A Good Project for Lin-Manuel Miranda

Whatever happened to Maria?

How did the remainder of her life play out after Tony, the young white man she wanted,  was shot dead by her fellow Puerto Rican-American Chino at the end of "West Side Story?"  Maria, readers will recall, got the gun after Chino dropped it and threatened to use it to kill both others and herself, but couldn't pull the trigger. So there she was, still alive when the final curtain came down.

Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" Remains Relevant

The on-line version of The Wall Street Journal recently posed a question for readers: should startup technology companies in the U.S. be open to financing by Chinese venture capital?

Those responding must follow WSJ civility guidelines and identify themselves.  The paper then publishes a few answers soon after a question has been posed.

Vulnerable Women and "What the Constitution Means to Me"

I was recently in New York and, among other things, saw a much-discussed play on Broadway entitled "What the Constitution Means to Me."

In truth, it is more of a one-woman monologue than a play, although at the end, there is a brief debate between Heidi Schreck, the author and chief actor, and one of two school-age girls as to whether the Constitution should be kept or scraped.  Audience participation -- cheers or boos for the various points made -- are encouraged at that part of the show.

I mention this because Schreck focuses mainly on the 9th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, the latter of which in particular underpins the Supreme Court's decision that a person's right to privacy (unmentioned explicitly in the Constitution) allows a woman to get an abortion without government interference at least in the first trimester of her pregnancy.

This is a hot topic at the moment because various individual states have recently passed legislation would undermine or overrule that decision. Moreover, because of recent changes in the make-up of the Supreme Court, it is possible Row v Wade, the landmark ruling on abortion, will eventually be revisited.

"Daisy Miller," or "It's All About Me"

One can wonder, when reading classic fiction, how relevant a work is to contemporary life.

Henry James, an American author who lived and worked mostly abroad, wrote the novella "Daisy Miller" in 1877-78. Highly controversial in America, where many readers were scandalized by his description of the behavior in Europe of a young American girl coming of age, the story, more than anything he had previously written, put him on the literary map.

New York City's Fourth Dimension

In the preceeding post, with considerable help from a 1948 essay by E.B. White, I wrote about three types of New Yorkers: long-time residents, commuters and goal seekers who come from elsewhere, the third category being the most important.  But the city, and especially Manhattan, has an increasingly important fourth dimension: tourists, or very short-term visitors.

Defined as anyone who stays overnight or comes from at least 50 miles away, New York is expecting a record 67 million visitors in 2019, up from about 65 million in 2018 and only about 44 million in 2007 when former mayor Michael Bloomberg launched an effort to promote the city's attractions.

Most of these people will visit, or stay in Manhattan, which has a population of only 1.6 million people.  The population of all five of New York City's boroughs -- Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island -- totals about 8.7 million.

I mention this because, as the New York Times noted, Broadway theaters have just had another record fiscal year (it ends in May, and then come the annual Tony awards) with 14.8 million people, spending about $1.8 billion on musicals and plays that qualify as "Broadway."  There are currently 41 Broadway Theaters, located near Times Square or at Lincoln Center, all of which have 500 seats or more.

Then, beyond that, and not counted in the attendance and spending statistics mentioned above, there are "Off-Broadway" theaters (at least 99, but less than 500 seats) and "Off-Off-Broadway" venues, which have less than 99 seats.

While most tourists probably attend long-running musicals for the most part, their spending has definitely helped promote a very encouraging revival in straight plays, both new works and first-class revivals of great plays from the past.

Broadway is alive and well if increasingly expensive when it comes to ticket prices (they have in recent years soared relative to the rate of inflation). But the industry's policy is to fill up every theater every night and as such, same-day discount tickets (half off in many cases) go on sale at three locations in Manhattan every day. Thousands of people take advantage of them.

New York Then and Now, with a Little Help from E.B. White

"The normal frustrations of modern life are here multiplied and amplified -- a single run of a crosstown bus contains, for the driver, enough frustrations and annoyance to carry him over the edge of sanity: the light changes always an instant too soon, the passenger that bangs on the shut door, the truck that blocks the only opening, the coin that slips to the floor, the question asked at the wrong moment."

