Into the woods

            Last night I might have experienced one of the most enchanting moments of my New York City life up until now. Erin and I had one of the luckiest strokes of good fortune when she won two tickets online for the Shakespeare In The Park production of "Into The Woods." Let me just say that the odds of getting these tickets on a normal day, let alone on a Saturday night, is about 1 in 600. This is less than a 3% chance of a possible win between those waiting in line and those entering the lottery online. She's been talking about seeing this musical all summer but hasn't had the patience to stand in line for the nine to ten hours it takes, as early as four o'clock in the morning. Most of the time, even those who do wait that early still don't have a guarantee spot despite their extraordinary dedication. I've never actually heard of the musical myself, until Erin brought it to my attention a few weeks ago. However, I've wanted to see a play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park since I've moved to the city back in 2004. While I was at work yesterday, Erin sent me a quick message that she's going to submit our names in the lottery and is certain she is going to win this time. Exactly thirteen minutes later, I got a message back from her saying that she won the tickets with as many exclamation points as I can actually imagine reflected the pitch of her voice, in which she would be screaming in my ear had she actually been in my presence at that moment. Glad that I was at work at the time that she got the news, I jumped for joy first that I was saved of becoming hearing impaired and then that I was finally going to see a play in the park.

            With great enthusiasm, a friend at work gave me a quick run down of the play, its cast and plot line. In short, the play, written by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, is a story based on the characters of the classic Brothers Grimm fairytales we grew up loving. However, our beloved fairytales characters are thrown into these woods, intertwined in a fractured version of theirs stories and tinted in a darker hue paralleling reality, in a fashion similar to the Shrek movies. Now, we know very well that life and love are nothing like a the fairy tales we grew up believing in, but it's nice to get lost in the idea of it now and then, and forget that we're bitter thirty-something's and succumb to childlike rapture we used to live in. Why not? We can go back to pretending we're adults again tomorrow...to the park!

            Once I got out of work, I jet over to the upper west side as fast as I could to meet Erin and a few friends before the eight o'clock performance. On my way there I happened to come upon Cafe Lalo, the very cafe that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan filmed You've Got Mail. I knew the cafe was somewhere in the neighborhood of the upper west side, but I never imagined that it still existed, and surly not in the same exact condition it was in when they filmed the movie. I had watched the film so many times I knew exactly what I was looking at the second I happened to looked up. Note to self: I'll have to go back when I have more time, so that I can actually go in and enjoy a cup of coffee. What luck that I found this place by accident!

            Entering Central park from the west side, just after the sun had set, under cast iron lamps illuminating the path to the theater, combined with the flickering glow of the hundreds of fire flies roaming about us, made the prelude of the evening feel like we had been dropped smack center into one of Grimm's fairy tales. It could not have looked more enchanting than if production designer, Norman Garwood, had fabricated the entire thing from his very imagination for our viewing pleasure. We weren't even at the theater yet and I was already amazed.

            Once we entered the theater, Erin and I began our never-ending climb to our "boxed" seats. It's a good thing I'm not afraid of heights because we found ourselves two seats away from the edge, in very last row of the theater. I think they figured, we won these tickets with no more work behind it than having to punch a few keys on a computer, while most of these poor shmucks had to wait in line for all hours of a perfectly good Saturday morning for their tickets. It's only fair that we should, therefore, get stuck in the nosebleed section. I couldn't complain though, I just had to show up, walk in and watch the play. Also, when I say worst seats, there really weren't any awful seats in the place. They were all perfectly viewable, if you had 20/20 vision or didn't forget your glasses, like I did. Although, once I got just the right mount of moisture in my eyes for squinting, I was good to go.

            I've walked past the open air theater, enclosed by it's high walls, during a matinee performance a few times, always wishing I was inside watching the actors exhibiting their talents to crowd before them. I considered climbing a tree just to get a peek inside once, but those crafty groundskeepers were smart enough to expect us poor urban folk to do such a thing and had presciently shaved the lower branches of the surrounding trees to prevent anyone from climbing them. Still, I think I saw a few trees swaying in the distance during the night, at odds with the wind. Sure that some determined few managed the climb up somehow. The stage below us looked much like the forest I imagine Peter Pan living in at Never Land. It was a child's tree house dream-come-true. Spiraling stairs climbing a forest of long oak trees, snug securely at the base of a dirt-covered stage triggered the memory of days I played on jungle gyms in elementary school. Fascinated by the set herself, Erin passes me her phone a few minutes later and says, "Take a picture for me, you're better at it than I am." Thinking back on it now, I think she was just tricking my ego into doing her dirty work. Glad to be so capable, I took the picture and just as I had snapped the perfect shot, I got a needlepointed nudge by Erin's elbow and turn to look at what she wanted. Her stiff upright position and tense profile told me that something was rotten in Denmark. Sure enough, I look behind me and one of the ushers had spotted me taking a picture. Trying as nonchalantly as possible to hide the evidence, I tucked the phone under my armpit just before the usher sauntered casually behind my chair. He stopped behind me, ducked down to my eye level and whispered in my ear, "You know, you almost got away with it. But you looked back. If you didn't look back with guilt written all over your face, I never would have noticed." Dang it. I was always a bad liar. "You'll have to delete the photo," he finishes. Dejected by my own idiocy and self-betrayal, I bowed my head in disgrace, pulled the phone out of my armpit and handed the phone back to Erin to delete. I was tempted to take another picture when I was out of the man's eye-line, just for good measure, but it wasn't worth getting kicked out of the theater just to prove that I could do it.

            The play itself was hilarious...and depressing, all at the same time. Somehow, Sondheim  and Lapine were able to flip the fairytale world completely on its toes. Because children, somehow, only seem to catch the good, happy-go-lucky moments in a story like this, they were safe in their happily ever after world. But for the adults, sheesh, the truth hurts. One minute I was laughing with tears streaming down my face, the next minute I was on the verge of sobbing in self-pity just thinking about how even in the fairy tale world someone could take even Prince Charming and turn him into a cheating womanizer too. Don't we have enough of that in the real world these days? Now they have to smash my favorite prince into fairy dust too? Come on. Give me something to hold on to here.