Last night while riding the subway home I saw one of my theater crushes: John Gallager, Jr., who originated the role of Moritz Stiefel in “Spring Awakening” on Broadway. I was standing on a crowded subway reading a book, and when I turned around to get off at 96th Street, I saw him getting up from a seat near me and getting off the train also. He looked very Brooklyn musician.

I admit I started to trail him a little bit to see if he was waiting to transfer to the local train or exiting the station. But then a man with a little kid called out his name, and it turned out they knew each other. So I listened to their conversation for a few minutes while pretending to read. The kid gave him a piece of candy. Then the local came, and the man and his kid got on, as did I. John Gallagher, Jr., didn’t.

I love New York.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a theater buff:

These days Admiral Mullen throws regular dinners at his 19th-century home on a small naval compound near the State Department, where the walls are not hung with medals but framed show bills from nearly every Broadway show that he and his wife have attended.

Of course, it’s possible Mrs. Mullen is the theater buff and he just goes along for the ride. Either way, this is cool.

I’ve seen three Broadway shows in previews lately and wasn’t really into any of them: the revival of Speed-the-Plow, Billy Elliot, and Shrek. Speed-the-Plow and Billy Elliot have since opened to great reviews, the latter this morning. (Shrek is still in previews.)

I’m wondering what’s wrong with me. I always doubt myself when I disagree with the general opinion of a show. Did the productions improve before opening night? Or, would I have enjoyed Speed-the-Plow and Billy Elliot if I hadn’t been sitting in the second-to-last row of the balcony?

I really wonder about the seating issue. Do better seats make for a better evaluation of a show? I’m sure that’s one reason why theater critics get great seats (at least, I assume they get great seats). If you sit too far away, do you appreciate a show less? On the other hand, changing your seat can’t change a show’s problems.

There was one number in Billy Eliot, called “Solidarity,” that I thought was really terrific. Another, “Grandma’s Song,” was touching and funny. But I found much of the show treacly; the actor who played Billy at the performance I saw, David Alvarez (there are three actors who alternate the role), greatly irritated me; and the score was too pop-driven and inconsistent. Maybe I’d enjoy the score more on repeated listenings.

As for Speed-the-Plow, I loved all three performers — Jeremy Piven, Raul Esparza, and Elisabeth Moss. But the plot seemed predictable and didn’t enlighten me in any way.

And again — for both of these shows, we were at the back of the balcony. Maybe better seats would have helped.

Shows I have enjoyed recently: Road Show, Equus. I even kinda liked 13.

Last night we saw a preview of Road Show, the Sondheim musical, at the Public Theater. Road Show has been bouncing around for more than 10 years as Sondheim has tweaked and revised it, under the names Wise Guys, Gold, Brotherhood, and Bounce, but it has never made it to Broadway.

Just before the lights went down, who slipped into the end of the row right behind us?

The master himself — Stephen Sondheim.

I couldn’t believe it. Stephen Sondheim is sitting in the row right behind us, I thought. We’re at a Sondheim musical and Sondheim is here.

And this was not a big theater.

I’m surprised Matt remained calm — Sondheim is a god to him. And by the eyes of the people around us, I could tell we weren’t the only ones who realized we were in The Presence.

Then the show began, and we watched it and enjoyed it. It was 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission.

At the end of the show, Sondheim and his colleague got up from the seats. They’d been sitting right next to the door to the emergency exit, so they decided to unobtrusively slip out that way. But an usher ran over and yelled at them, “Excuse me! Excuse me! You can’t go out that way!” Everyone turned to look.

There was some general low-key conferring as Sondheim explained to the woman who he was. The doors closed behind all three of them, and then we and everyone around us burst out laughing.

As we reached the end of our row and made our way up the aisle, the usher reappeared from the emergency exit door. Several of us smiled at her as if to share in the hilarity, but she had a pissed-off, defensive look on her face. “I’m not lettin’ people out that door,” she said. “I don’t care who you are.”

