Yes, that's really the title of the play we saw yesterday. This is a Pulitzer Prize nominated play that opened in Los Angeles and came to Broadway in March for a limited run until July 4th. This was the most sparsely attended performance we've been to, in a pretty unremarkable theater. The performance, however, did not disappoint. It was completely different from everything else we've seen.
My initial attraction to this play was exactly what the backers hoped: I wanted to see Robin Williams perform live. (His role is the tiger.) The play overshadowed him which gives you some idea of how powerful a vehicle it is, and he was very good in his role. This is a serious play asking the viewer to think about serious questions. The setting is the chaos of Baghdad in 2003 right after the American invasion. The play is populated by the tiger, American soldiers, and Iraqis. It's not unremittingly grim, and the running joke about the stupidity of lions helps relieve the seriousness of the subject matter. This play is about the insanity of war, the stupidity of greed, the loss of innocence and innocents, evil, and corruption not to mention the afterlife and the purpose of life. After Drake and I debated what we thought were the themes of the play for about half an hour, I checked in on the NY Times reviewer's take on the play.
The thing he thought of which we hadn't considered is how different this play is from the other offerings on Broadway. As he put it, this play stands out from the nostalgia craze (revivals), the let's be teenagers again shows, (Book of Mormon), the straight musicals (Chicago), and the let's make a show out of a movie (Lion King). Only Jerusalem (play) comes close to this one, and Jerusalem was hilarious in a serious situation and ultimately a fantasy. I would definitely recommend the Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo if for no other reason that it was nice to be able to think about something we saw. My only complaint was that it seemed to lack an 'ending' which was perhaps deliberate. After all, we are STILL in Iraq, aren't we?
After theater dinner last night was potluck. I had originally thought to eat Mediterranean food, and had pre-picked a place. When we walked over to it, it just didn't look good. We discovered that 46th Street in the Theater District is called Restaurant Row (each street has an alternative name in a separate, albeit smaller, street sign under the official name). 46th Street is restaurant after restaurant of everything you can imagine from the traditional Italian to Brazilian, to Thai, to Sushi, to French, to American, both traditional (burgers) to contemporary (novelle) and a Turkish restaurant. That's the one we picked.
I was also amused to note the competition for customers is so fierce that the restaurants have 'shills' who stand outside and try to entice passer-bys (especially tourists like us) to come in and eat at their restaurant. They address you directly just as if we were marks at the traveling carnival and they were barkers luring us into a girlie show. It works, though because when we rejected out pre-picked choice, we remembered the nice girl in the red shawl who invited us into her Turkish restaurant.
Sometimes you just get lucky. After the disappointment of City Lobster and Steak of the previous evening, "Symrna" was terrific. I think my first clue came that this was going to be good when I noticed that initially we were the only people in the restaurant who weren't speaking Turkish. Always a good sign when you're eating ethnic food. I won't bore you with what we had - pretty standard stuff followed by pistachio filled baklava - but it was all first rate.
Today we are off to the theater again - this time a musical that closes June 19th - Chicago. We both liked the music in the movie, and expect to juvenile entertainment. We did our grown-up duty at the theater yesterday. Today we have picked Argentinean/Italian food - what a combo. I have discovered that Italian food is to New York as Mexican food is to Texas. We are kind of holding off for Little Italy before we indulge in a big Italian feast.
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