  From the start, it is clear that Willie is unraveling and his end is near.  He is failing in his job and is frustrated and angered by older son Biff’s inability at 34 to find employment and keep it.  After all, Biff was a star football player with a bright future ahead of him, or so Willy believes.  

In reality, Biff has succumbed to the same delusions of grandeur as his father, based on the premise of being very well liked, not merely well liked, as the key to success.  Linda, wife and mother, is the linchpin who keeps this family from crumbling.  She supports and cajoles Willie, scrounging and scrimping to pay the bills, while he berates her.  In contrast to the Lomans, next door neighbor Charlie and his son Bernard are hard-working, goal-oriented, and successful.  

Although the setting is just after WWII, the themes remain relevant for today, and with a focus on Willie’s memories/hallucinations, thoughts of dementia come to mind.  It is impossible not to be moved by Nathan Lane’s performance; sobbing was heard around us.  

The play has received 9 Tony nominations and runs into early August.  We highly recommend it!  See it if you can, or if you’ve never read it, it’s easily available on Kindle or in paperback.

ARTIST & INVENTOR

Marcel Duchamp (MoMA)

MoMA’s retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work is the first in this country since 1973.  Duchamp lived from 1887 to 1968, and like his contemporary Picasso, had a tremendous impact on art and the various forms it took.  His early works included landscapes and portraits of various family members, representational works where people and trees are identifiable.  

Landscape
Duchamp’s Father

Then Duchamp changed directions toward more abstract works, some Cubist, like his Nude Descending the Staircase No.2, the second image below. 

Sonata (mother & sisters)

Later he focused on the invention of things and devices and an approach he called “precision optics.”  

These later works I found both odd and interesting. This exhibition runs into late August.

A SIMPLE LUNCH

Three Guys Restaurant

Another day, after spending time at a nearby exhibit, we decamped to Three Guys, a trendy diner on Madison Avenue, for lunch.  This is a very popular eatery, and it’s best to snag a table or booth before noon.  Teenagers, mothers with little kids, and rising young women congregate here for lunch and laughter.  Generally, there are a few men sprinkled around, but mostly, it’s a bevy of females.

I had one of the best sandwiches ever! It was grilled bacon, cheese, and tomato on white toast.  The bacon was crispy, the cheese oozed just enough, and the tomato was ripe and juicy.  It’s a sandwich I almost never order, but it was perfect.  The Chief Penguin ordered his usual grilled bacon and cheese with a side of cole slaw.  Service here is prompt and friendly, meaning no delays in getting your meal.

Note: Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Manhattan Moments: Night at the Opera Plus

TULIP TIME

Striped tulips
Red & pink tulips
Cream tulips

Spring in Manhattan usually means a surfeit of tulips.  This year is no exception.  Despite rain and wind which have beaten down some blooms, we still discovered colorful arrays here and there.  In Central Park, in the Jefferson Market Garden, and in the occasional street-side bed.  

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA 

Our midweek outing was a modest adventure.  A night at the opera, it included a walk in Central Park, dinner, the last performance of this contemporary opera, and a bus ride home.

Curtain time was 7:30 pm.  It was a pleasant afternoon, so we decided to walk through Central Park from the east side to the west side to Lincoln Center.  I thought it would take much longer than it did.  We had time to wander around outside the Lincoln Center complex and arrived early for our early dinner reservation.  

PRE-THEATER DINING

Café Fiorello

Café Fiorello is directly across the street from the center.  I expected it to be acceptable red gravy fare, but nothing special. It was so much more! First off, the waiter seated us in at a small booth set for 4 tucked in a corner.  More space than most couples received and a bit away from the main fray.  He was humorous, and when we ordered drinks said that June would make them, and he’d be back.  The Old Fashioned and my glass of pino grigio were fine (actually, the Chief Penguin’s Old Fashioned was the best he’d had in a long time!)  We were told that robot June did all the measuring so that the cocktail recipe was the precisely the same every time.  Not sure if we believed him or if he was stringing us along.

In any case, the meal was very good!  We shared a Caesar salad nicely dressed.  

My chicken piccata and his chicken marsala with porcini were both luscious as was the large half-order of spaghetti with pesto sauce.

 By the time we had finished, the restaurant was bursting, every table fully occupied, and conversation almost impossible.  A popular place and we’d happily go there again—without the opera as an excuse.

BOLD CONTEMPORARY OPERA

Innocence (Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center)

Innocence by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) is a short opera in five acts performed without an intermission. It is set in Helsinki during a wedding, ten years after a school shooting, with flashbacks to the event and recollections from the survivors and victims.  It’s a powerful piece staged on a revolving multi-story set with windows and rooms on all sides. Central characters include Marketa, one of the victims; Tereza, substitute waitress at the wedding reception and mother of Marketa; Tuomas, bridegroom and brother of the shooter; his bride Stela, and his parents.  At the opening, Stela is unaware of the family’s connection to the tragedy.  

The score is not particularly lyrical, but includes a wide variety of percussion instruments including drums, while the singing is varied and in different languages. Noteworthy is Marketa’s part which includes the poignant and sometimes raucous-sounding calls of rural herders.  The school students frequently speak their parts in various languages.  Susanna Malkki, the conductor for these Met performances, is also Finnish and was composer Saariho’s longtime collaborator. The opera’s subject is somber, but the performance an unforgettable experience with some hope at the end!

When we exited the theater, it was raining a bit.  We had several options for getting home which included the subway or an Uber.  Fortunately for us, the M66 bus was at the corner with a line of opera goers waiting to board.  We were some of the last people it could accommodate. The trip was just 15 minutes to a stop a short walk from where we are staying.  Success!

MAY DAY DEMONSTRATION

Laborers demonstrate

On May 1st, people demonstrated in cities across the country in support of workers, urging priority for workers over billionaires.  We were walking to Union Square from Three Lives, one of our favorite bookstores, and decided to go via Washington Square Park.  Up by the arch, laborers were out in full force in bright orange shirts with plenty of signs denouncing the current administration and inveighing against fascism.  Loud music added to the noise of the crowd, but all was peaceful.

Signs and demonstrators

Note: Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved) except the Met’s photo of the stage set.