Matt and I continued walking up the aisle and I said softly, to no one in particular, “I don’t care if you’re Stephen Sondheim!”

As regular readers of my blog know, I’m into weird statistics.

Well, it turns out that right now there are six consecutive Tony Award winners for Best Musical playing on Broadway: Hairspray (2003), Avenue Q (2004), Spamalot (2005), Jersey Boys (2006), Spring Awakening (2007), and In the Heights (2008). I wonder if this is a record? I’m talking about original productions that have won Best Musical, not revivals of shows that originally won Best Musical or productions that won Best Revival.

Anyway, the current situation is going to last only until January, when Hairspray, Spamalot, and Spring Awakening all close.

Tonight we’re going to see Daniel Radcliffe naked.

We’re going to be in the last row of the mezzanine, but I’d be too embarrassed to bring binoculars.

(Oh, and he’s not naked in that link. It’s safe to click.)

A new play by Arthur Laurents will debut in New Jersey next spring.

Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and directs the current production of Gypsy on Broadway, turns either 90 or 91 years old today, depending on your source.

I’ve been thinking lately about getting back into playwriting. This makes me feel like maybe it’s not too late for me after all.

Reviews of Broadway flops, part 1.

“Wild and Wonderful,” The New York Times, December 8, 1971. Reviewed by Clive Barnes.

The new Broadway musical, “Wild and Wonderful,” is wet, windy and wretched. It opened last night at the Lyceum Theater. I shall always try to remember it, and to use it as a yardstick to measure the future.

I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind to the people who perpetrated this — but why did they have the arrogance to imagine that their garrulous wanderings justified two hours of my time, or anyone else’s time? This is a show that insults the intelligence. Producers — even amateur producers — shouldn’t do this. This is the kind of show that sends you back to television — or, if that is too radical, at least back to television commercials.

It is impossible to imagine the precise degree of cultural shock that a show of this type can administer. A musical like this makes critics wonder whether they should ask their publishers for hazardous duty pay for their brains, or, failing that, a precise statement of where they stand with Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

“Wild and Wonderful” is described as a “Big City” fable. Its hero is a West Point dropout who has joined the Central Intelligence Agency. He is assigned to infiltrate youthful radicalism. A girl throws her school books off the George Washington Bridge — it happens every Tuesday, I guess — and he confuses her with a radical bomb-thrower. His C.I.A. chief, who lives in a helicopter, encourages him in this mistake.

The agent radicalizes the girl and takes her to a Roman Catholic shelter. The shelter is managed by Brother John — who wears a turtle-neck and is absolutely groovy — and Father Desmond, who appears to have ulcers and a problem of incipient alcoholism. He also — quite frankly — cannot understand the now generation, or even the youth sub-drug culture. Father Desmond is without it.

The girl — a nice enough kid in all conscience — falls in love, without knowing it, of course, with this young, hippy C.I.A. agent, who happens to be the son of a multimillionaire. But I shall not detain you with the story. The humor — at the performance I saw, people were giggling at the show incontinently but with reason — is so flat that is makes Amsterdam appear like a village at the top of Mount Everest. Indeed, this musical provides a new dimension to flatness.

The music was bad, the lyrics were bad, the book was worse than bad, the choreography unsupportable, the costumes proved singularly hideous and were spectacularly unflattering to every woman in the cast and, in the context, the settings seemed gratefully close to what we think of as professional.

The role of the heroine — who had to carry the most stupid of cumulative gags about late, late show movies — was played with more charm than it deserved by Laura McDuffie, and Walter Willison threw in everything but his kitchen sink, range and refrigerator — to say little or nothing of the air-conditioning — in an effort to make the hero viable. Even Mr. Willison failed, and Mr. Willison is unusually talented. Ted Thurston, who played the priest with something of the gallant air of man about to be defrocked, is also a fine performer who deserves better of life than this.

