The calamity that is 2020 ended up canceling this year’s Mother’s Day Weekend on Broadway, making this pair of posts the closest we’ll be getting to the stage in quite some time. Originally we had tickets for both parts of ‘The Inheritance’, ‘Jagged Little Pill’, ‘The Minutes’ and ‘Six’. That’s quite a lot of dashed dreams, but such is the price of being safe so we’re not complaining. And while social distancing has kept Andy and I from properly seeing Mom and Dad since mid-March, I sent her a Mother’s Day gift box (fully sanitized of course) in the snail-mail which has already been delivered. With that, I wish her a very Happy Mother’s Day, and with this we’ll take a moment to look back at what we’ve done over the last few years.
Since we have some time, here’s a detailed and link-filled revisiting of our previous Broadway jaunts, all of which are filled with happy memories and wonderful recollections. We’ve been doing this off and on since the 90’s (see the photo below, taken the first time we saw ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in its original Broadway run in 1995). Our Broadway tradition has taken hold as a Mother’s Day mainstay, one that we’ll miss this time around, but we’ll make it up in different fashion sometime in the future.
It was 2013 when we first resurrected our old tradition of seeing a Broadway show together. That year we saw ‘Kinky Boots‘ and ‘Pippin‘, and we had such a grand time it ushered in an annual celebration of Mom and Broadway. That first year, Suzie joined us for dinner, making things even more special. We skirted Times Square as best we could, ducking into this cozy space and escaping the madness for a moment.
In 2014, we found our footing and the tradition began to take root. This time we began with a stroll in Central Park, amid flowering trees and spring bulbs, along with some classic NYC sights. The show selection that year included a Terrence McNally play, ‘Mothers & Sons’, as well as Jason Robert Brown’s ‘The Bridges of Madison County‘ ~both of which were excellent. We also had amazing seats for Neil Patrick Harris and his run in ]Hedwig and the Angry Inch‘. Suzie joined us for dinner at Beautique and we closed out the weekend with a Mother’s Day brunch off of Central Park.
By 2016, we had honed the weekend into a streamlined affair, with just two shows to give us proper breathing room for leisure and shopping. ‘Fun Home‘ and ‘The Humans‘ may not have been the most uplifting shows to see back-to-back, but they were excellent enough to offset their dour themes. Also aiding in the cheer quotient was this amazing meal at La Grenouille, matched perhaps by this other amazing meal at Felidia. We closed out that weekend with tea at the Plaza which was about as perfect as it can get.
{More Mother’s Day adventures to come…}
