Just back from several days in NYC casting for Grey Gardens.   One of the best groups of talent we’ve seen.  Lots of excitement from actors about getting to work on such rich material.

Harriett Bass, our wonderful casting director (pictured here with Marv – Rick Lewis, our wonderful musical director’s partner) assembled a great group.  Among the highlights for me were meeting Rita Gardner, the original Luisa from The Fantasticks, and Jane Summerhays, the original Sheila from A Chorus Line.

Eileen, our other wonderful casting director, was still glowing from her recent marriage in November.  She is now Mrs. Eileen McCabe – and surely will have the most Irish children on the planet.

Scored a seat to Billy Elliott which is one of the hottest tickets in town.  I highly recommend it.  While I didn’t love every single thing about the production (the set felt a little clunky to me, and some of the music was a bit pedestrian), it is incredibly well performed and very moving.  The kid playing Billy Elliott just blew me out of the water, as did the kid playing his friend Michael.

I also had a wonderful meeting with Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich – the songwriting team we are working with on The Best So Far for next season.  They were, as I had been warned, completely delightful.  Smart, funny, incisive.  We had a wide ranging conversation about the possibilities we can create from their existing canon of music (and some new work as well) – and they can’t wait to get to Portland!

Also had a chance to see the new musical Happiness with music by Scott Frankel (composer of Grey Gardens).  It is playing at Lincoln Center.

This is a photo of Alice Tully Hall, home of the the New York City Opera, which just completed a long awaited renovation.  The reviews of the new hall have been heavenly, and the exterior was pretty breathtaking.

Lincoln Center Theater is still covered in scaffolding, as the campus of the rest of the Center is still under renovation.  South Pacific remains the hottest ticket in town.

I saw Happiness in the 400 seat Mitzi Newhouse Theater.  It was directed by Susan Strohman (Contact, The Producers).It was beautifully staged, and designed (by Thomas Lynch) – but when I realized the premise (9 people stuck in a subway car) – I thought “How in the heck are they going to keep this alive for 2 hours?”.  But they did. The 9 discover that they aren’t living anymore, and have to choose a perfect moment from their life in which to spend eternity.  So each of them end up morphing out into a fantasy sequence from their past.  It was magical, and gorgeously sung and acted.   And just wonderful. Scott’s music was both very idiosyncratic, and unabashedly melodic – while always serving the dramatic moment.  I think he’s the best of our generation.  Go see it.

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