Vienna waits for meeeeee

I’m in the gate area for my Air France flight to (eventually) Vienna, forty minutes until boarding, and thoroughly exhausted from the week this week was. I put everything I own into storage or into the two bags I’m taking with me to Europe (a daybag and a carryon-sized backpack). I opened and closed the final-performance cabaret for the class I TA, having found out on Monday of this week that I’d be accompanying (and in some cases composing for) some of the songs in the piece, and having been tasked with linking music for the evening. The finish to my time in Boston was a blur, and frankly that’s just as well. I’ll be glad to get back there this fall, but it was good to leave at full speed.

After the jump… New York!

It was a whirlwind. I blitzed Eleven Madison Park with my old friend Danielle, whose Inside Connections led us to a kitchen visit and a generally swank night that in all other realities would have been far out of the realm of the possible. This shot is from that kitchen visit, featuring an ice shaver from which a delicious, invented-for-Pat’s-specific-obsessions rhubarb shaved ice dish was created while we chatted with our server about food, travel, and The Wide Wide World.

Then, Saturday, after a brunch and coffee with some of my favorite New York Pals, it was Hamilton Time. I’d bought the tickets back in October under very different circumstances, and had briefly entertained the possibility of selling them until my friend Sara found out I was trying to unload at least one and demanded that it go to her. Here you can see us, pre-show, mildly interested in what was to come:

And the show… well, tons of people have spilled digital/actual ink about this thing, and I don’t have any really novel insight to add. What I will say is:

Daveed Diggs is electrifyingly charismatic, and explodes across the stage in a way that read even to the back of the theatre (where we were). He and Leslie Odom Jr. were spectacular (and probably best-of-show), but I have to say the surprise of the night to me, coming from the cast album, was Anthony Ramos as John Laurens/Philip Hamilton. Energetic, nuanced, nimble, layered – he popped in person far more than he did on the recording (as, for that matter, did Christopher Jackson as Washington.)

The production is lean, stylish, and moving storytelling. As dense physically as the show is verbally, they pack information onto the stage throughout, lending the moments of quiet and solitude a particular poignancy.

And, you know, I ugly cried all the way from Philip’s duel through “Forgiveness, can you imagine?” So, thoroughly incredible.

Today has been a recovery day – seeing a last few folk on my way out of town, and now waiting for my flight to board in about twenty minutes. Right now, Vienna doesn’t seem real, and neither does the rest of the summer, but I’m about to get there and grapple with its reality. I will report back here, on this blog, where I blort out wordpiles to convey how little I understand anything that’s happening around me! HOORAY??