BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

1Nov/140

Newsies Recap, Extra Extra, Read All About It!

Last night I went to see Newsies!  It was pretty amazing.  Everything about it was awesome.  The singing was right on key, the dancing was finely choreographed, the lighting made everything look like a 3D hologram and the set design blew my mind.

We started the night out by meeting at my friend's place in Ardmore at 5pm.  My friend Curt and myself were the first to arrive.  He has a professional Canon DSLR camera so he took a bunch of pre-evening photos of us in our fancy evening clothing while waiting for a few stragglers to arrive.  A little backstory: I'd been asking my boss to leave an hour early from work on that day at 4pm for a while now.  He said it was totally ok.  Enter Friday morning (yesterday).  My one coworker took off on Friday instead of the usual Monday in exchange for working on Saturday, so it was just my boss and myself.  He then tells me that his vehicle has an exploded part of some sort that busted open upon him pulling into the parking lot and so he needs to leave early to get his car towed.  I was then worried I wouldn't be able to leave at 4pm.  He said that the original plan still stuck.  So, it stuck.  I left at 4pm anyways, and constantly checked my phone for emails as I drove over to my friend Melody's place.  Luckily, nothing new came in, and as I found out today, no one was really even around yesterday afternoon anyway.

From her house we waited for everyone to arrive.  Some of our other friends were late, so a few of us went over to the restaurant—The Saint James in Ardmore, Pa—to hold our reservation.  Upon arrival, the place was dead.  I guess, it being Halloween night and all, this was appropriate.  So, we really didn't need our reservation I suppose.  We then proceeded to order things, the waiter asked what sort of water we preferred.  We told him the kind that you can drink.  He brought out sparkling water and Fiji brand water.  The joke was on us when we received the bill.  But I have to say that the sparkling water was pretty fantastic!  And my turkey burger was delicious as well.  About half way through the meal I realized that I was a bit warm (it was a chilly night last night) and I took my sweatshirt off.  I found that my sweatshirt had shed little blue fuzzy balls all over my shirt, I spent the remainder of the meal picking at my shirt with one hand to remove the blue fuzzies, and picking at sweet potato french fries and the remains of a turkey burger with my other hand.

Our car pool of two cars from Ardmore down to the Avenue of the Arts may have come very close to running a red light or two to make it on time.  We arrived at The Academy of Music with three minutes to spare.  The seats were great!  We were on the ground floor level about two thirds of the way back and just to the left.  The view was great.  Although, in that theater you could sit almost anywhere and still see the stage pretty well.  The show was absolutely stunning.   They used a slew of projectors combined with live props and danced alongside robotic 4 story tall stair case set pieces that twisted and turned in each and every direction along with the actor and actresses moves.  It was seamless and flawless.  I've done theater tech through the years at the college I attended and for a community theater run by the college that I work at, and I always love to see sets and designs.  I recommend seeing Newsies for sure.  The actual show did deviate some from the movie, and it included several things that weren't in the movie at all.  During the second Act (the show was comprised of two nine scene acts with a fifteen minute intermission) they started the first scene out with this amazing tap dance number.  There were also aspects of acrobatics involving various flips and cartwheels and as well a bit of a juggling act involving all the members of the cast tossing the newspapers around to each other.  I don't know how no one managed to drop a single stack of paper!  I guess practice makes perfect after all.

After the show we snapped a few photos (Curt used his flashy Canon camera) in front of the Newsies display near the front of the theater entrance.  As soon as he gets those uploaded to Facebook and tagged, I'm most likely changing all my social media main profile pics, depending on if they came out ok.  Since we were wearing super fancy clothing, he even took a new LinkedIn headshot photo for me—being that mine is from circa 2007.  After play time was over, we all carpooled back home and everyone went their separate ways.

All in all it was a great night despite some of the setbacks.  I will always love going to see live theater.

 

 

Filed under: Stuffs No Comments