There’s an Al Stewart song called “In Brooklyn” that contains the lines:

 

“And oh, I’m back in the city again;

You can tell by the smell of the hamburger stands in the rain.”

 

Well, I’m well and truly back in the city again although the weather has been pretty good so far with only a small amount of rain. But he’s right; even with my eyes closed and my ears blocked, I can tell that I’m in Manhattan just by smell. It’s a mix of the hamburger/pretzel stands, the steam from the Con Edison heating system, innumerable delicatessens and fast-food joints and the faint tang of the ocean as the wind whips through the skyscraper canyons and there’s no smell like it anywhere in the world. And I love it just as much as I love every part of this city. Sorry if I eulogise, but when I come back to New York, something clicks inside of me and I end up with this big silly grin on my face, even when I’m being frozen by the wind-chill or yelled at by a cab driver. It’s falling apart, it’s messy, it’s perennially in dire financial trouble, it has some of the most ridiculous laws and a billionaire mayor who can’t stop meddling, but it feels like home to me. So I’m happy to be here and happy to be working and I just happen to like New York.

 

Friday was meet and greet day: a chance for the UK creative team and acting company to meet the US cast, crew and, most importantly, the producers. Tom Stoppard had flown over for the occasion and was lurking in a corner of the rehearsal room looking stylishly elegant but slightly aghast at the number of people milling around. He’s a determined smoker but the fact that you now can’t smoke anywhere except in your own home or on the streets didn’t seem to be worrying him too much and he spoke eloquently and wittily about his delight in being a part of the whole live theatre experience.

 

There was coffee, smoked salmon, cream cheese, bagels, strawberries, and other assorted nibbles and speeches were declaimed and introductions made. Our director, David Leveaux, has earned a reputation as something of a hard man, enhanced by an incident at the first night of Fiddler On The Roof, where he decked a drunken columnist from The New York Times; an endeavour which gained him a great deal of respect from the Broadway community and a pair of boxing gloves from the producers. Our little party was over in forty-five minutes and the technical crowd trooped back to the theatre to get on with the real work whilst the actors got down to some serious rehearsing.

 

Saturday and Sunday were free days, but I spent quite a lot of Saturday nursing a bruised foot, having slammed it into the leg of the bed in my apartment whilst trying to get my bearings in an early morning daze. My associate’s wife had arrived from England for the weekend, her first ever visit to New York, and I joined them in the evening for a meal in Little Italy, having taken them to my favourite pizza joint in Greenwich Village (coincidentally called John’s Pizza) the previous evening. There was a slight altercation in the pizza restaurant resulting in the two guys in the booth behind us disappearing at high speed, one of them leaving his laptop computer bag behind him. We handed it over to the waiter and asked what the problem had been: “One of dose guys yacked his brains out on his way to da men’s room and I charged ‘em ten bucks clean-up fee.’ It seemed quite reasonable to us, though not exactly the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re mid-way through a large pizza.

 

I did the tour-guide bit on Sunday, starting with brunch on the upper west-side and then a leisurely walk, or hobble in my case, through the families enjoying the spring sunshine in Central Park and on to Fifth Avenue where we encountered a Greek parade complete with three gentlemen, resplendent in period costume and luxurious facial hair, riding horses and brandishing swords, much to the delight of the crowd lining the sidewalk. There were princesses, endless children in national costume, much waving of Greek flags and marching band after marching band, none of then playing anything recognisably Greek, and including a kilted pipe-band giving a spirited rendition of Amazing Grace. The effect was only slight spoiled by their military crew-cuts and a propensity for wearing wrap-around sunglasses under their bonnets.

 

 

Then down Madison Avenue, window shopping, across to Bloomingdales and further east to the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tramway, a Swiss-built cable car that connects Manhattan with a 147 acre island in the East River which has been variously named Hog Island, Manning Island, Blackwell Island and Welfare Island and was once the site of the Blackwell Penitentiary which played host to Mae West and “Boss” Tweed of Tammany Hall fame, amongst others. Named Roosevelt Island in 1973, it’s now home to various mixed-income housing projects and two hospitals and is a haven of peace and tranquillity, being almost traffic-free. The cable car was built in 1976, initially as a temporary measure until the subway line was completed, but this took twenty-three years and by then “The Tram” was a New York institution. It’s a very different way of seeing a part of the city from above, but very few tourists seem to know it exists.

 

I seem to have lapsed into travelogue mode and it’s getting late, so I’ll stop for now. The rain has just started and I’m sitting here looking down Sixth Avenue at the endless waves of traffic pulsing from one intersection to the next, with the lights reflecting in the wet streets. It’s past midnight, but this is the city that never sleeps, although it does have a bit of a rest between three and five in the morning, which is what I’m going to do once I’ve opened a bottle of excellent Napa Valley Chardonnay from the liquor store across the street and chosen something to watch from the hundreds of television channels that are available on cable. I promise more local colour in the next posting, so indulge a confirmed New Yorker in his adopted second city on this occasion.

