This stay-at-home vacation thing is unexpectedly working out in a way that my top-priority sizable project for the week (in the “home video” category) remains untouched on the to-do list. And there is only one formal vacation day left…
I suppose going for a matinee movie showing one day followed by a mid-day theater outing followed by long-distance chauffeur duties were bound to kill enough time over the course of a few days to make it feel that I am actively occupied on what I thought would be a very lazy week.
The movie I watched with Becky was the latest Sherlock Holmes, which was both entertaining and somewhat disappointing. I am not a Holmes purist to any degree, I was familiar with the first movie and calibrated my expectations accordingly, and I appreciate the high entertainment quotient and directorial skill found in the latest installment. And I actually think the second movie went to greater length to showcase Holmes’ deductive reasoning than the first one. But in the end, it felt as if it was mostly about guns, explosions, well-placed acts of sabotage, hand-combat skills and a fortuitously positioned cannon than about, you know, brains. Downey Jr and Law do play off each other fantastically, though.
The next day it was musical theater’s turn. A friend recommended a play running at the NYU’s Skirball Center and we went for a city outing alongside several families. Started with a nice lunch at Café Español, then moved on to Washington Square so that the younger kids could have some fun on the playground, and finished the day’s itinerary with a play.
Called Shlemiel the First, it is Jewish-themed and theoretically was supposed to appeal to our crew of folk music lovers. But I ended up thoroughly outnumbered when attempting to craft a positive review afterwards. The prevailing opinion ranged from Kimmy’s diplomatic “I did not like it that much” to the blunt “It sucked” voiced by several people in the party. It is not that the music was too Broadway-ized to be readily identifiable as Jewish. It is not that the plot was silly and its resolution was dumb. It is not that the lyrics were mediocre and the jokes were mostly unfunny. It is not that the actors were, charitably, unremarkable as singers. It is, frankly, all of that combined together that created an overall impression of something that should have been, in hindsight, avoided.
Least of all I understood why we brought children along (kids, actually, comprised a large portion of the audience). There were a couple of mildly risqué scenes, but not a single children-level joke. Given the buffoonery overtones of the proceedings, the play could not be called educational in any respect either.
My attempts at finding positives about the show stopped at appreciating the choreographed open-scene transformations that were well worked into the flow of the performance. Becky agreed that it looked really neat, but refused to give the show any other props.
Driving into Greenwich Village in the late morning went along considerably smoother than driving into Midtown Manhattan in the early afternoon. Today I had to pick up Becky’s friend from the Penn Station as she arrived for a few days’ stay with us, and my composure was sorely tried. Too many cars, too many pedestrians, too many “you can’t turn here, go straight” prohibitions. On the bright side, I did spend considerably more time than expected on the round-trip, further reducing my idle existence on this boringest of vacations.