This was a terrible and witless show. The kind of show where you leave, find that it is raining, instantly feel like Gene Kelly and start singing. At least you are in the street rather than in the theater.

It closed after one performance.

Post number five on [title of show].

I’m sorry. But I can’t get it out of my head. And I’ll explain why.

And then I have an anecdote. But first the explanation.

It’s not like this a flawless, OMFG-amazing this-is-the-best-thing-you’ll-ever-see show. It’s not tightly plotted, and it can be too insider-y, and some of the writing could be more polished, and the second half has problems, and the whole thing has minimal production values.

But there are so many wonderful stretches, and hilarious moments, and brilliant lyrics, and catchy or moving melodies, and the sum of its parts is terrific. And that whole experience on Saturday night — being in that wild, fan-filled audience, going to the stagedoor afterward — the whole thing somehow reconnected me with my much-younger, long-forgotten self.

I haven’t felt this way since I experienced Rent.

My Rent experience started way before I actually saw the show. In the mid-90s, I wasn’t too plugged into the Broadway scene, because I was away from home, at school in Virginia. Rent opened on Broadway in the spring of 1996 (after a long journey), but it wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t until the end of ’96 that I was home in New Jersey, on break from my first year of law school, that someone mentioned the cast album of the show and how good it was. A few months later I decided to buy the album, knowing nothing about the show and never having heard the music before. I think I bought it over spring break — again while home in New Jersey. I listened to it in my car on the long ride back to Virginia, and it blew me away. For months thereafter, I listened to it endlessly. It was practically the only thing I listened to in my car. To this day I probably know every note of that album.

Then I read online about how this whole subculture had built up around the Rent line. Rent used to have a policy where the first two rows of seats were reserved for the first few dozen people on line outside the theater. Young Rent fanatics would wait outside the Nederlander Theater overnight for tickets, and over time, they developed friendships. Theyd wait all day, then tickets would be distributed at 6 p.m., and you could go grab a bit or whatever until the show at 8.

I read about these people and I was so envious. They seemed like they had so much fun. I wanted to be part of them. I wanted to be in their group.

I suppose it came from my not rebelling enough as a kid, from being too careful and studious — from feeling that while other kids were always allowed to play and break the rules, I, for some reason unknown to my kid self, never was allowed. I carried a Unique Burden. I had a Responsibility. I liked the neatness of my world — do well in school, and in return receive praise and protection from parents and teachers. I preferred my own world, where I knew what the rules were and knew how to follow them and thereby succeed.

Anyway, now I was 23 and I read about the RENT-heads and I wanted to be with them.

That summer, I was home working in New Jersey, and I finally decided to wait on The Line and see the show. There were numerous times I thought about it, and finally one day in the middle of July I decided to skip work and do it. I didn’t want to wait all night long, though, so I decided I’d get up really early and get to the theater by 7 in the morning. If the spots were all filled, then at least I’d tried.

I got there and I was in luck: there were still spots remaining. I hung out in front of the Nederlander with these other people all day. I talked with a few of them, but I didn’t particularly bond with any of them, and I never saw any of them again.

The big downer was that, as I learned sometime during the day, both Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal were going to be out that night. I’d fallen in love with Anthony Rapp through listening to the cast album, and I was devastated that I wasn’t going to be able to see him perform. And on top of that, Roger was out, too? Both male leads were out? (Turned out Rent experienced a rash of understudies that summer.)

It wound up not mattering. I got a second row ticket and I had a magical experience that night. I was moved to tears more than once, overwhelmed by finally being able to see this show that I’d come to know so well in my own way and to commune with the performers who stood just a few feet in front me.

Anyway. Back to [title of show].

Experiencing it among the fanatics the other night was a much different experience from seeing it at the three-quarters-filled Vineyard Theater a couple of years ago. The combination of the show itself, its inspirational message, the appeal of the four leads, and being among all these fanatics — it all added up to something hard to define.