That quote is from E.B. White's essay "Here is New York," written in the summer of 1948 and first published in a 1949 issue of Holiday magazine. White, long a writer for The New Yorker, was then living in Maine and had been asked to re-visit New York and record his impressions.

Well, things are little better now -- for the passengers as well as the drivers.  Getting just a few blocks crosstown on a bus in Manhattan can feel like an eternity.  So, to help riders pass the time, the newest crosstown buses, one of which is depicted below, offer not just wireless, but USB ports where one can charge a phone or a laptop. 

This, when I'm living in NYC, is my crosstown bus -- the M66 -- pulled up at a stop on Broadway and W66th on a rainy afternoon. It's a new model since the last time I stayed in Manhattan, in the autumn of 2018.

How about other aspects of White's essay, now available as a small book at, among other places, the Center for Fiction in its very attractive new location in Brooklyn, beside the Mark Morris Dance Group home base and across the street from the opera house of the Brooklyn Academy of Music?

Much, has changed, of course, but that, White himself said, is what New York is all about.

But much, too has remained the same.

For instance, "the residents of Manhattan," White said, "are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere else and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail."  Whether they will succeed or fail depends in large part on luck, he said, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky," he said.

There are, of course, long-time residents, who White said take the city for granted. And then there are commuters that simply get devoured by the city each morning and spit out at night.

But the most important category of denizens is that mentioned first above: those who come from elsewhere in quest of something, for whom he city is a goal, White said. That group "accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements."

While the long-time residents give the city stability and while commuters endow it with a tidal restlessness, the goal seekers from elsewhere give it passion, White said.

That is no less true in 2019 than was the case in 1948.  But the center of gravity as far as where such people now eat and sleep, even if they still work in Manhattan, is Brooklyn -- sometimes called "the new Paris," not because it looks much like the almost mythical French capital, but because of cultural ferment.

When I eat in Manhattan restaurants, if the occasion presents, I often ask my server the following question: "do you consider yourself a hospitality industry professional, or are you just doing this while you get your degree in aeronautical engineering?"

That always gets a laugh -- and then some fascinating stories.  There was, for instance, the young restaurant receptionist, born in Somalia, brought up in Nebraska and in Manhattan to try to make it as a writer of film scripts.  Or the waiter who was a dancer.  He had no recent successes to report but proudly said one of his colleagues at the restaurant had just made an eight-minute appearance on "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," an award-winning television series about a New York housewife who discovers she has a knack for stand-up comedy.

Of course plenty of people don't make it and eventually depart, often very quietly. In fact, they melt away as newcomers continue to arrive.

As White said: such New Yorkers have to be willing to be lucky.

The ABT: Cassandra Trenary and Calvin Royal III

There are times, when watching a ballet, that one particular paring jumps out as especially  noteworthy -- and even so exciting that hair stands up on the back of one's neck.

So it was the other day at Lincoln Center where the American Ballet Theater (ABT) was performing a new work by choreographer Alexei Ratmansky entitled "The Seasons." It's based on a score of the same name by Alexander Glazunov that was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1900.

Although Ratmansky, the ABT's artist-in-residence for the past 10 years, re-choreographed the  piece from scratch, it remains a plotless "divertissement" featuring Petipa's ideas of just which characters should represent the four seasons -- starting with winter and ending with a potpourri of weather.

The ballet, as New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas put it, "overflows with steps" and as a result, in her words, gets choppy from time to time. That may be putting it kindly. It can also seem repetitive and boring.

But toward the end, out came ABT soloists Cassandra Trenary and Calvin Royal III, dancing characters identified as Bacchante and Bacchus, in the "Autumn" portion of the piece and one's attention -- and appreciation -- suddenly sharpened.  They were wonderful individually, but even more important, exemplary as a couple, executing their routine with an exuberant mutual understanding that seamlessly integrated polished technique with vibrant aesthetic and emotional expression.

"More, more!" one wanted to shout.

By the way, Ms Kourlas, whose review I read only after I had seen the piece, labeled Trenary and Royal "excellent."