A fine adventure on and near Broadway.

We've just returned from a New York City adventure. It has been a while, to our dismay. It's not an inexpensive undertaking, of course, but this time we had a special reason for going. But as usual, we crammed as much theater-going into our time as possible, along with celebrating our birthdays.

We got up to the Apple on a Thursday afternoon, though there were some weather-related delays. We still had plenty of time to hit up the TKTS booth to see "Peter and the Starcatcher" as our first stop. What a fine time that was. Prior to the Tony Awards, I knew little about this show other than some kind of connection to the Peter Pan story. I came to understand that two writers I enjoy, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, had created the original young adult book (and now, several sequels), and that this was a prequel for Peter Pan somewhat like "Wicked" is the prequel to The Wizard of Oz.

It's a very inventive "play with music," using some somewhat simple tools to help define set and place. It also won the play-side Tony for lighting design, and for good reason. Very fun stuff indeed.

On Friday night, we took advantage of a connection for our birthday celebration. Our son, Andy, is in a master's degree program, studying lighting design with Tony-award-winning Brian McDevitt, who won for "The Book of Mormon" last year. We were able to acquire house seats with Brian and Andy's help - fourth row, center. Pretty darn nice.

It's a very funny show and by some people's standards, probably tasteless at times. (I suspect most Mormons don't get a kick out of it either.) We had a special bonus in that the guy sitting next to us was raised Mormon - never quite got whether or not he still is. But he laughed with the rest of us. We didn't see the original two leads, but that didn't matter to me, anyway. Well performed and technically fine, too.

Based on some recent friend reviews and the Tony performance, we had pre-bought our Saturday afternoon tickets for the musical "Once." This for me was the high point of the shows. One friend referred to it as a chick-flick of musicals, and heck, he might be right. But we did not care. It was sweet, touching, sad, very well performed, musically delightful, very talented cast who acted, sang and played instruments -- and two lead characters who were written to be very interesting, and they were played very well by the actors. Excellent. Now I have to see the movie on which it was based!

From there, TKTS set us up for the play "Clybourne Park," which won the Pulitzer Prize. I liked the play, interesting concept and questions being asked -- but I have to question the Pulitzer. I don't know what else was up that year, but it didn't quite glue together at the end. Well done, though, and worth the time.

We also adventured by our standards on Sunday afternoon. We'd never been to the alphabet streets (Avenues A, B and C), which was the real-life setting of the musical "Rent." There's a relatively new rep company in its third year of doing two shows in rep during the summer (Sink or Swim Rep is their name). I just happened to find that one of those shows this year was "An Ideal Husband," the Oscar Wilde dramedy. (I guess, really, a comedy by classical definition: no one dies.)

Since that play is the play-within-a-play of my last full-length script, "Rehearsals," and I've never seen it on stage (only the movie, which was excellent), we made the taxi-trek and generally enjoyed the production (considering it was an $18 ticket, it was certainly worth it, compared to the $155 ticket price for the Bwy. musicals). It was also located in a neat old theater revitalized for stage theater purposes.

We wrapped up our stay with our first time to see an off-Broadway play in preview. It's a comedy co-written by Woody Harrelson and his friend Frankie Hyman, based on their summer of 1983 working construction in Houston, TX. A fair amount of it is fictional, but the characters are entirely based on reality. They are quirky, different, fun and funny.

Why this show? Truth is, we wouldn't have known about it if our son, Andy, hadn't been the assistant lighting designer and also in town while we were there. We got to hear a lot of back-stage stories and spend some time with Andy while we were at it. "Bullet for Adolf" was fun to see, especially knowing some of the back story.

So six shows, and not really a dog in the group. Nice!