This theater group Kelly knows, the Anthropologists, canvassed Fort Washington today, collecting from passers-by six-word stories, a literary form that legend has originated with Hemingway. Then, this afternoon, in the luxuriously grassy front lawn of Fort Washington Collegiate Church, they acted-out improv mini-plays based on the stories. Curious and clever, and with free baked goods donated by a local bakery for refreshment; I had my first black-and-white cookie and it was good. Some photos I took of Kelly and Joe are, as of this writing, at the top of my Flickr page.

Strange and beautiful, this puppet show I saw tonight named Fabrik. Although there are moments of levity, the holocaust is obviously a serious subject for cloth characters. But this troupe of puppeteers, clad in black fedoras and black tailored suits as camouflage on the black-painted set as they operated the small cast, did a fine job conjuring characters that aren’t quite typical puppet-show caricatures. In the years before the German invasion of 1940, Moritz Rabinowitz founds, operates and expands a burgeoning suit-making business in Norway. The story structures itself around his numbered rules for success in business (and parts of his various screeds on European politics and the rights of man), which he relates to the audience, intertwined with the realization that as a Polish Jew in Norway, the world is pressing in on him, his wife Johanna and their daughter Edith. There are few Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers, a poignant scene of Rabinowitz’s daughter practicing ballet and surreal dreams of flight that transition the years and scenes. The effects were minimal but creative. For instance, in one scene, a pair of the puppets realistically “swim underwater” merely by means of motions from the puppeteers and undulating colored lighting. Hard to explain, amazing to watch and like many novellas or short stories I’ve read, the enterprise ends just as I’m getting invested in the story, which in Fabrik’s case is based on a true one.

A combination of slushy sidewalks and brittle hips meant few matinee-favoring elders were in attendance for the opera at the Met this afternoon, which was a shame, because Faust concerns a bitter coot exchanging his soul to Méphistophélès for youth.

Newly brisk and handsome, in a tenor sort of way, Dr. Faust saunters about town, knocks up a young hottie then abandons her for drink and carousing with his new buddy satan. When she’s imprisoned for murdering her illegitimate child, Faust tries to bail her out. But she refuses and angels whisk her away via a deus ex machina similar to the one she rode in on, billowing white and floating in the heavens over a rainbow. Love lost, Faust grows old again and though hellbound, has at least experienced all his missed pleasures of youth. Now he can retire in comfort to the lecture circuit to promote his new book, Soul-Selling for Fun and Profit.

After the show, Andie, Eric and I trekked up to Big Nick’s for dinner. We scaled small unplowed mountains of snow in our path and leapt over those seemingly solid pools of slush that collect in dips at the curb near crosswalks.

The warming glow of pink and red neon signs surrounding our table made us feel as if we ourselves were in Faust or maybe Taxi Driver, although instead of angels, a framed photo of Homicide’s Detective Munch (Richard Belzer) hovered above us.

Andie and I headed out tonight to see an urban reinterpretation of The Nutcracker at the Abrons Arts Center on Grand Street at Pitt (a.k.a. Avenue C). It’s so far east it’s just about under the Williamsburg Bridge and neither Andie nor I felt we’d been in a section of Manhattan less Manhattan-like. It was as if we were in New Jersey or deep in Queens or somewhere with all the industrial decay, oddly inactive housing projects, shuttered storefronts and lack of pedestrians, all of which you may see in the city during odd hours, but this was around 7:00 on a Saturday night. We thought we’d find someplace quaint to eat dinner; we found nothing and bought Pringles and bottled drinks from a bodega.

The play was not bad. There was a mix of dance students with professionals, whose every leg, arm and back muscle was clearly defined, and who can contort their bodies with ease into the most unnatural yet graceful positions. The “urban reinterpretation” part of it was half-assed. Occasionally backbeats would funk up into the recorded Tchaikovsky or the cast would start clapping its hands rhythmically as someone all the sudden started breakdancing. Other than that it was a basic interpretation, from what I can remember of the original, although with added jubilance from the young kids in the cast.

My friend Joe and I saw Avenue Q tonight at the John Golden Theatre. I was pleasantly surprised and greatly amused. In my mind, I hate musicals because the songs get shoehorned into unlikely moments and put feelings I’d rather see enacted into hamfisted lyrics. The songs work in Avenue Q because most are sung by puppets, and if Sesame Street taught me anything it’s that puppets can (nay, must) sing. Also, as you’ve probably heard, the songs are politically incorrect and feature naughty words. Many hit near my heart with subjects like getting out of one’s apartment to enjoy the city, making mixtapes, racism, gay friends and, in a song by a puppet that sounds suspiciously like Cookie Monster, internet pornography. So many quick references and humorous turns on New York facts and myths: dropping a penny off the empire state building, easy NYU girls, the challenge of a black man successfully hailing a cab and many more.

