December 17th 2010 – Maybe it takes a Great Depression to bring out the fun in life, but everybody visiting New York wants the holiday season’s hottest thing since soup kitchens.
“The expense really adds up,” says Stella Wishnubitsky of Hamtramck, Michigan, visiting the Big Apple with her husband, Stosh.
“There’s $400 for subway tickets, $75 for popcorn, $240 each for hotdogs afterwards, but it’s all part of seeing the show,” says the 32-year-old GM auto worker, whose company is now lobbying Congress for its fifth consecutive bailout in two years.
“It’s also educational to see how people without federal bail-outs have had to suffer,” adds Stosh, a junior official with the United Auto Workers Union. “Today on 5th Avenue – splat – right in front of us. He had to have come from the 8th floor or higher.
“We thank the Lord for making us so fortunate,” adds Stella. “We didn’t even get any splashed on us.”
Nobody thought that the country was ready for a 1930s, Depression Era, big musical full of Busby Berkeley chorus lines, much less at $2600 a ticket – up $300 since November.
“Everything costs more these days. Call it inflation, call it gefulte fish – the dollar’s worth bupkis. You wanna see the show, you gotta have a ticket and that’s gonna cost you,” says the producer, Maxine Bialystock.
On or off Broadway, most New York theatres closed in 2009, and many survivors have translated their productions into Mandarin for the majority of visitors.
Locals say “diamonds won’t get you in” to see the Chinese version of ‘The Miracle Worker.” The perennial hit play about the disabled educator Helen Keller, translated into Chinese pictograms, comes out literally as ‘No-See-Hear Lady Births Surprises.’ Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’ is billed as ‘Three Henry Kings One More Here Now.”
“But we’ll also keep making a few shows in English,” insists Ms Bialystock, “so long as there’s somebody with federal bailout dollars in his hot little fist. Bankers, auto-workers, federal employees can’t get enough of this, while the other poor slobs can’t even afford to fly here. So, tough nuts; they can wait in the Pellagra Belt for the pirate DVDs.”
Plot was never the selling-point for big musical collations such as The Broadway Melody of 2010, but innocent Suzie Creamcheese comes from Nebraska to collect on her aunt’s will. She finds she’s a multi-millionaire – but in an inflationary age when a million bucks isn’t much.
Her aunt’s lawyer tells her, “Kid, in this town a pigeon’s the only creature that can still make a deposit on a Buick.”
She finds her college roommate Eunice, who majored in piano and French at Oberlin, working as a street-walker (“Back home at the pork packing plant, you had to stand up to get paid.”). Her soft-hearted pimp, a down-and-out hedge-fund manager (“I’m still a broker, got that?”), wants Suzie to join his trade but there’s little business these days.
But once Eunice realises that her sole surviving customer is a former congressman, Suzie gets her big idea and she leads the “economically under-utilised” call-girl sector marching to the nation’s capitol to lobby for a federal bailout disguised as a loan.
Back in Nebraska, Suzie’s family has been reduced to boiling and eating their old baseball mitts, thanks to inflation caused by federal bailouts. They warn her never to return home, so she rents a little townhouse on Capitol Hill that is by night a bordello and by day a consultancy on economic development.
Next week: Texas goat-riding in the Recession Rodeo.
S.J. Masty is a former Washington, DC, speechwriter now based in London as an international communication adviser.
