Hi again! Last month I went on a surprise visit to NYC again because my friend lives there now and I had a free place to stay, and since I'm an adult who makes money I can waste it all however I want!! I decided to spend President's weekend with her. I totally dillydallied in writing this blog post so here is a very delayed recap of my awesome Broadway vacation.

Thursday

I landed at 5pm, so all I did was reunite with my friend, grab dinner and hang out in her apartment. She lives uptown near Columbia which is a neat neighborhood that I hadn't been to before! I got suuuuper lucky and threaded the needle between the freeze and the blizzard, so the weather was chilly but mostly totally specacular too! But the real adventure started on

Friday

My friend had class, so I spent the morning wandering around her neighborhood and taking in the sights!! I didn't take any photos because I wasn't really being touristy, mostly just strolled and listened to music, but I also popped into a bookstore to get something new to read! Once we reunited, we hung out in her apartment and watched the show School Spirits which we are both super into lol. We are Xicole (Xavier and Nicole) shippers but the show seems to have forgotten about them completely so our dreams are crushed. Then we got ready for our first show of the trip, which we already had tickets for (my mama bought them for us for my birthday <3):

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

I LOOOOVE Spelling Bee ever since I stage managed it in college. I really wanted to sign up as a guest speller because I knew I'd regret it if I didn't. And to my surprise, we show up and my old friend and co-worker is working the sign-up booth!! Small world!! It was super fun to catch up with her, and I think she had a little bit of influence over who gets picked so I thought it was likely that I could get nepotism'd in and chosen to guest spell. But she told me that there were friends and family of the cast present and the spellers had already been chosen, so I did not get picked. Honestly I am relieved not to get picked because I knew I would have gotten nervous and made an embarrassing mistake.

This show was just spectacular and I recommend it to everyone. Jasmine Amy Rogers as Olive is my beloved, she is so talented and dazzling to watch. Kevin McHale as Barfee was also great, me and my friend kept joking about how so many Glee actors are on Broadway currently. Our personal favorite cast member was definitely Philippe Arroyo as Chip, he was so freaking funny and I love the interpretation of Chip as one of those rizzler kids. Spectacular characterization. I love this show so much.

After the show we went to my favorite Times Square restaurant, Ichiran Ramen. Very popular and busy 24/7 but if you're in NYC you should go.

Saturday

Valentines Day! On Saturday I had a plan: I was DESPERATE to see Operation Mincemeat, so we booked it to the rush line at 7am. The demand for that show was crazy: when we got there we were 4th in line and the people 1st in line got there at 5AM! Because the original cast was leaving later that week the show was nearly sold out and they only had 2 rush tickets per show, which is just insane but I was so desperate that we agreed to pay full price tickets to see the show that night ($227 each, so not the insane $700 they were selling online but not cheap). Money is temporary memories are forever.

We met some real interesting people in this rush line too, I hadn't realized that Operation Mincemeat had such a ravenous fanbase but we met 3 superfans of the show who had all seen it like 8+ times. The person in front of us already had tickets for that day's matinee and was getting another one for the eveing!! They were telling us about how they make unofficial merch for the shows, have stage doored so many times that the actors knew them, and even the front of house staff knew them by name. I gotta say, if I lived in New York and had these shows so accessible to me I would probably be the same way tbh. They were super funny, they were in total disbelief that my friend and I were going into the show blind and had no prior context. I guess they thought only superfans were insane enough to wait in that line for crazy expensive tickets.

Once we had our tickets, we went on a stroll to the High Line and down to the Whitney Museum. As I shared in my previous NYC blog post, my mom and I tried to go to the Whitney on our last trip but it was closed, so this was my redemption. 25 and under get in for free which is awesome but unfortunately most of the museum was closed for rennovations. The exhibits that were open though were pretty sick. The art on display was beautiful, and in their temporary gallery they had a really cool exhibit about an artist from the late 1920s who made miniature wire circus sculptures with moving parts that he would make perform for kids. It was super impressive, and in addition to all of the figurines on display they had a video of them in action. I loved it.