The pacing is speedy and there’s hardly time at all for dialogue as the songs hit one after another, but the play boiled-down is a love-story: Princeton, a puppet just out of college, moves to Brooklyn and tries to find his purpose in life while having an off-and-on relationship with another puppet, Kate Monster. Strangely, the puppets not only mingle with human actors, the puppeteers mimic the movements, sightlines and facial expressions of the puppets they’re controlling. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be focusing on, but I ended up watching mainly the puppets.

Andie and I met up at the tiny, basement-musty Looking Glass Theatre for the opening night of Shakespeare’s Richard III, adapted and directed by our buddy Kelly.

The fellow playing the king, everyone’s favorite conniving hunchback, bore a resemblance to the real deal: thin, with drawn lips, and still eyes caught flashing at the thought of cunning plots.

It was a good show; I find enactments like this one, with a minimum of props and stage design, make it easier to concentrate on the actors and the dialogue. Kelly craftily emphasized the humor burried in the play, which is usually top-billed as a tragedy, what with all the murder and the famous endgame battle-cry of “my kingdom for a horse!”

The audience for the performance tonight of Stomp at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village was treated to a commercial, billed as the first before a theatrical event in the U.S.

True to the venue, it was a live pitch, and the audience clapped when told they’d be watching, in essence, a one-act ad. It was for the “Visit London” campaign and consisted of a conversation between a mother and daughter, as well as a married couple, who namedropped limey tourist attractions. This was followed by, The New York Times noted dryly, a disembodied voice chiming, “Whatever you like doing, you’ll love doing it in London.”

Whether any of this was digested is uncertain; the Times reported the audience’s pre-show chatter continued on through the commercial, just like during the 20 minutes of slides, commercials and trailers (which are commercials for movies) before the typical film shown in Manhattan.

So the video/live-action admen now have us hooked on multiple fronts. There’s still TV, of course, and they’re working overtime to make sure we can’t TiVo them out of existence. They’re making new strides online; Google announced Tuesday that it is rolling out click-to-play “video ads,” which in the olden days were called “commercials.” They’ve still got us snared in most airports, and on airplanes with TVs. Not to mention at the movies, and now at the theater.

And where should I read this Stomp story initially, but on a tiny television screen mounted in an elevator in my office’s building, which handily displays a weather forecast and breaking news items, but is also rife with conflicting pitches for online poker and money management firms.

After Andie, Katie and I finished dinner at Angus McIndoe, the ladies shared a dessert, a decadent chocolate-raspberry concoction. Then we walked over to Theater 5 (311 W. 43rd St.) for NEUROfest, four one-act plays centered around a neurological disorder, which I thought was a clever idea.

We wanted to be there to show our support because our friend Kelly wrote one of the plays, Vestibular. The neurological condition she referenced was Ménière’s disease, characterized by a constant ringing in the ears and loss of balance from frequent dizziness. Her characters, a classically trained dancer and his nurse, converse about independence and balance, related both to the disease and, by extension, to their lives in general. It was well done and probably had the best acting and best written dialogue.

The other plays were a one-man show starring a creepy bearded guy and his trunkful of hand puppets, a woman who could taste colors and moan the letter “O” for seven-second stretches, and one that had something to do with dementia and was appropriately hard to follow.

An excellent touch was that afterwards, a panel convened on stage, comprised of a moderator, Kelly, a doctor familiar with aural neurology and a woman with Ménière’s. It was an informative discussion on a disease I didn’t know existed. It’s often misdiagnosed because of its rarity, and it most often affects the left ear of women in their 30s or 40s; no one knows why. It was flabbergasting to hear what she goes through—taking Antivert (meclizine) to combat vertigo, never again playing the oboe (which used to be her passion), avoiding salt and stress, and the worst, living with constant tinnitus. I was suddenly hyperaware of my sense of hearing and newly thankful that my auditory nerves are still helping me keep upright when I should be.

Almost a great a tradition as attending Shakespeare in the Park, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, is waiting in line to get tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.

In a strangely equitable fashion, the Public Theater has made the tickets free, a catch being that one must pick them up on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the performance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which is where the shows are performed. (For the idle rich or handicapped, who won’t or can’t wait in line for hours, the theater sells a limited number of tickets, but assigns them to alternate rows, “to preserve the democratic character of Delacorte Theater audiences.”)

The tickets are passed out beginning at 1:00 p.m. and people arrive as early as 6 a.m., bearing determination and sleeping bags. Eric got there fairly early this morning, around 8 a.m., yet ended up a few hundred people back, near the Pinetum. When I woke up, around 10:30, Andie had left me a note stating that if I wanted tickets, I had to get on over there myself and wait with Eric—another catch is that each person is allowed a maximum of two tickets.