Afterwards, Matt and I decided to hang out by the stage door for a while. We did this more out of curiosity than out of… what? Well, when I was younger, I might have wanted desperately to commune with the actors, get their autographs, talk to them, and hope that they’d see something great inside me and want to be my friend and that, by some form of osmosis, they might transfer their coolness to me.

But on Saturday night I was 34 years old and I knew that that’s not what happens, and anyway, there were tons of people waiting by the stage door, including a 16-year-old girl who was waiting to give the actors a stuffed toy monkey in a Playbill t-shirt (this relates to the show), and I heard some guy mention how he’d seen Wicked with the original cast, back when he was in second grade. I felt way too old to be there, not cool enough to stand out from the crowd enough for Hunter and Jeff to notice me, and on top of that, I knew that the sort of magic I used to yearn for doesn’t happen. Other people can’t make you different from who you are. There’s no transitive property of coolness.

And we were tired of waiting. So we went home.

So here’s my anecdote.

One weeknight a couple of years ago, I was coming out of the West 4th Street subway station on the way home from somewhere. By the time I got off the last car of the train and walked all the way down the platform to the front end where my stairway was, there was nobody else around.

And then I saw two people coming down those stairs. They were Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, the stars and creators of [title of show].

There was nobody else around but me and them.

I was starstruck. But I didn’t say anything, because I was a New Yorker, and we see recognizable people all the time, and you’re not supposed to disturb them, and maybe they were in a hurry to get somewhere, and besides, what would I have said to them?

But I wish I’d said something anyway.

Deep down — sometimes not so deep — I still want to be one of the cool people. The ones who sing and dance and act stupid and hug each other and say funny things to each other and know that they’ll always have each other.

I really want to. Desperately.

Here’s a Q&A about why ushers at many Broadway shows now scan the bar codes on your tickets instead of tearing them. Tidbit:

[T]he scanners record exactly when each patron enters the theatre, allowing Telecharge to amass and analyze data on when people tend to show up. What have they found so far? A lot of the data has confirmed conventional wisdom. For instance, at plays, which tend to attract native New Yorkers, lots of people show up five minutes before curtain. At musicals, which attract more tourists, people tend to show up earlier.

We just got back from the first Broadway preview of [title of show]. It was a night at the theater I’ll never forget.

[title of show] is a musical about its own creation. It was written for the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004, transferred to an Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theater, and led to a series of YouTube videos about the gang’s quest to get their show on Broadway. (More here.) It’s developed a big cult following among the theater geek set. We first saw it at the Vineyard a couple of years ago, we’d both watched all their videos, and we’ve listened to the cast album a lot, so a few weeks ago we decided to get some tickets for the first preview.

I have never heard cheering in a Broadway theater as loud as I heard in the Lyceum tonight. It was overwhelming. The audience was clearly filled with fans. From beginning to end, the audience screamed and shouting and clapped its heart out for the five people up there. It was a wall of sound.

I felt bad for the elderly couple sitting next to me. They seemed thoroughly baffled. I was next to the husband, who was using the theater’s hearing equipment. At the very beginning, when Larry Pressgrove, the music director, who is actually part of the show, walked out onto the stage, and the audience erupted in cheers, the man leaned over to me and asked who the guy and why everyone was cheering for him.

For the rest of the audience, it was lots of fun. And since the show is about trying to get to Broadway, and this was the first preview on Broadway, it was poignant. The audience spontaneously broke into a standing ovation at the end of the second-to-last song, and it must have lasted a good minute and a half. Who knows what the four principals, Jeff, Hunter, Susan, and Heidi, thought of this. Their expressions were frozen on their faces as they waited for the ovation to die down, but they must have been overwhelmed. During the final number, which is a low-key, poignant piece, a couple of their voices broke as they sang, and Susan’s eyes were filled with tears.

I don’t know how run-of-the-mill Broadway audiences will respond to it. They certainly won’t respond like the audience did tonight. That’s why it was so much fun to be there tonight.

