SUMMER IN THE CITY

Details should be forthcoming, but just quickly now, New York has been the WTC-9/11 Memorial, the West Village, the High Line, The Met Museum for lunch in the patrons dining room and a quick informed escorted selective tour, The Frick, The Neue Gallery for the Klimts,  and another excellent (Viennese) lunch, an afternoon in the bowels of the Met in the archives with the files, books, records and costumes of the centuries, more walking and walking, a jaunt in Central park, mastering the subway, not mastering the heat and humidity, Williamsburg Brooklyn and the East River ferry back to Wall Street, a very relaxed night in a west village loft and nearby restaurant with two characters even Woody Allen could only dream of. And a sound system which I can without any hyperbole say is the best I've heard. He reviews.

The Book of Mormon was timely, lots of fun and lots of laughs in a South Park shock-em-in-the-aisles kinda way, with people waiting four hours in the hope of returns. And The Best Man, dedicated to its recently deceased writer Gore Vidal, a 1960s look at the hypocrisy and horse trading in politics is just as potent today. With punchy lines and quips, if not quite Wildean, and if tending now to be a bit preachy and overwritten, it is still compelling theatre driven by a great character performance by James Earl Jones, and the fascinating presence of Cybill taxi-driver Shepherd, whose erect controlled performance as Mrs Betrayed Canditate was of another style completely but I found I couldn't take my eyes off her. It was theatre that couldn't happen anywhere else in the world - the size of the theatre, that Broadway slickness of the scene changes, the usher(ettes) in campaign hats seating everyone with asides and the gift of the gab, the two crowded intervals, the audience its own self-aware entity, and then the jammed streets afterwards, the road blocked by a throng waiting for Ricky Martin over the street (after Evita), a hapless NYCPD cop bawling 'keep orrff the street please' every few minutes, guiding endless yellow cabs through the crowd, New York doing New York as if it were its own film set.

The hotel edges Washington Square Park, where we would mostly begin the day and end the night.

Not everyone heads to the fountain.