 

One last image: on the first night, on my way from the Port Authority building to my apartment, I passed a guy selling fashion accessories, bracelets, brooches and hair-clips from a trestle table on the sidewalk. His hand-painted sign proclaimed: “Every Item Just One Damn Dollar!” You’ve got to love it.

 

 

 

Another New York song – On Broadway, by The Drifters starts like this:

 

“They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway,

They say there’s always magic in the air…”

 

The neon lights are fast being replaced by high-tech LED video screens, but the idea’s the same as it’s always been: sell, sell, sell.

 

We’re a part of all that, as is every other Broadway show, but our marquee (the canopy over the main entrance to the theatre) is a little more discrete than some of the long-running musicals. As I mentioned before, we’re part of a series called National Theatre New York and the first show to move from London to Broadway, so we’re considered ‘art” rather than out and out entertainment. That hasn’t stopped the producers from coming up with some Broadway-style merchandising and I’m sure I’ll be wearing the Jumpers sweatshirt fairly soon. I draw the line at the baseball cap, however.

 

It’s been a hard week, even more so for our crew, who start their days at eight a.m. and finish at ten at night. As most of them live outside Manhattan, they tend to leave home at around six-thirty and get back at eleven thirty at night. They do get pretty well paid, however, so I don’t feel too sorry for them and once the show is up and running, life gets a little easier. A couple of years ago, I was elected to the Broadway Stage Hands’ Union, IATSE Local 1,which is quite an honour for a foreigner. After I’d read the pledge of allegiance in front the entire union board (stunned silence, then the union president said, “Gee, that’s the first time we’ve heard anyone read the pledge that fluently”), I was given my Local 1 badge, card and hard-hat and the magic phrase with which I was to counter all adversity: “don’t f*ck wid me, I’m a Local 1 guy. I pay them a couple of hundred bucks a year and four per cent of my Broadway earnings and have to promise to do picket duty if ever there’s a strike whilst I’m in the city. I get excused doing picket duty when I’m not in New York, because by the time I’ve flown three and a half thousand miles to get to the picket line, it’s stopped being my day to do duty. My membership means that I can work in any theatre on Broadway and not get shouted at when I move a piece of equipment. Oh, and I also have to give up my seat on the subway if a senior member of the union gets on and has nowhere to sit.

 

We did our first preview tonight, in front of a slightly baffled but very appreciative audience and now our sound team have three days to refine our part of the show before I get to come back to the U.K. and hand over to my New York associate. There was a producer’s Thank You drinks party tonight after the show at a trendy mid-town restaurant, but most of the cast and crew were too tired to stay for more than a couple of drinks. I cadged a lift back to my apartment with our leading lady and the stripping secretary (you have to have seen the show, really) and the chauffeur-driven car got pulled over by a couple of New York’s Finest for a routine safety and document check. “Hi, license and insurance, please. Any bombs or dead bodies that I should know about?”

 

 

I tend to visit the same place for Sunday brunch whenever I’m in the city. It’s a place called Docks, a fish restaurant on the upper west side that does a very good fixed-price brunch, which usually suffices for the rest of the day. It’s a twenty minute ride uptown on the subway, but the local subway station was closed for some repair work, so I walked up to the station at Herald Square and encountered the opening ceremony of Macy’s Flower Week. For some reason there was a dog’s fashion parade outside the store and as I walked past, ‘Princess’, a very small dog wearing a ballet skirt and a tiara, was replaced on the podium by ‘Clear-Eye’, a ferret wearing a very small Easter bonnet. “Hey folks,” boomed the compére, “let’s hear it for Clear-Eye; the first ferret of the day.” Only in New York.

 

 

 

It’s obviously time I left to get back to the UK: my favourite bar is just around the corner from the theatre and it also happens to be the director’s favourite bar as well, so we tend to drift in after rehearsals to chat and have a drink or two. I’m not a great beer drinker and the wine isn’t all that great, so I usually drink Margaritas when in NY. This habit seems to have rubbed off onto one or two others and when we dropped in for a post-show drink last night, the nice lady behind the bar just asked “How many?” before I’d even opened my mouth. It may not be a bar where everyone knows your name, but they sure know what you drink.