I threw on some pants and picked up some water, juice and bagels from H&H, walked over to the park and located Eric, craftily folding myself into line using the “hey man, I’m back with the bagels” gambit. Those who know me know I’m not typically the sort of dick that cuts lines, and in fact gets silently bitter when someone else does, so I compensated by penitently offering a bagel to the stranger in line directly behind us. She politely declined, as she was engrossed in annotating some paperwork involving flowcharts and long words. People brought all sorts of stuff with which to pass the time in line for Shakespeare: Frisbees, portable video game systems, musical instruments, lawn chairs, paperbacks, small dogs, iPods, a significant other to roll around with in a slightly naughty fashion on a blanket, their kids, their laptops, the trustily dense Sunday edition of The New York Times. The line snaked through the park, over grassy knolls, pathways and benches, and the weather was cool and breezy. I am certain it was the most relaxed queue ever in New York City. Me, I stretched out on the lawn and took a nap.

As in lines of this length, there was the usual rumor-mongering, that our position was too far back for tickets today and that we’d be mercilessly slapped with reserve tickets, which require you to return later and wait in line some more. But once we got to the front, we saw those fears were unfounded and we got our five tickets. (By this time, Andie had joined our party in order to secure tickets for Katie and Mark, who weren’t present.)

We all returned prior to the 8:00 p.m. performance to enjoy a picnic dinner of sandwiches, potato salad, chips and wine. We spread out on the southern fringe of the Great Lawn, within view of Turtle Pond at the base of Belvedere Castle. It was like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (The Picnic), only with slightly less nudity.

Then, the play. I thought it was capital. The Delacorte is an open-air amphitheater, the seats in a semicircle around a pitched circular stage. The play was As You Like It so the venue was perfect—most of the play takes place in a forest, and the theater area is surrounded by real trees.

A draw to Shakespeare in the Park is that there’s often a token celebrity—I don’t know, Meryl Streep or someone—who has grown bored and dour with his or her movie career and wants to inflict some Shakespeare on the public. Then that line is really, really long. But I was glad there were’t any celebrities at all in this performance, keeping the hotdogging and fawning to a minimum. The closest brush we had with celebrity was directly before the play, when a recording of Liev Schreiber came over the PA to credit the event’s corporate sponsors and provide the ground rules for the audience during the performance, his stern voice implying he would personally kick the ass of anyone disrupting or illicitly recording the performance.

The regular readers among you with sharp memories will recall I already saw this play this year, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January. But I liked that I could compare and contrast the performances. I’d say the Academy performance was more traditional and staid, more “theatrical,” with professional lighting and sets and vaguely fascist-looking costumes.

The performance in the park was more like fun for the whole family, with fake trees and stage decor that looked like some gradeschoolers whipped it up one afternoon with some papier mâché and poster paint. The costumes were bright with primary colors and breezy. The acting had more emotion in it and more closely resembled actual speech, which is the point, really. I got the feeling the actors knew what the lines meant as they said them, particularly the guy who played Jaques (he of “All the world’s a stage”-speech fame), allowing Shakespeare’s densely packed and oddly ordered phrases to flow more naturally and understandably. (Walking back home through the park after the play, I overheard a grandma-aged lady say, “To me, it sounded like it wasn’t Shakespeare. It was very clear. Did they change the words?” They didn’t, but I knew exactly what she was talking about and I think it was a great compliment to the actors.)

I noticed lines I hadn’t before because of the way they were read, laughing this time at Jaques’ line, “in his brain,/which is as dry as the remainder biscuit/after a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d/with observation, the which he vents/in mangled forms.”

Also regarding the reading of the lines, I was reminded of what Mr. Moderick taught me in high school honors English: that while some people persist in thinking Shakespeare penned grand and hallowed verse, he in fact wrote large chunks of his plays to entertain the groundlings, the grubby blue-collar masses that paid their penny to get in, then gathered ‘round the foot of the stage in the hopes of catching some sex and/or violence, much like today’s fans of Oprah and professional wrestling.

For instance, when Touchstone the jester says “He that sweetest rose will find/Must find love’s prick and Rosalind,” he’s referring to more than one kind of prick, if you catch my drift. The Touchstone in this production added a carefully placed wagging finger to drive home this point and the audience laughed. Well done! As You Like It also contains a wrestling match, hunting, lesbian overtones, some annoyingly bombastic musical numbers (Shakespeare only wrote the lyrics, but both productions I’ve seen put them to song) and plenty of cross-dressing, so everyone goes home happy. I sure did.