There are a few kinks they need to work out with some of the new material. But the show remains clever and witty and endearing, and it’s filled with inside theater jokes. If you’re a theater geek — or any sort of creative type, for that matter — you’ll appreciate the show and its message.

Glory Days, the new musical about four college friends, has closed after opening night. One official performance. The reviews were pretty miserable. We saw one of the preview performances a couple of weeks ago; it was a cute show (with cute guys), earnest and somewhat poignant, but it didn’t belong on Broadway.

The songs aren’t bad. You can hear some of them on the show’s MySpace page.

(The last show to close after one performance was The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman show starring Ellen Burstyn five years ago. But at least both those shows opened, unlike Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, which closed in previews.)

People who annoy me: those who write on All That Chat and say what they think of a show and call it “My review of…” or “Here is my review.”

It’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion. You’re not a theater critic. A review is something formal that appears in a newspaper or on a theater website. If you’re a random schmo saying what you think of a show, it’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion.

I know it might seem weird that this annoys me, because everyone has a right to give an opinion of a show and theater critics can be clueless or woefully misguided. But it still annoys me. Take your self-promotion elsewhere. Get a frickin’ blog.

Jesus. Does Matthew Murray ever like going to the theater? I think 90 percent of the reviews I’ve ever read by him have been negative.

Seriously, why go to the theater if you get no joy out of it and hate everything you see?

We saw a couple of shows last week. Both were great.

On Wednesday night, we saw Macbeth at BAM, starring Patrick Stewart. It was exciting and scary as hell, almost like a good popcorn movie. The theater looks like this, all exposed plaster and peeled paint (that’s not what the stage looks like for this production, though). I said to Matt that it would be a great place to see Follies.

We sat in the balcony, which is way, way, high up in that theater. I got vertigo as we walked down the steps to our seats. It didn’t help that we had to sit in upright rigid stools, so we couldn’t even lean back. The last time I felt such vertigo at the theater was when my mom took me to see Barnum when I was a kid and we sat in the balcony. (I don’t remember Barnum at all. All I remember is the terrifying vertigo.)

On Friday night, we saw Patti LuPone in Gypsy, currently in previews on Broadway after having transferred from the Encores production last summer. Oh my god. So brilliant. I love her as Mama Rose. And I love Gypsy. Is there a better musical? After almost 50 years it remains fresh. It was my fourth time seeing Gypsy – Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, last summer’s Encores, and this one. Patti LuPone is even better than she was last summer. Her “Rose’s Turn” is heartbreaking, and I’ve never seen the show end the way this production does (it’s different even from last summer).

There was one mishap, and it happened at a pivotal moment in Act II. Louise, played by Laura Benanti, was beginning her metamorphosis into Gypsy Rose Lee, putting on her long silk gloves, looking into the mirror, about to say to herself, “Mama… I’m pretty!”

And then a curtain came down right where she and the mirror were standing.

Benanti pushed the mirror through the opening between the curtains and tried to continue the scene. Then she stopped and disappeared behind the curtains. Then, from behind, a stagehand pulled back the mirror, which snagged on the stage right curtain and pulled it nearly all the way back, giving us a glimpse of Benanti standing there wondering what to do before it closed again. Then the curtain went back up, where we could see, too early, the “Garden of Eden” scrim. Benanti stood there, looking off stage right, and then we heard her say, “Stop the show. Stop the show.”

The main curtain went down and someone made an announcement about technical difficulties. About 10 minutes later, the curtain went back up, and the show picked up again from the mirror scene. Benanti continued as if nothing had happened, and the rest of the show went on to the end from there. Brilliant, really.

Anyway, Patti LuPone is wonderful, Laura Benanti is wonderful, Boyd Gaines as Herbie is wonderful.

God, I love this production. I may have to see it again.

This appears to be a clip from a production of “Moose Murders,” the infamous Broadway flop.