Theater: New York City Center / 130 West 55th Street, New York, NY, 10019
Bullets fly and bathtub gin flows in Cole Porter’s 1930 Prohibition musical The New Yorkers, a gleefully amoral celebration of speakeasies, gangsters, society dames, and the great city they love. The show centers on featherbrained socialite Alice Wentworth, whose bootlegger beau leads her on a madcap romp from Park Avenue to Sing Sing and back again. The New Yorkers produced a number of standards—“I Happen to Like New York,” “Love for Sale”—but much of the original material has been lost, making this Encores!’s most ambitious musical reconstruction ever. Don’t miss an evening of sophisticated Depression-era madness.
March 23, 2017: So this is what Manhattan looked like in the tipsy yesterday of Prohibition, when drinking was an illicit thrill you couldn’t get enough of, and the world was best seen through a martini glass — preferably of cut crystal and filled to the sloshing point with bathtub gin. The view, I must say, is divine.
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