A little getting to the show drama

It nearly happened to me. Yesterday, when I went to Boston for the matinee of How Shakespeare Won the West, I was almost one of those people who can't get to the theatre on time and are forced to stumble around in the dark to reach their seat, inconveniencing everyone sitting around them. I shudder to think how close I came.

Let me begin at the beginning. I took an 11:30 bus to Boston, which should have gotten me there at 12:30, plenty of time to take the T to the Huntington Theatre, get something to eat and be in my seat by 2 p.m. I've done this before and it's always worked out perfectly. (I could drive, but it's been many, many years since I've driven into Boston and the bus is more relaxing - when it's on time.)

Little did I know that my bus would be 15 minutes late leaving Providence, make an unscheduled stop downtown to pick up more passengers before proceeding to Boston and then encounter highway traffic on a Sunday afternoon. I didn't arrive at Boston's South Station until about 1 p.m. I thought about taking a cab at that point, but what if I got stuck in traffic? I figured the subway was safer.

Okay, fine, if I made my connections promptly, I might still have time for lunch before the show. Wrong! First there was the wait at South Station for a Red Line train to Park Street, then there was a wait at Park Street for an "E" Green Line train to Symphony, the closest stop. (It's some kind of law of nature that the subway line you're waiting for will be the last one to come. I should have remembered that from college.)

As the minutes ticked by, I'd given up hopes for a sandwich and ate my emergency Nature Valley maple granola bar. It would have to do. At this point, the time was closing in on 1:30 and I was getting extremely panicky that I'd miss the beginning of the show, never mind lunch. I hate, absolutely hate, feeling rushed and I hate coming in late to anything - a movie, a tv show, a meeting.

Finally, the train came at about 1:35 and we inch our way to my stop - Boylston, Arlington, Copley, Prudential and finally, Symphony. It was excruciating. I frantically pushed past my fellow riders, then bounded up the steps and out of the station. Luckily, the Huntington is practically across the street. I made it to the theatre at about 1:50 p.m. - 10 minutes to spare and still time to visit the ladies room. Whew, that was a lot closer than I like to cut it.

Now, if you remember, last week I wrote about getting a reduced-price ticket at BosTix, except I wasn't sure where I'd be sitting. Well, it turns out what I suspected was true - I was in the first row of the balcony, on the aisle. And it was fine. I don't think I would have enjoyed the show any more if I'd paid $77.50 for an orchestra seat instead of $32.50 for the balcony. In fact, I think I enjoyed it more knowing that I paid less. Still, I do like being close to the action.

But it wasn't actually the "best available" seat in the house that BosTix promised me. There were entire rows of empty seats in front of me in the mezzanine. I could have moved down but I could see fine, so why bother?

Afterward, I asked a Huntington staff member about my seat assignment was told that "best available" means best available out of the seats that BosTix purchases, not the best available unfilled seat in the entire theatre. Oh, now they tell me.

One other thing bothered me. My ticket stub showed a face value of $26, less than I paid. I checked the Huntington's Web site to see how much the seat would have cost if I'd paid full price, and it would have been $50. So I still saved. But I don't understand the discrepancy. I've e-mailed customer service at BosTix and I'll report back on what I find out.

So, all in all, a good day but not as relaxed as I was expecting. After the show, it was another mad dash back to South Station and a sandwich from Cosi at the food court before heading home.

Now, I have more sympathy for those theatergoers who, through no fault of their own and despite their best - even heroic - efforts, arrive late for the show. I nearly was one of them.

Update 9-23: I got a reply today from customer service at BosTix.

The price on your ticket is the reimbursement price for the theatre, meaning that amount is what the Huntington received for each ticket. The box office uses the tickets for financial purposes and no one paid the price on your ticket for the show.

The seats that you received were the seats allotted to our ArtsBoston patrons. The full price of the seats you sat in were $60. We were only able to sell $60 tickets to our patrons which meant the seats would be in a certain area. Each box office allocates a section for our patrons, which is why on the main show page the text shows: "SEATING: Reserved".

The term "best available" on our site refers to our specific allotment, not the best available in the whole theatre. Our ticketing system only allows us to use the term "best available".

