Scientology, Sushi Donuts, and Scoring a Prime Seat on Broadway

I’m back! Sarah’s NYC Adventure makes a brief return this week before a longer resurrection when I start my tenure as a New York Times Culture reporter (*hopefully* in June, but since fellows are coming from all over the world, I suspect my arrival date may be TBD).

Since the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference I was going to present at Saturday has gone virtual (I’m now presenting via Zoom at 9 a.m. Saturday morning), and IU banned all university-affiliated domestic travel (less than 24 hours before I was supposed to leave — UGH), I’m no longer being reimbursed for my travel expenses like my flight and hotel, which MAJORLY stinks. But all the Broadway shows I had lined up are continuing to play as scheduled (for now!), though my excellent NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade seat, as of this evening, has become a coronavirus casualty. But I’m here through Wednesday, so I’m sure I’ll find some fun things to do (while sanitizing my hands off, of course — I’ve already gone through half the bar of soap in my hotel room!)!

So let’s start with the plane ride in. It was the second-emptiest plane I’ve ever flown on — the flight was maybe a quarter full, if that. I had three entire rows to myself. And my flight arrived at JFK Airport half an hour early, so bonus! I’m staying at a hotel on the west side of Midtown that’s a little under a mile from the theater district, which means I can walk rather than taking the subway (actually, the subway doesn’t really connect to the far west side, which is served by buses, but that’s another story).

After I checked in, I had an immediate priority, and its name was ‘sushi donut craving.’ (If you followed my last NYC adventure, you had no doubt what my first stop would be). On my way to Poketeria, I passed a landmark I’d somehow missed last summer: The Church of Scientology. I passed on the free tour, though.

I also ran into some sort of mini-parade/march snaking its way through Times Square that featured white-suited, latex-gloved participants. Ah, parades in the time of coronavirus.

My nigiri-, avocado-, and cucumber-laced confection dunked in a bath of two-tone sriracha mayo was just as good as I remembered — at least one sequel is in order before I leave NYC!

Tonight’s show — the first of nine I have scheduled for my 7-day theatrical adventure — was a preview of “The Lehman Trilogy” on Broadway, which opens March 26.

This show had been on my must-see list ever since I read the smashing reviews the Off Broadway and West End productions garnered. While I bought a last-row seat as part of a TodayTix deal a few weeks ago, I definitely did *not* end up sitting in the last row of the upper deck — more like the third row of the orchestra (all the yes!)!

The rotating glass cube set the show takes place in is unique — and it's an impressive feat for a three-and-a-half-hour show to be so engaging with no set changes.

The play takes a few minutes to get going, but you’re soon sucked into the world of Lehman. The company’s bankruptcy is only a footnote in the final chapter of a play that’s largely about the generations of Lehmans who took the company from cotton and coffee to investment banking.

The funniest parts of the show are when the three actors — Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley — impersonate characters of the opposite gender. In hindsight, I should’ve seen this coming in such a long show carried by a core cast of three, but each of the men plays dozens of roles over the course of the play, male and female (the Lehmans had wives, after all). I was wondering what Russell Beale was going to do for the rest of the play when (no spoilers here!) his initial character, Henry Lehman, died about 10 minutes into the show. But he’s soon plenty busy taking on the personas of doctors, girlfriends, and eventually, Philip Lehman, a member of the Lehman Generation 2.0.

I also love the use of dry erase markers on the set walls, which provide a visual log of the company’s various forays through the years. And though the set may be a box, but it’s clear the Lehmans, who are always looking to cash in on the next big thing, from coffee to computers, don’t see it that way.

In the end, to modify the play’s parlance, while I didn’t surrender to the show, I believed it. It was a long show, and the script could've done with a few trims. But it *is* amazing that just three actors — mere, as they say, “ordinary men at the end of the world” — can hold your attention for such a long show on a nearly empty stage.

My show on tap for tomorrow is “Little Shop of Horrors” Off Broadway (one of Gideon Glick’s final shows as Seymour before he departs March 15).I have several other fun wish-list experiences for this week in addition to Broadway shows, meetings with NYC-based acquaintances new and old, and continuing to report and write my ongoing slate of freelance stories, so stay tuned!

On a side note, I think I may have set a record for how quickly I went from attending four conferences this spring to (maybe) one. In addition to the JJCHC call-off, my Purdue Literature Symposium and Indiana Society of Professional Journalists conferences have also now bit the dust. The American Copy Editors Society conference in Salt Lake City in late April/early May is still on for now, but I don’t know how much longer.

Side note: When I got back to my hotel room last night, something felt off. Then I realized -- after living in the East Village all last summer and dozing off to cab horns and drunken squabbles below my window, there was none of the noise I'd come to associate with NYC! It's eerily quiet.