Beyhives & Broadway: A Weekend of Performances
Reflections on packing in three back-to-back performances around NYC
On Attending Events
Thanks to my work on the Blankman List, I spend a lot of time researching and writing about events in New York City. Unsurprisingly, I attend a lot of events, too. (Including many not on the monthly list.)
Over Memorial Day weekend, I experienced what felt like a wide range of musical/theatrical events with three events in four days that, by the end of it, left me feeling exhausted and thinking about Performance with a capital P:
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour (technically in New Jersey, not NYC)
Antony and Cleopatra at the Met Opera
The current Cabaret revival
Events quickly turn to blurs for me. Hours become condensed into just a handful of critical memories. When I look at old ticket stubs, it’s humbling how many events I’ve forgotten in toto. It’s wild to me—hours of my life, major social events, sometimes hundreds of dollars—how has that memory completely evaporated?! With that in mind, I wanted to document the weekend and share what stood out and what, if anything, I have to share.
One aside on the matter: I believe that events stay with me whether I remember them or not. The ways that a play can make me think a little differently or a concert can make me hear music a little differently, these ways add up, literally affecting my neural circuitry, affecting me even long after forgetting a character’s name or a song’s title.
Beyoncé
One advantage to starting this Blankman List project is I’ve learned deeply about how event tickets are sold. For smaller shows with limited seats, there isn’t much to hack. If you know someone in the show, you might get a comped ticket. If the venue partners with a papering service like Club Free Time or Will Call Club, you might find $5 tickets. Otherwise, you pay the entry fee.
However, larger shows get more complicated. Broadway shows have 8,000 or so tickets available every week, and there are lots of ways to find discounted tickets. I once wrote at length about how to see Broadway shows for cheap. For megashows, like Beyoncé’s that takes place at a football stadium, there’s the “last-minute trick.” A lot of tickets are sold to scalpers looking to profit off them. But when the show is near—say, a day or two away—scalpers still with tickets become increasingly desperate to sell them at a loss versus not make any money back at all. Seatgeek.com is a great resource here and gave me a chance to get tickets for about half of what they originally cost.
It would of course be a shame to reflect only on the cost of a Beyoncé show. No matter how much (or little) you spent, I imagine you left feeling like you got your value’s worth. I marveled especially at how the performance’s design worked on such a grand scale: bracelets that lit up in synch across every seat and giant props that lifted Beyoncé up and carried her around the stadium. I was struck too by the acoustics. Despite being outdoors and at a dizzying height, I still heard her voice and the accompanying musicians clearly.
(Perhaps obviously) this is not my first time hearing Beyoncé. Somewhere around B’Day I started to listen to her tracks closely, and by 4 I was a lifelong fan. A theme I know I write about again and again: for me, it’s all about the music. I’m embarrassingly out of touch with the celebrity of it all. I didn’t know until this show that she had more children after Blue Ivy. What drew me most to the concert was the genre bending. I would argue she’s been doing that for a while, but this album, Cowboy Carter, does so conspicuously with country singles and clear sounds of soul, bluegrass, rap, zydeco, and a little 18th-century Italian art music. As someone who is always looking to find new music, getting to hear (and see—the choreography is just as far-reaching) such a range in a single concert was my favorite part.
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Antony and Cleopatra
I feel an urge to fight back anytime the Blankman List is used alongside the label of “high” art. While I recognize qualities like accessibility or adherence to tradition, I believe strongly that art—all of it: music, film, theater, painting, and the like—are human endeavors that change over time, and I don’t want to gatekeep who gets to like what.
That said . . . whoo, Antony and Cleopatra was heady, at least for me. I openly love abstract art and weird literature. This should have been perfect for me. But I agree with the New York Times’ review of the opera: “Even with subtitles it’s so difficult to figure out what’s happening moment by moment that you may well find yourself tuning out entirely.” The language is Elizabethan. The story alludes to historical and political details that I just plain didn’t get. On top of it all, the staging had Hollywood glamour and film cameras shoved into the last throes of Ancient Egypt.
There was one major redeeming factor, however, that leaves me without regret: the music. It was thrilling for me to see John Adams conduct his own score, one punctuated by cimbalom lines and crunchy harmonies. I didn’t love the overall performance as much as Beyoncé, but I found just as much joy in listening to the music. The stories of Madama Butterfly, Aida, etc., are classic and written beautifully, but they are pushing a century and a half by now, and I’m glad that I can go to the Met Opera and hear music getting written today. I enjoyed so much of the Met’s most recent season, which had plenty of contemporary offerings. Grounded and Ainadamar weren’t experiences I’ll forget anytime soon.
Cabaret
This is my second time seeing Cabaret. I saw it in 2024 as well and wrote about it briefly in an article ranking all of the Broadway musicals playing at the time. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite show on Broadway right now. Much of its themes and songs are explosive, yet the production scales everything down largely to a single circular stage. To me, it felt more like a miss than a statement.
The show’s warnings of fascism feel more relevant than ever. (“When don’t they?” quipped one friend.) But for much of the show I felt neither urgent reminders nor pleas of hope. I attribute that to mostly—there’s a theme here—the music. It often sounds like prototypical musical theater: jumpy dance number, drawn out ballad, rinse, repeat.
I understand that this show is by people who built that prototype in the first place, and this show sits at the tail end of a golden age before more musically daring works like Hair, The Wiz, and A Chorus Line brought us into the modern age of musical theater. I also recognize that the score is constructed well and includes songs like “Willkommen” and “Maybe This Time,” which have found long lives independent of the show. But contrast, say, “Married” with the Beyoncé show and its wide adoption of different genres. Hell, contrast it with the rest of Broadway. Dance music in MJ, son cubano in Buena Vista Social Club, hip-hop in Hamilton, 90s pop in & Juliet. . . . The score might be well-written, but it feels so dated.
Sharing Experiences
Something friends probably know me for is a willingness to go to just about anything. I don’t mind being confronted with a performance I don’t get. In a paradoxical way, I like it. It makes me stop and think, why don’t I get this? Someone does. There’s at least a writer or performer somewhere who believes in it. For this reason, part of my experience anywhere invariably relies on not what it is, but rather who is with me. After a performance ends, I immediately want to hear other perspectives and learn what I missed.
I saw Beyoncé with my husband, and I’m grateful for the shared experience of navigating New Jersey Transit among a snowballing throng of people in cowboy hats and glitter. I saw Antony and Cleopatra alone, and I’m grateful I didn’t have gnawing thoughts of what did I subject this person to? Then I saw Cabaret with both my husband and two friends, J. and J., and I’m grateful that despite my criticisms it made for a shared experience. We talked about the show afterwards and didn’t all leave it with the same opinions. This is theater’s greatest asset in my opinion. An audience of people all agreed to come together, sit silently (or not so silently, my friends noted about one of their neighbors), and listen to a story. “What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play. Life is a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret.”