 

 

Walking home very early this morning after a few too many Margaritas with a couple of the cast members, I took a short-cut through one of the parking garages that are scattered around Times Square. There were a few stragglers collecting their cars and two beautiful and unconcerned horses tethered to a rail by the exit ramp. Although the horse-drawn carriages were still plying their trade around the city, these two were not the depressed hacks that plod their way around the streets, but perfectly groomed and handsome beasts. The mystery was solved when a pair of smartly dressed policemen emerged from a nearby coffee shop, unhitched their horses, swung into their saddles and trotted off into the night. Ten minutes later on the deserted streets near my subway station as I waited for the lights to change, six motorcycle policemen rode slowly by in perfect formation, almost as though they were in a parade.

 

Of course it’s Easter weekend, so the city if full of out-of-towners, all of whom seem to be travelling in large groups. Groups of giggling teenage girls with arms linked so that they don’t lose one another make walking on the sidewalk a hazardous business, so, like most New Yorkers in a hurry, I take to the road and dodge the slow-moving traffic. Believe me, it’s easier than trying to force your way through a party from the mid-west who are all walking along looking up.

 

I can’t finish without a word about New York’s buskers, almost all of whom are immensely talented. Times Square usually hosts the ubiquitous pan-pipe band competing with the doom & gloom preachers and the plastic bucket thumpers, but on my first night, walking down to the apartment, I passed a trumpeter playing a sublime version of Honeysuckle Rose to the empty streets. In Central Park, a sax player was improvising cool jazz in one of the pedestrian tunnels; up by Lincoln Center, a string-quartet entertains the passing crowds and in my local station the other night, an Asian gentleman was making beautiful music with a small electronic wind instrument. It’s going to be a real wrench going back to the Northern Line and endless badly played choruses of Streets Of London and Take Five.

 

Good flight back, although I was rather surprised when my designated seat turned out to have no actual seat cushions, just the basic chassis. “Can’t think how we came to miss that” said the bemused flight attendant, before moving me to the adjoining seat ‘as we’re quite empty up here.” No comment.

 

By the time they’ve fed you and administered the rather meagre two glasses of wine (you really expect a bit more when someone has paid £1200 for your tickets), there’s not much of the flight left for snoozing in, so I watched, or rather dozed through, a nice gentle movie called Kill Bill. I gather that this film is supposed to be full of reverential homage to bits of other films, but I’m sure that the biggest influences on Mr. Tarantino were the Monty Python sketch of the Sam Peckinpah remake of Salad Days, and the increasingly limbless knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The fake blood bill must have been pretty high, which might account for the dreadful storyline. Still, that and the terrible prosthetic severed heads and limbs did at least raise a smile.

 

Arriving home, I noticed that my suitcase was rather more neatly packed than I’d left it and there was a polite note inside informing me that the Transport Security Authority had opened and searched my case. Give the amount of electronics that tend to get packed in with my clothes, I’m not surprised and rather impressed. But quite glad I did all my washing before I left New York.

 

A few more things that I either forgot or was too Margarita-ed to mention: our local café was The Edison Café on the ground floor of The Edison Hotel, almost next to theatre. It’s known by most of the locals as The Tea Rooms or The Polish Tea Rooms as an ironical counterpoint to the rather more famous and vastly more opulent Russian Tea Rooms (now defunct.) The Edison does probably the cheapest sit-down meal on Broadway; for $3 you can get a large bowl of chicken noodle soup with a side order of cellophane-wrapped Saltine crackers. This is no ordinary chicken noodle soup, but true Jewish penicillin and I have a suspicion that it forms the major part of the diet of rather a lot of resting actors. There’s a small roped-off seating area just inside the door with its own telephone, which is reserved for a select band of old-school Broadway producers who shun the Atkins-friendly fare offered by other, classier restaurants and opt instead for a menu that includes a rather wonderful corned-beef hash with a poached egg on top (and chips, if it’s lunchtime) and, at Passover, a special menu featuring more ways with a Matzoh than you would imagine are possible. Sooner or later, everyone turns up at the Tea Rooms and lunchtimes on mid-week matinee days are a delight for people watching. They must run coach-parties from the upper east-side, judging by the number of blue-rinsed mittel-European ladies packing the booths.

 

Tom Stoppard reappeared towards the end of last week and wandered into the theatre to see how things were going. The producers had booked him into one of the latest swanky hotels to emerge recently, which is simply called “W”. It has a doorman who’s about seven foot six tall and built in proportion who simply parts the crowd as he steps across the sidewalk to greet the great and the good that come to stay at this “Zen-like environment.” Tom was greatly intrigued by one item on his room-service menu, which was entitled “Sex Between The Sheets.” Further enquiry revealed that this consisted of eight different flavours of ice-cream, a jug of chocolate sauce, a very large plastic sheet and a disposable camera. He was also rather surprised and little alarmed to be called by the manager and informed that his “room-stylist” would be along shortly. This turned out to be the maid, to check his sheets and towels.