At some point after college, Christmas ceased being fun and turned into a yearly stress. It is a bummer. Maybe having a kid will help bring back what I used to love about it when I was little. I still remember what that was - to sum it all up, it was listening rapturously to Christmas carols alone in our living room, which was lit only by the lights on the tree, eating gingerbread cookies and eyeballing all the sparkly wrapped presents underneath in giddy anticipation.
Guided by nostalgia, I guess, I still long to recapture some elements of that vision at Christmastime, which is why I pounced on a Groupon for the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. It is not a show, people: it is a Spectacular, with a capital S. It might be hopelessly cheesy, I was aware, but there was only one way to find out. And the movie "Annie" was a large force in my childhood, so I have always been predisposed to appreciate the Rockettes.
My friend Erin accepted an offer to go with me, and we went first to Carnegie Deli in Midtown, as if the Rockettes weren't enough touristy cliche for one evening (I had been to the Deli once before, in 2000 - as a tourist!). I had a pastrami sandwich and it was awesome. It was simply a gigantic pile o'pastrami with a sort of an afterthought of rye bread on either side, not enough to even come close to covering the meat. Mustard on the side was its only accoutrement, which is fine by this carnivore. I ate half of it, somehow (baby must have been pulling her weight), and got the other half to go. We were stuffed. And then we ordered a massive slab of cheesecake, incomprehensibly. And we made a good dent in that too. And then I got the rest of that slab boxed to go as well.
I should mention here that despite it being a tourist destination, the experience at Carnegie was very pleasant. We were seated immediately (at 6:30 or so), and our waiter was uncommonly nice. They put multiple parties together at the same table but we had no one next to us for most of our meal, and even after some tourists were seated there, it didn't feel intrusive.
Erin heroically hid my leftovers in her large bag when we went to the theater, for which I am even more grateful having just polished off said leftovers for lunch. To leave them behind would have been a tragedy.
The show was as anticipated: a mix of glitzy fun and schmaltzy boring. The numbers with the Rockettes were mostly great. I particularly enjoyed their "12 Days of Christmas" routine, and "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," which is apparently a staple from the original 1933 show and features them wonderfully falling down like dominoes in slow motion. The 3D movie bits didn't add anything (and hello, isn't it already 3D when you see a show live?). A story about a mother looking for a gift for her daughter was at the same time deeply annoying, yawn-inducingly boring, and appallingly syrupy. Dancing Santas were fun; one Santa making transitions between songs was awkward. I liked the splendor of the nativity scene at the end, which also dates to 1933 as I understand it.
No comments:
Post a Comment