Restrooms at the "new" Palace
Posted by: aleck 08:06 am EST 11/13/24

You'd think that after spending zillions of dollars to lift up the historic and protected Palace auditorium and building a new building around it that they would finally address the rest room issues. Alas, no. The restroom, at least the men's room, is still as small and awkwardly designed (with just one little towel dispenser bottlenecked in a corner and one small door to serve as both entrance and exit) as other rest rooms found in 100-year-old Broadway theaters. Plus, you are required to walk down a steep and curving staircase (from the orchestra section) to reach it. A traffic cop awkwardly directs the crowds to stand in small cramped spaces to wait in line. Unless the urologists of America can figure out why everyone in America has to use the rest rooms so frequently when they didn't 40 years ago (and still don't today in the U.K. and European theatres), the rest room situation has got to change. And here the Palace had a great opportunity to do just that. I guess we'll need to wait for some future zillion-dollar renovation to bring those rest rooms to a new standard for the 21st century, which probably won't happen until the 22nd Century.

And what about the stuff going on at the Palace between the trips to the rest room? Despite the very hard work from the incredibly-talented Michael Cerveris, Christian Borle and Katie Brayben, the thing is a bore. It's like a Wikipedia entry with songs. The songs themselves are generic versions of different genres of this, that and another. The production gets my vote as one the ugliest I've ever seen. But it uses electronic flashes to cover up one of the clunkiest books ever. This was an award-winning hit in London? Well, so was the current Cabaret, which should tell optimistic producers of the future when looking at London properties to bring over to beware. (No one ever asks me. They could save themselves a lot of money. I could have told them when I saw Cats in London before it came over that it wouldn't run a week in New York because the New York audience would never put up with such s**t . . .)

But then maybe I was distracted at the Palace by my fear of anticipating that walk down the dangerous steep, curving staircase to get to the rest room. One false step and I would have tumbled.
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