Butley Opening Night, Wednesday, October 25th

As I mentioned in the last post, I attended the Opening Night performance of Simon Gray's Butley at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. It is nice to see one of our shows, and the fine work of our own staff, running on the Great White Way again. Directed by Nicky here in 2003 with Nathan Lane as Butley it was a great success and our first and only sold out run ever. It is doing quite well in NY as well. Yes, we'll see some income. It is our scenery and properties, built right here on Huntington Ave, that had been sitting in a storage trailer in CT for the last three years. The arm chair, in which Butley sits dejected as the curtain falls, had been "stored" in the office of our costume director. If I only had a nickel for each time I was in that depressing chair! Anyway... we get a payment for the use of all of our stuff, a percentage of the gross, and an additional percentage on the profits. It's not huge money, but it is helpful.

The events started off with a pre-show reception at the Time Hotel, our host hotel. We had quite a group, with over 20 Huntington Trustees and Overseers and spouses, and 10 or so staff. The crab cakes were my favorite! Had a nice chat with overseer Janice Hunt who knows another Tod Williams, a NY Architect who recently designed the new American Folk Art Museum. We all walked around the corner to the Booth to find a throng of photographers surrounding the red carpet! Funnily enough, when we got on the carpet the flashes all ceased and the cameras went down. Donna Glick, Director of Education, loudly commented "Hey, we're important too!" to which one sassy paparazzi replied "Who cares!". The play was great, Nathan Lane's performance amazing, and I fell in love with Dana Ivey. It was nice to see Pam Gray again in the role of Butley's wife, and Jessica Stone as Miss Heasman. It was really all about people watching, and since I'm not writing the gossip pages here I'll send you over to Playbill for the who's who. The party was at the elegant Cipriani 23, with enough security to lock down Fort Knox, and the food and desserts were great. My favorite was a delectable seafood salad with lobster, clams, squid, shrimp and scallops. See a pattern developing here? Then there was the chocolate mousse. Yummy. It was nice to see a few old Huntington friends there as well.

All right, I'll gossip a little. The celebrity sightings did not end Wednesday Evening. I traveled back to Boston with Special Events Manager Veronika Vaclavek. We had scored nice seats with a table in the quiet car on the Acela, and thought we were going to get all four seats to ourselves. No such luck. Someone sat next to me, and then along came three; a very familiar looking woman, her young daughter, and a companion. After Veronika was kind enough to give up her window seat and some other switching around it was the three of them and me. It soon became clear that even though this was the quiet car, my new travel companions had no intention of keeping it down. And my feet seemed to be at the perfect height to serve as a foot rest for the (otherwise adorable) daughter. Ugh. Thankfully, for all parties, their companion soon went scouting alternate seating and found it in a forward car. I'm glad they found a place to catch up, and we got our nice seats back. Veronika discover this in her mailbox upon our return to work, along with a photo of our travel companion, none other than Julia Sweeney, androgenous"Pat" from SNL. How weird was that? She's in town for a performance of her show at the Saunders Theatre at Harvard.

That's all. Break is over. Back to work.