Column: Get Back

We had wandered into a more city-centric holiday season than normal, due to a confluence of work issues, grandkid visitation schemes and a vague sense that partaking of Manhattan’s newly welcoming cultural cornucopia seemed like the right thing to do.

We missed the grand holiday concert at St. Bart’s, which always gets to me when the children’s choir gets its spotlight and the organ pipes start rattling your spinal cord during some thunderous low passages.

But we went to see the Frick collection of Old Masters at its temporary home at the former Whitney Museum just a few blocks away on 76th from our apartment on the Upper East Side and popped into the Met at 80th for a quickie.

These were easy calls, COVID-wise, for the city had happily opened up for the most part. Taking in a Broadway play required a discussion about our mutual comfort levels about sitting in a theater cheek by jowl with lord knows who for a couple of hours inhaling their exhalations. This discussion took approximately five seconds.

Yes, we would, and yes, we would see “Girl from the North Country,” the mostly ecstatically received drama (that I had pushed for) about a bunch of strangers who wind up in a guest house in Duluth, Minn., and whose lives — past, present and future — intermingle in random and strangely lyrical ways.

If this sounds like ripe fodder for a poet like Bob Dylan to chew on, the director and writer Conor McPherson thought so too. The whole show is Dylan songs.

If you live in the city, going to a Broadway play involves several psychological reckonings. First, deliberately journeying to the Theater District, which means the Times Square neighborhood, is a decision not to be taken lightly.

Pre-plague, Times Square was an utter no-fly zone, except for one’s parachuting into it for a play. The horde of tourists there was easily mocked and abhorred (only to be dearly missed during the plague’s interminable venomous grip on the city).

Second, as lovely as the old-time theater houses are, they were built for the smaller human beings of yesteryear, and if you approach 6-feet tall or taller, you are in for several hours of knee-crushing confinement that is better off repressed than focused on.

Third, the bathrooms often require expeditions.

The elemental joy of experiencing live theater trumps these quibbles.

We can easily take the subway to see Broadway shows, but opted for a taxi because of rain in the forecast. The cabby was cranky (oddly, a rare occurrence in the city) and deposited us at 44th Street where our theater, the Belasco, was all lit up. The sidewalks were heavy with pedestrians, and in these days that was a good thing.

My idea of getting a drink and a bite afterward was nixed, so we ducked in to Virgil’s, the venerable BBQ emporium a stone’s throw from the Belasco, mostly for old time’s sake. In pre-plague days the two floors would be jammed (with those wonderful tourists again) but there was a decent crowd, and Troy, an over-the-top effusive waiter, wrapped us in good cheer.

My pulled pork sandwich was fine, but Jane’s chicken wings arrived attached to the thigh, creating a bizarre twisted conglomeration that was off-putting. But no matter. I would bet your life that we will never darken the door of Virgil’s again.

Inside the Belasco, the ushers seemed particularly friendly and there was a tinge of excitement simply to be once again part of the New York City theatrical world. We had mezzanine seats and so did most of the crowd, which took up maybe half the house’s seats.

Twenty years ago, when we first moved to the city, theater-goers got dressed up. Nowadays, everyone looks like they are going to their kid’s soccer practice. We have reluctantly joined the soccer practice look.

Now, to the theater review: Jane loved it and was moved to tear-like emissions during the final moments; I was non-plussed. The swirling lives and mini-plots swirled a bit too much for me. The cast, all no-name pros, performed with such uniform excellence that I longed for a standout, which we got near the end with a belted-out Dylan song that got the audience finally fired up.

And there’s the rub. I fall into that category of Dylan fans that is more dutiful than obsessed. As I walked out, I remembered exactly two Dylan songs, “I Want You” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Yet looking at the Playbill, I realized that I had just been treated to more than 20 of his creations, including “Slow Train,” “Hurricane,” “Forever Young” and, of course, “Girl From the North Country,” songs that even a haphazard Dylan listener should have latched onto.

Maybe I was just inattentive, or expecting some on-stage fireworks that were never intended to be ignited. Maybe I subconsciously was eager for a “Lion King” extravaganza that I have sworn never to see.

During intermission, we moved to an empty row of seats and spread out luxuriously, blood flowing to the lower legs normally. The men’s room was around the corner.

Broadway’s back. And so are we.