Less than a week to go

by | Apr 26, 2026 | Uncategorized

Our home-away-from-home in NYC, the Westin Times Square

We are almost off to NYC. Our home base will be the Westin Times Square, which is less than three blocks from all four theaters we will be attending, as well as most restaurants and many tour destinations. So I just thought I would give you a quick update on everything we are doing. Tours, shows, restaurants and all the other stuff you do when you are taking a “Broadway Tour.” (It also gives me a chance to send out one more post to make sure everything is working here on the website before we go.) As I mentioned in my last post, we will be seeing three musicals and one straight play. For those of you who don’t know what a “straight play” is, that means it’s a drama or comedy that’s not a musical. Here are the shows we are seeing:

The Plays

I had seen an article in the New York Times about all the plays currently on Broadway, but I somehow lost it. Thankfully, Kathleen (the master of the internet) found it for me again. Since the NY Times is behind a paywall, I grabbed their blurbs about our four plays, and here they are. Keep in mind that the links to the reviews are behind the same paywall, so you won’t be able to read them without an NYT subscription. But you can click the play’s title to see its page.

Maybe Happy Ending

This is the show that tiptoed onto Broadway and quietly took the 2025 Tony for best musical. Robot neighbors in Seoul, nearing obsolescence, tumble into odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer of a musical comedy by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss (through May 17), a Tony winner for his performance, and Hannah Kevitt. With Tony-winning direction by Michael Arden (“Parade”). (At the Belasco Theater.) Read the review.

Operation Mincemeat

A sneaky compassion lies at the heart of this caper of a show, a deliciously eccentric London import that won the 2024 Olivier Award for best new musical. Now with an American ensemble, it’s a riff on a bizarre true story from World War II, when British Intelligence, keen to misdirect the Germans, dressed up a dead man as a Royal Marine major, planted a fake invasion plan on him and dropped him in the sea for the enemy to find. Beware the emotional ambush hiding inside its poignant standout number “Dear Bill,” sung by a proper, middle-aged secretary who has been through war before. (At the Golden Theater.) Read the review.

Oh, Mary!

Channeling the deliriously outrageous, emphatically queer downtown spirit of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this arch comedy by Cole Escola (“Difficult People”) was a fizzy Off Broadway hit. The title character is a sozzled, stage-struck Mary Todd Lincoln— a very loose cannon largely ignored by her husband, the president (John-Andrew Morrison), who is occupied with assorted sexual exploits and the bothersome Civil War. Maya Rudolph (from SNL, Loot and more) plays the teacher he hires for Mary. Maya Rudolph makes her Broadway debut in the title role from April 28 through June 20. Sam Pinkleton, a Tony winner for this production, directs. (At the Lyceum Theater.) Read the review.

& Juliet

With a song list full of pop hits, this frolicsome musical comedy imagines — with an assist from Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife — what happens when Juliet goes on living sans her Romeo. (At the Stephen Sondheim Theater.) Read the review.

The Food

I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention the food. We have three group dinners and one breakfast included. Break-Away is taking us to Tony’s di Napoli, Marseille, and Bond 45NY. Since our three other dinners are on our own and right before our plays, and some are on Friday and Saturday night, we wanted to make sure we had reservations for those nights. We are eating at the world-famous Sardi’s, a tapas place called Boqueria, and a Greek place on another night called Kellari. We have rounded up some friends and friends of friends to join us at dinners. You will, of course, have complete reports on all of them.

Lots of places to go and lots of things to see!

Tours

Besides the plays, we have numerous tours scheduled for us by Break-Away Tours, the travel company that is taking us to NYC. These include tours of Carnegie Hall, the Top of the Rock, Radio City Music Hall, a private tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tour of Lincoln Center and a theater workshop with someone (director, writer, actor) from one of the plays we are seeing. All that, along with a harbor cruise, the 911 Museum, the Museum of Broadway, Whew, I am tired already, and we haven’t even left yet.

I think that about covers it. Expect posts starting on Friday morning from the Westin Times Square, our home for those six nights. We can’t wait.

There’s no place that communicates as much – and as quickly – as Times Square does. — Jan Vogler

We are going to BROADWAY!

by | Apr 18, 2026 | Uncategorized

Fom a recent trip (2024) to NYC. This was a two day stop off the Oceania Vista. Our trip this time will be six nights in a hotel in Times Square

We are back to traveling! YEAH!!! In less than two weeks, Kathleen and I will get up really early (4:00 am) and meet 26 other Trilogy residents at our clubhouse for a ride to SeaTac Airport, where we will all board Alaska Air flight 34 nonstop to the Big Apple.

I know this sounds very different from our usual trips. For one thing, we don’t usually travel with 41 people, but we will this time. If you are a regular reader, you know that we live in a 55+ community called Trilogy on Redmond Ridge in Washington State. Our community has an active Travel Club, and I happen to be its president. One of the things the Travel Club does is offer quarterly trips for members. In the 20+ years the Trilogy Travel Club has existed, it has traveled to every continent except Antarctica, visited more than 50 countries, and traveled all over the US.

I joined almost as soon as we moved four years ago and was asked to join the board and take over as Vice President and Communications Director in my first year. I became president the second year and have been ever since. I tell you all this because, in that time, there have been more than 12 Travel Club trips, and we have been on exactly NONE OF THEM!

So we decided we needed to join one, and along came a theater tour to New York City. Two of our members participated in a theater tour sponsored by a local theater group and LOVED it. They thought it would make a great trip to offer to the club. So we contacted Alex at Break-Away Tours, who had led the theater tour they went on, and started setting this up.

To get a little deeper into why this trip will be special for the Club,I need to let you know that up until the pandemic, the Club trips had a very high rate of participation. Usually, the Club’s trips and tours would have 20-30 members (out of our total of 450 members) traveling on them. Since the pandemic, it has been hard to get back to those numbers. Our norm right now is somewhere around eight people. Sometimes as few as four. We have started working with tour companies who don’t have minimums for tours because they will do a tour with 16 people and combine our eight with four from somewhere else and four more from another place. It’s great but not what used to happen.

On this theater tour, we (the Travel Club Board) decided to roll the dice and do a private tour with a minimum number of people required, or the tour would not go. Break-Away only does private tours, so we had to have at least 20 going. To be honest, when we rolled out the trip, I wasn’t sure it would go. Getting 21 people to want to travel that far and spend that much was a distant memory in our Club’s history.

But lo and behold, three days after we put the trip on sale, we were sold out with 41 people headed to Broadway. In fact, up until our final payment date on Valentine’s Day, we had a waiting list of 8 more people who, sadly, won’t be joining us.

So that’s why, a week from Thursday, Kathleen and I will get up early, board a “luxury motor coach” I have arranged, and take off on a Broadway adventure. We will be in NYC for 7 days/6 nights, leaving on April 30 and returning home on May 6.

The trip itself looks to be amazing. We have tickets for three Broadway musicals and one straight play, lots of different tours, six nights at the Westin Times Square (where we can walk to every theater in less than 10 minutes) and a bunch more that I will detail between now and when we leave.

Needless to say, we have never done a tour like this. Most people we have ever traveled with were on our Martini Mates reunion cruise to Alaska in 2017, when we had 17 people on Celebrity’s Solstice. This will definitely be an adventure, and I will be detailing it all here on our blog. If you want to follow along, make sure to sign up to be notified when I post.

Broadway is a main artery of New York life – the hardened artery.   —Walter Winchell