The Kindness of Strangers

Ever since my first knee surgery I have had real trouble sitting in a seat for a long period of time. Any seat. My office chair, the couch, a theatre seat. I have to be able to extend my leg every few minutes or the pain becomes intolerable. Sitting with my friend Cathy at a performance of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike last year I had to leave before the end of the first act because the pain was too intense. (I stood for the second act).

Yesterday I was at the Walter Kerr Theatre for the matinee performance of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. The Walter Kerr was built in 1921. It has no elevators and precious little legroom -- people were shorter and more active back then. I knew I was in trouble.

I found the Head Usher and asked him if there was Standing Room available. He told me that, yes, I could stand, but then said, "Wait here." Within a minute he came back to usher me to a new seat: on the aisle and far enough to the right of the seat in front of it that I could stretch out both legs. It was truly a gift.

The show is a gift as well. Christopher Ishwerwood, writing in the New York Times on November 17, 2013, said, "Bloodlust hasn't sung so sweetly, or provided so much theatrical fun, since Sweeney Todd first wielded his razor with gusto many a long year ago." I couldn't agree more. You can read all of Ishwerwood's review here). The show has elements of Gilbert and Sullivan as well as Hollywood screwball comedy and is packed with memorable characters and Sondheim-clever lyrics by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak. It is also brilliantly staged; of many inventive moments my favorite might have been a fall from a bell tower that was straight out of Hitchcock's Vertigo, brilliantly achieved with little more than a back wall, a well-posed victim and a rear projection.

You may have heard that Jefferson Mays plays eight (8!) different roles, both male and female, all members of the aristocratic D'Ysquith (pronounced DIE-squith) family. He is brilliant, as is his co-star, Bryce Pinkham, whose character, Monty Navarro, has just learned that he is ninth in line to be the Earl of Highhurst. If only those eight people standing in his way could be somehow made to disappear . . .

The rest of the cast is wonderful too, especially the two women vying for Monty's heart, Lisa O'Hare as Sibella Hallward and Lauren Worsham as Phoebe D’Ysquith. But for me, neither the brilliant Jefferson Mays nor the silver-tongued and wickedly gifted Bryce Pinkham was the star of the afternoon. No, that honor belongs to T. J. D'Angelo, the Head Usher of the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Thank you, sir!