Then we took a nap before our performance of:

OPERATION MINCEMEAT

And let me tell you all that the $227 ticket was WORTH IT!! This show absolutely blew me away. I love really tight small ensemble shows, and this one is just the most absolutely perfect one I've ever seen. Only 5 actors playing all of these characters, and every inch of this show feels so intentional and choreographed and tight. The superfan we met in line chatted with us at intermission and commented that this performance was really tight with the actors feeling super in sync, and I felt that deeply. I already used the word "intentional" to describe it but I have to use it again because that's just how well done it is. We had Jessi Kirtley understudying for Leslie Jean and she was phemonenal, she is the definitive Leslie Jean to me I can't imagine the character as being anyone else now.

Also Monty is HOT.

After the show we went to Marie's Crisis, which is a singalong piano bar that plays showtunes!! It was really fun, it really caters to a specific type of person which luckily me and my friend are lol. This was the beginning of the end for my poor voice though, singing along totally shot me through.

Sunday

On Sunday we had a little bit more of a leisurely morning: we woke up at 10, had pastries, and walked ourselves over to the Masquerade stand-by line around 11am. My friend is a diehard Sleep No More fan and had already seen Masquerade and was convinced that I would love it, so we decided to make an attempt to get the cheaper last minute stand-by tickets to see the show. For those who don't know, Masquerade is this immersive walk-through Phantom of the Opera revival with a cocktail dresscode (I had to borrow my friend's dress) that does 6 "pulses" of performances per "showtime" at 15 minute intervals with a bunch of different Phantoms, Christines, Raouls, etc that perform in different rooms in the building as smaller audience groups are led through. Totally trippy, and I was yolo-ing my money away so I thought yeah let's do it. The building is totally anonymous except for newspapers plastered on the windows that are sprinkled with Phantom of the Opera references, suuuuper cool.

Unfortunately, one of the matinee pulses got cancelled and the super nice box office lady told us that she wouldn't be able to sell us a stand-by ticket that afternoon because they were filling the remaining pulses with those with tickets to the cancelled one. But she told us that there were no promises for the evening show but to try again, so we had to find something else to fill our afternoon. So I thought, rush tickets?

A little backstory: when we were in line for Operation Mincemeat, a friend who also lives in NYC told me to try the online rush because she got her tickets there super easy, but the online rush opened an hour after the box office and I did not have faith that we could get those tickets reliably and didn't want to chance it. So we bought the full-price tickets but when the online rush openen I checked it just out of curiosity, and sure enough so many people tried to get them that the site crashed. Once it was back online, I clicked through all of the shows they sold rush for and they all were sold out. This list included Heathers. So, by the time we knew we weren't getting into the Masquerade matinee it was 12:15pm and rush had opened 15 minutes prior, but I checked the rush site just in case because we had talked about maybe seeing Heathers, and by some miracle, 2 rush tickets for the 1pm performance were still availble. So of course we bought them and sprinted to the theater 45 minutes before the show started.

HEATHERS

Heathers is, you know... Heathers. It's the show I had the least expectations before because you KNOW I was a Hamil-Heathers-DEH-BMC fandom WARRIOR back in the day so like, I know the show I know what I'm getting into. It's Heathers, what else do I say. I still think that a lot of the changes they made to the show since the UK version are not for me, though I'm not a total hater of 2 of the 3 new songs (take a guess which one I don't like...). It's fun, it's camp, it's catchy, it's Heathers. It's not high art but I had fun.

I've been a Casey Likes fan ever since Back to the Future so it was so fun to see him as JD in this show. He is so great as an unhinged little creep who you can still see the appeal of, you know? My friend was converted to fan as well, he really is all that.Kuhoo Verma as Veronica was also mindblowing, just an incredible performer. We also thought it was very amusing to see Peyton List in this because as previously mentioned we are School Spirits fans, but unfortunately I hate to say that she is really not a strong singer. Sorry Peyton List, but she was easily the weakest link in the show which is too bad since she's the stunt casting.

After the show we got dinner and then said, what the hell let's go stand in the Masquerade line again for the evening performance. What's the worst that could happen, we waste a few hours? It won't hurt. We turned up 2 hours early which meant we were first in line but also were waiting forever, and the super nice box offce lady came back out and told us that we had a solid shot at getting into the show. It was freezing but we had to change into our dresses on the sidewalk just to be prepared. They had a policy where people who already had tickets but missed their show could skip in front of us in line which was annoying, but we made friends with some other stand-by hopefuls and at 7:45pm, for the 3rd to last pulse of the evening, they finally called on us and got us tickets to the show. All of the people waiting in line with us started cheering for us, it was such an exhilarating moment.

