New Years Theater Spectacular!

Roar! Today was a theater extravaganza! In the morning I met up with my friend Bao Bao at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center. (The very same place I saw Neil Gaiman recite Peter and the Wolf) They were having a Chinese New Year theater celebration which included bits of Chinese Opera, variety acts, and vocal performances. It was pretty neat! 

Here I am with Bao Bao at the Winter Garden. He was really excited to see the Chinese Opera. Roar! 

Bao Bao got confused and thought the palm trees at the Winter Garden were like bamboo. Boy, was he surprised!

Here is the cast of the Chinese New Year celebration. It sure was a great show. Besides the opera, there was a barber shop quartet, a harmonica player, and an entire dance number based off Kung Fu Panda! Bao Bao really like that one. Roar! 

After the show Bao Bao and I went outside to play in the snow around the World Financial Center. Here is Jeff Koons' "Ballon" statue. It really stood out on a gray day like today.

Bao Bao and I took a photo of our reflection in the sculpture. Woah! It's just like a fun house mirror! Roar!

Later in the evening, I headed up to Judson Memorial Church by Washington Square Park for Bailout Theater. Bailout Theater is the really cool event the church puts on every first and third Wednesday of the month where they serve a free meal and have free entertainment. Tonight they had a play by Johnna Adams called Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Those Damned, Pernicious Go-Betweens. 

Here is a scene from the play. It was such a cool play. The whole thing was written in rhyming couplets and each character spoke in a different form of poetry. 

The coolest part of Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Those Damned, Pernicious Go-Betweens was it was directed by John Hurly who directed Hack! for Vampire Cowboys Saturday Night Saloon. It was so cool to meet John, he's a great director and I can't wait to see more things he's working on. Roar!

T-Rex and the Sandman...

Roar! Saturday night was so cool! I went to got see a free concert of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf that was performed by the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra and narrated by Neil Gaiman! It was so much fun! The performance was at the Winter Garden of the World Finacial Center which turned out to be a pretty unusual place to see a concert.

The Winter Garden has all these palm trees growing in the center. It was a strange sight to see! I guess when you're the World Financial Center you can put palm trees whereever you want. All those palm trees also made the accoustics for the concert really bad so they had to mike the entire orchestra and play the concert on speakers throughout the garden. The music they played before the concert was also really strange! It was Vangelis' score to Bladerunner. I hope it wasn't... time to die!

It was also really dark in the garden. I can barely read my pamphlet! Roar!

Finally the concert started. Since the concert was free seats were first come, first serve. I got there an hour early and still ended up near the back. You can see Neil on the left and the conductor of the orchestra on the right. Turns out he's Neil's cousin! Roar!

The performance was really good and Neil did a great job but seeing it made me want to make my own version of Prokofiev's story starring me and my friends. So we got together on Sunday and filmed the introuction to Peter and the Wolf. Evntually we'll make the rest of the story but I think the introduction gives a pretty clear idea of what it will be like. Roar!