Before catching Samson et Dalila at the Met tonight, I got dinner across the street at Rosa Mexicano.

I had the grilled sliced chicken atop something called Chihuahua cheese and served with sides of beans and two kinds of salsas. The dinner came with a little woven container filled with a stack of soft, warm corn tortillas. Very delicious. I had margaritas to drink and, for dessert, some decadant chocolate cake thing.

I got to the Met early, so I purchased some red wine, served unceremoniously in small clear plastic cups, from one of several bars situated in the main lobby area, where I stood still as a stormy ocean-like crowd of really slow-moving, elderly opera patrons milled about.

The show itself was well done. I’d imagine most folks are familiar with the basics of the tale of Samson and Dalila, so it wasn’t tough to follow, despite being sung in French, although the English translations displayed on LED screens mounted on the seatbacks helped. Unexpectedly, the show was spiced up considerably by extended ballet-like dance sequences in the first and third acts, the latter of which involved a lot of leaping and writhing by a gaggle of scantily clad Philistines. It was a attention-getting buildup to them getting smushed by a falling temple ceiling, a special effect accomplished by sound and light, falling scrims and a mechanically pivoting column for Samson to “knock down.”

I forged out into the bitter cold to catch the 7:30 p.m. performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Overall, it was very well done: genuinely funny dialogue (it’s a comedy, after all), minimal yet appropriate sets, with cleverly designed lighting and projections to recreate the Forest of Arden, where most of the play takes place. The director knows his stuff; he’s Sir Peter Hall, former head of Britain’s National Theatre and a Tony award-winner for the original Amadeus.

Unfortunately, however, his 22-year-old daughter played Rosalind, the female lead. In general, I didn’t like her overexcited performance, with its breathy phrasing and needless extension of the last syllable in each sentence. She reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love or Emma—just a bit too dramatically British, so filled with wide-eyed wonder for the world that she’s in danger of bursting and besmirching the front row with a syrupy goo. On a positive note, her initial meetings with her interest, Orlando, were well played with the physicality of a young couple hesitant in love.

Those scenes, along with some of the hammier roles (particularly Touchstone the jester and Jaques, the world-weary curmudgeon who gets the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech) reminded me well that reading Shakespeare’s plays, as so many are forced to do in high school, is an exercise in futility. They were never meant to be read; they are meant to be seen performed, with everything Shakespeare never specified: detailed stage direction; pauses, timing and phrasing; body language, gestures and interaction; the use of props and song; and many other nuances. Even if 400-year-old unrhymed iambic pentameter makes you squinty with incomprehension, the best performances of his plays reveal the dialogue through action; you may not understand all the words, but you get the gist through the performance. This version of As You Like It certainly fit the bill in this respect.

I was also reminded that for every phrase Shakespeare gave us or popularized, he provided others that still stir the mind. On the greatest-hits side, in As You Like It alone (one of his “lesser” plays, no less), we get “laid on with a trowel,” “motley fool,” “we have seen better days,” “neither rhyme nor reason,” “too much of a good thing” and “for ever and a day.”

But we also get fresh observations on life and love (Rosalind’s “how
full of briers is this working-day world!” and Orlando’s “What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?/I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference.”), brief and beautifully turned descriptions (“desert inaccessible”), ruminations on growing old (“my age is as a lusty winter/Frosty, but kindly”) and quips I’d like to add to my everyday speech. On the subway, for example, I yearn to shout, “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens.”

I went to the theater directly from work, and not having had any dinner, my tummy was making angry noises ’round ’bout 10:30 when the play ended. I went back to Manhattan to Diner 24 (102 Eighth Ave. at W. 15th Street). The décor is Midwestern retro-pop, with portions of exposed, rough stone wall reminding me of the Big Boy restaurants from my childhood. The place specializes in “comfort food,” classics like meatloaf, chicken pot pies and something called Disco Fries. I had the Cuban sandwich and it was O.K., but a bit dry and unflavorful. The highlight was the caipirinha I drank, which swept my memories momentarily back to Brazil.

I left the diner around 1:00 a.m., and on my ride back home, I sat across from a bum stretched out sleeping over four seats stickered with the MTA’s strictly ornamental “Priority Seating/for persons with disabilities” labels. He was perched precariously close to the edge, and like clockwork, at the W. 66th Street stop, he rolled right off and gently hit the floor. (Being New York, no one in the car gave this sudden development any more than a passing glance, if that.) But there were no injuries to this motley fool, because at that point, with him splayed confusedly on the ground, I could see he was wearing no fewer than two pairs of pants and at least three sweatshirts. He lay there silently for awhile, as if pondering this cruel fate, then got back up, stretched out again across the seats and fell back asleep.