How Shakespeare Won the West

Gratuitous Violin rating: *** out of ****

Playwright Richard Nelson name checks a lot of Shakespeare in How Shakespeare Won the West. And just like the Bard's works, Nelson gives his audience at Boston's Huntington Theatre Company a little history, a little comedy, a little tragedy - all rolled into one not always tidy package.

How Shakespeare Won the West, directed by Jonathan Moscone, is the first production under the leadership of the Huntington's new artistic director, Peter DuBois, who comes to Boston from New York's Public Theater.

The play follows a ragtag troupe of New York actors as they make their way to California in 1848. They dream of earning fame and making a fortune by putting on Shakespeare before audiences of extremely erudite gold miners. Nelson got the idea after reading an obituary for historian Helene Wickham Koon, who wrote a book called How Shakespeare Won the West, a study of Shakespearean productions during the Gold Rush.

The action opens in a New York City tavern, where Antje Ellerman's simple, unadorned wooden set looks like it could have come out of a Hollywood Western or a production of The Iceman Cometh. Thing start out very slowly. For the first 10 minutes or so, a few actors come on stage and talk to each other quietly or read. I couldn't figure out whether the play had begun or not. But I guess it hadn't, because we still hadn't heard the turn off your cell phone announcement.

Eventually, Buck Buchanan, an aspiring actor, played by Erik Lochtefeld, comes in. He's soon regaling everyone with stories of traveling troupes performing before wildly enthusiastic audiences in California Gold Rush country. The rough-edged miners are so knowledgeable about Shakespeare, they shout out the lines along with the actors and shower them with bags of gold dust in appreciation.

Soon enough, actor-turned-saloon-keeper Thomas Jefferson Calhoun, played by Boston theatre stalwart Will LeBow, his wife Alice, a former actress, played by Mary Beth Fisher, and their daughter Susan, an aspiring ingenue, played very sweetly and eagerly by Sarah Nealis, are putting together a company to bring Shakespeare to the culture-starved masses.

This part - where the Calhouns are searching for the right performers for their troupe - is very funny and it's probably my favorite section of the play. Sure, they're kind of stock types, but they're done well, with great humor - including the alcoholic, philandering leading man, the character actor, the comic relief, the ingenue, the child star.

I liked LeBow and Fisher as journeymen performers who've given up treading the boards but not their dreams of stardom. The rest of the cast is good, too. Jeremiah Kissel starts out very funny as a pretend British thespian, then turns unexpectedly poignant. Kelly Hutchinson is great as the hooker with a heart of gold. Chris Henry Coffey is suitably self-important as the leading man with the drinking problem and Susannah Schulman is affecting as his long-suffering wife, who's also a leading lady. Joe Tapper adds some nice comic relief as a childhood friend of Susan's and a wannabe performer.

Nealis and Schulman have a truly hilarious scene as child actors who perform snippets of Shakespeare. But there are so many characters in this play, no one really gets a chance to stand out. It's one of those love letters to the theatre. And I think the actors in this company should be a bit over the top and larger than life. But too often, they just fade into the background.

My problem with How Shakespeare Won the West actually begins when the troupe leaves New York. I guess I hadn't realized how much of the story would be about the journey, rather than the destination. It takes them almost the whole play to get to California, and I have to admit that at times, my mind began to wander. That's not good in a play that's only 1 hour and 40 minutes long.

Then, there's a point in the action when what had been a very funny play takes a tragic turn. It changes the whole tone and it kind of threw me. I don't mind comedy and tragedy in the same play, but this transition seemed kind of abrupt. Things had been pretty lighthearted until then, but afterward, they become very serious. The play stopped being as funny as it had been. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of humor, but it almost seemed like a different play.

All sorts of disasters befall this troupe of actors - and some of them seem like things that would really have happened on the journey west. But some of them seem, well, more unbelievable. For example, Abraham Lincoln and Buffalo Bill show up. (Not at the same time, though.) And in a bizarre scene, the actors are kidnapped by a group of bigoted religious zealots. I don't mind a witty, incisive satire of organized religion, but this just seemed like a bit of a cheap shot.

