Sunday

Chris Pedersen has this wonderful, unassuming tenor voice; it’s not loud and booming like you might expect in a stage production, instead it’s smooth and has this perfect little warble right where a perfect little warble is needed. His voice projects just enough to make you lean in and want to hear more; it makes you want to fall into the song, and let it wrap itself around you.

So you can imagine how ticked off I was when, in the middle of his only solo in Guys & Dolls this afternoon (heck yeah! I had to see the closing show!), some 2,000 year old woman (whose head was damn near swallowed whole by her Giant Red Hat) blew her nose. This wasn’t any dainty clearing of the sinuses, this was a freaking foghorn cutting through the dead of night.

Mr. Pederson never missed a beat or allowed the distraction to throw him off key. If I’d been wearing a Giant Red Hat, too, it would be off to him.

The closing showing of Guys & Dolls was played to a nearly packed theater, and in my little hemisphere of it there were one hundred and ninety seven thousand people over the age of 80. And you know what? People over the age of 80 seem to enjoy talking through whatever they’re watching. We suffered through a matinee of the Ancient and Dust-Covered when we saw The Aviator—they talked and talked and talked through that, too—and today as I was surrounded by the smell of Ben Gay and Old Funk, I was treated to running commentaries coming at me from all sides.

Why, I was in this show when I was a young fella! No, sir, you were an adult long before the time period during which this show is set. You may, however, be recalling your days as a post-Depression crapshooter in the sewers of New York…

Oh! Those kids are just so cute up there! Yep, they’re cute all right. But with only a couple of exceptions, they too are adults…but I’m sure they would like knowing you think they’re cute. I’ll pass that along to at least one of them.

Harvey, did you take your fiber today? Because you know how you get when you don’t take your fiber! Ma’am, I’m sitting very close to Harvey, and I assure you, he took his fiber, and it’s beginning to work on him.

Hack, hack, hack, hack, hack… Yeah, 60 years of smoking’ll do that to ya…

The production itself was awesome. I don’t think there’s a lousy song in the whole show, and the actors playing the parts once again did it justice. But the audience…

Boys and girls, when you go to the theater (stick your little finger in the air when you say “theater”) please remember that you’re not at home watching TV. The people on stage can hear you. If you have to blow your nose and you’re not especially dainty about it, excuse yourself to the lobby. If you have a smoker’s cough, suck on something that will quell it during as much of the show as possible. Please don’t sing along, either. Most of us did not pay good money to hear you sing, we paid good money to hear the actors sing. And most of all… be quiet!

Thus endeth my rant today. Now excuse me while I go smack my head against the wall to get Luck Be A Lady out of it…

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