West Side Story!

That’s my life, of course.  But I also did see the Broadway production of it last night with Larry (it was my birthday gift to him).  A little bit of drama preceded the show of course.  In the morning, Larry texts me with this message:
“Hobie, you do realize these tickets are for the 2pm show, right?”

Here’s me walking in the Rockefeller Center concourse on the way to work….. reading the text…. stopping…. beginning to panic sweat….. freak out commences.  I text him back, “please tell me you’re kidding…”   He’s not.  I check my email and see that yep, I moronically bought the matinee tickets.  No WONDER I got such great seats.  So, now I’m thinking through all the options I have:
1)  Ditch work for the afternoon — Unfortunately, there’s no way I can do that especially that day with the meetings I’ve got to be involved with
2)  Larry goes without me and takes someone else like a coworker or family —- a viable backup option but it would still suck for ME, so I wasn’t content to go that route; plus, Larry wasn’t necessarily able to leave work either!
3)  Beg TicketMaster to exchange the tickets from the matinee for the evening show.  I really did think I had bought the evening show.  This goes to show my attention to detail leaves a LOT to be desired.
4)  If all else fails, I bought ticket insurance (the first time I’ve EVER done that), and one of the covered reasons is work responsibilities.  i was totally ready to make up a story in that route and get my money back to buy tickets for another performance later on.

Option 1 and 2 sucked, so I started the phone calls for Option 3.   Surprisingly, Ticketmaster was helpful.  But when they put me on hold for a while as they made calls to their client rep, they finally came back on with me and told me they couldn’t get in touch with their contact.  She tells me that if I don’t hear back from them by 1pm, all sales are considered final.  What the hell does that mean?  She obviously has to say that, and in response to my questioning of what my insurance options, tells me to call the insurance folks.  So that’s what I do.

After about 30 minutes, during which I have been talking to Larry (and apologizing for being a dumbass), I finally get a call back from Ticketmaster.  They exchange my tickets!  My original tickets were center orchestra, row H.  I know, awesome seats, right?  The rep tells me the best seats she can get me now are row N, against the right side of the theater.  Well, that sounds okay.  I’m just stoked to get seats and not have to do an insurance claim (I know, an insurance claim for Broadway tickets?).

Fast forward through the workday, then it’s evening.  I pick up my tickets at the theater, then wait for Larry.  I see the seating chart and realize that the seats are literally far right.  I’ve been there before, and usually you end up not being able to see that far right part of the stage because it’s just blocked by the wall.  Oh well, you don’t have to SEE music, right?  Anyways, we finally go inside and find our seats.  Jackpot!  The seats, while on the edge, are also unlike what I’ve seen before.  The middle orchestra is normal, but the side sections are raised up a little bit.  Plus, row N was at the front of the particular section, so we had no seats in front of us and a little wall too, so lots of leg room and no giant heads in front of us.

Whew, that was a long way to tell a story about seats.  It’s my blog though, so I’ll talk about whatever the hell I want!  West Side Story was really good though – although the performer who played Tony, while ridiculously hot, was not a good actor at all.  He could sing decently, but his acting was a lot about exaggeration and talking in a funny Broadway voice.  He’s lucky he’s hot and in jaw-dropping shape.  I’m sure that’s how he got the job.  ;-p  The other performers were amazing.  My favorite scenes from the performance were ‘Somewhere’ (I absolutely love that song – it makes me tear up every time), ‘America’, and ‘Dance at the Gym’.  One of my favorite songs from the movie, ‘Officer Krupke’, just wasn’t done all that well, so I couldn’t get all happy about it.  Some interesting choices the show had versus the movie were that America was sung amongst only the girls, ‘Somewhere’ had a kind of dream/fantasy sequence sung by the whole cast for most of the song before it became only Tony & Maria, and very noticeably, ‘I Feel Pretty’ and ‘A Boy Like That’ were sung in Spanish.

Alright, enough of that.  Here’s an awesome video my friend Dan sent me – it’s an over-dubbed ‘Literal’ version of the video for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’  If you’ve seen it before, you probably know it’s kind of a weird, creepy-in-a-bad-uncomfortable-way video to a great song.  Well, this video version addresses all that head on.  Glee Club of the Damned, indeed.