Downey We Hardly Knew Ye
Three bad dudes start shooting at him in broad daylight at this legendary location, managing to both miss their target and avoid any contact with the police, who apparently were out of town that day.
After our treatment at the famed performance space on Saturday afternoon, my family has a pretty good idea how that guy must’ve felt.
Granted, nobody reached for his shooting iron, but we did have to contend with some high caliber attitude and bulletproof indifference.
This was supposed to be a day at the theater for me, my sister and auntie. We’ve done many such outings over the years, where we agree on a show, pick a restaurant and enjoy the day together.
On this we were all set to see Iron Man star Robert Downey, who was making his Broadway debut in McNeal, a play about writer with a lot of troubles.
McNeal was written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar and directed by Bartlett Sher, a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater and a Tony winner for South Pacific.
Prior to McNeal, Downey, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his work in Oppenheimer, had one off-Broadway credit, American Passion, which opened and closed on the same date in 1983.
In his review, the New York Times’ then theater-critic Frank Rich wrote that “one of the few egregious by-products of Broadway's longest-running musical, ‘A Chorus Line,' is the endless parade of knockoffs it has inspired since it opened in 1975.”
“The latest and perhaps the least - but probably not the last - of these clones is 'American Passion' at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea,” Rich wrote, adding that “even those few numbers with promising titles - such as ‘There Ain't No Virgins in Queens’ - trail into inanity and repetition after an opening lyric.”
Nevertheless, Downey seemed ready to return to the theater, saying in a statement that ‘It’s been 40 years since I was last on ‘the boards,’ but hopefully I’ll knock the dust off quick.’”
Perhaps things went well for Robert Downey this time out, but we have no way of knowing as we never saw the play.
I’ll explain.
Curtain going up
My aunt has great difficulty walking and needs a cane to get around. Stairs are pretty much out of the question for her at this point and upon our arrival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, we confronted with a steep flight of stairs leading to the lobby.
We were told to go outside the theater, take the handicapped elevator down one flight, walk through a lower-level entrance and then take a smaller lift to the lobby.
And yet when we were showed our tickets to the usher, we were directed to a flight of stairs to the level we had just left. And there was no elevator to this location.
We explained the situation to the usher, who put us in touch with the theater manager, who couldn’t do anything for us except parrot a line about the theater behind the most handicapped-friendly location in the country or some such horseshit.
Normally we get orchestra seats to avoid this misery, but the McNeal tickets were going for a reduced rate and we pounced on them.
My auntie seriously suggested that my sister and I see the show while she waited in the lobby and read a book. We quickly nixed that idea.
There ain’t no virgins in Queens and there ain’t no way we were leaving our auntie on her own, so we demanded our money back.
“You have to courage to be handicapped in this world,” my auntie said as we left the theater. And that is so true.
I think of all things I do that I take for granted—walking, running, climbing stairs and working out at the gym—all activities that so many people can’t even think about doing it.
We regrouped outside on the street, rebooted our restaurant reservation and took a long, slow walk down Ninth Avenue on a beautiful sunny day to a fabulous Greek restaurant on 43rd Street.
It sucks that we didn’t get to see the play and it is highly unlikely that we ever will, given the show’s rather short run and staggering ticket price.
But I’m grateful for the day that we had together and I’m looking forward to our next theater outing.
Let’s hope it’s not American Passion.
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Take care.