Then it was time for...

MASQUERADE

This show is sooo cool!! This is my first ever immersive show and it is such a special experience, I would love to do something like this again!! My friend kept telling me that I would love Sleep No More which I probably would, it was super fun. It's such a cool different perspective to watch a play where the actors are standing in the same space as you and walking around you (and sometimes touching you), it definitely adds a special layer to the story. The free alcohol helps too.

I actually got selected for a 1-on-1 moment with the actor playing the Phantom!! It was one of the most special theater moments I have ever experienced. In a scene in his layer, he picked my friend out of the crowd and was staring her down as he walked towards her, and right as he was face to face with her making super intense eye contact, he reached his hand past her to ME!! GAH!!! He took my hand and practically ran dragging me to the next room, where he sat me in a chair and showed me the sheet music for the song "Masquerade", and he held my hand to guide it along the notes as it played, and then led me again to a new room where Christine is sleeping post-"Music of the Night" and sat me in the seat right next to the bed for the most up-close view. Absolutely crazy, it was so exciting I can't describe it. I also kept catcing a lot of eye contact and attention from the actors which was really exciting, probably because I was so interested to look at them that neither of us would look away lmao. I got stared down and tracked across the entire room by the Young Phantom actor in a scene where he does a wind-up doll dance (he ended the dance facing a mirror, and as we were leaving I snuck a peek into the mirror to see he face and he SNAPPED aroud to look at me, and every time I looked back at him for the rest of the time it took me to leave the room he was watching me! Freaky!) I also got stared down by a clown carnie in the Phantom childhood flashback scene, and she jumpscared me by following us all out of the room and grabbing my shoulder haha.

All this to say that the immersiveness really was all that. The only real bummer of the show was that the chandelier did not actually fall :( also "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" was done indoors since it was fucking cold. Post-show the lair where the Phantom and Christine are in the boat is transformed into a bar which is also very fun. I cannot even begin to imagine how much tech and coordination goes into this show. I would die to be a crewmember on something like this.

It was snowing as we left!! Magical!!

Monday

We got up again hella early to rush Two Strangers! We kept joking that we were going on the Brit Brorld Brour (Brit World Tour) because every show we saw except Spelling Bee was a West End import. This is another show I knew nothing about and was curious to see blind, plus it was one of the only Monday shows so it all worked out. We got rush tix no problem (thank god), and then went back to my friends apartment to watch youtube and sleep for the rest of the day. What, we were tired!!

Then we saw our last show of the trip:

TWO STRANGERS (CARRY A CAKE ACROSS NEW YORK)

To be honest, this show was just fine. Both Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty are spectacular and I thought the humor was very good,but the script just didn't blow me away. It's a very drama-heavy romcom, which is fun and entertaining but not really what I connect with on a deep level. The people behind us though were GAGGED, they would not stop gasping really loud and making really annoying commentary the whole show. HOWEVER, this is the only show of the trip that made me cry. I ended up downright sobbing at the ending. Almost-love stories and missed connections have always hit me in the feels. Also "New York" is a song from this show that I have found myself returning to incessantly over the past few weeks, it's just so catchy!!

Then Tuesday morning I woke up at the asscrack of dawn to make my way to the airport!! I saw 2 bodega kitties on my way out, so ending on a high note!

And that concludes my NYC trip! Final show ranking:

• #1: Operation Mincemeat
• #2: Masquerade
• #3: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
• #4: Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
• #5: Heathers

If I could make any changes, I wish we could have seen Chess instead of Heathers - we met a woman in line for Operation Mincemeat who said it was her guilty pleasure favorite of the season and I always like to take the advice of strangers in rush lines. But of course, given our circumstances that wouldn't have been possible. I also really wanted to see Ragtime and Oh, Mary! but my friend had already seen both and I was very happy to prioritize shows that are new to both of us, you can't do it all.

The end!! Thank you for reading!!