Nelson is trying to be insightful about the power of theatre in general - and Shakespeare in particular - to speak to disparate audiences. Along the way, he's trying to say something about the resiliency of the pioneers, religious intolerance, homophobia and the treatment of Native Americans. And I might even be leaving something out. To some extent, he succeeds. In one nice scene, a Native American chief is riveted by the group's performance of King Lear.

Unfortunately, while there were some truly comic moments, there weren't enough of them. And the tragedy and history sometimes felt forced. Also, at first the miners don't exactly greet the troupe with open arms, which somewhat undercuts Nelson's premise that they're so eager for high-class entertainment.

I think Nelson has stuffed a lot of ideas and characters into a relatively short amount of time - and that may be why, for me, the journey at the heart of How Shakespeare Won the West wasn't as fulfilling as I'd hoped it would be.

Seat selection drama

They say anything can happen on stage - that's one of the thrills of watching a performance unfold live, right in front of you. Well, I decided to add some seat-selection drama to the mix.

I just bought a ticket for the Sunday matinee of How Shakespeare Won the West, at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston. Usually, I go online and get the best available seat in the center orchestra. (I like to be as close as possible). But when the best available seat came up in Row A for $77.50, I did pause.

Yeah, I could afford it, and I've spent that much on a couple of shows at the Huntington. Plus, I routinely pay over $100 apiece for Broadway tickets. But I don't go to New York very often and my traveling dates aren't very flexible. When I do go, I know the shows I want to see and I don't want to take any chances on a lottery or just drop by the TKTS booth to see what's available at a reduced price. It's my vacation, you know?

(Not that I'm adverse to getting a discount ticket for a Broadway show, of course, especially as my New York trips become more than a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I did buy a reduced-price ticket once through Playbill. It was for Passing Strange, which, sadly, could have used the full price. I got a great seat for about $60 in the Belasco Theatre's intimate orchestra section.)

But when I see a show in Providence or Boston and my dates are more flexible, I do like to hunt around for a discount. For shows at Trinity Repertory Company, I routinely get the $15 rush ticket, available at the box office a couple hours before the show. It's a great deal - Trinity's two theatres are both pretty small, so you get a good seat no matter where you sit.

And something about that $77.50 just rankled me. I'd noticed a link for BosTix on Hub Arts, a Boston-based arts and culture blog. I decided what the heck, I'll try it. I always thought that you could only buy same-day, half-price tickets and you actually had to go to a BosTix booth to get them. But it turns out that for some shows, you can go online and buy tickets in advance.

So I registered and got a ticket for How Shakespeare Won the West for $32.50 - less than half price! The rub is, I have no idea where I'll be sitting. I guess I have to print out the ticket confirmation e-mail and bring it with me to the theatre.

My ticket is supposed to be "best available." So if there's one seat left in the orchestra section, do I get it? (And really, isn't there always that one seat left?) Or will I be relegated to the "best available" in the mezzanine or balcony? I don't know. It adds a little bit of drama to the drama of the play. I'll report back after the show. The Huntington isn't an especially huge place and I figure my seat can't be that bad.

Not every performance of every show is available at BosTix. I could only find one performance on sale for Follies at Boston's Lyric Stage Company, and it wasn't on a day when I could go. I may have to pay full price for that one.

But I'll keep looking around. I know Theatermania and Goldstar have discount theatre tickets for Boston shows. I haven't used either one of them yet, so I'm not exactly sure how they work. Along with BosTix, they may be a good alternatives to simply logging in online and saying, give me the most expensive ticket you have.

So, I may regret my decision come Sunday, but for today, I feel like a savvy theatre shopper.

Theatre in my backyard

To welcome its new artistic director, Peter DuBois, and to celebrate its 27th season, Boston's Huntington Theatre Company is holding a special reduced-price ticket sale Aug. 19.

For that day only, you can buy $27 tickets for select performances of the first three shows of the 2008-2009 season: How Shakespeare Won the West, Boleros for the Disenchanted, and Rock 'n' Roll. Tickets will be available online from 9 a.m. to midnight, and by phone and in person from noon to 6 p.m.

I'm really looking forward to Richard Nelson's play How Shakespeare Won the West, which runs from Sept. 5 to Oct. 5. It's about a troupe of New York actors who seek fame and fortune during the Gold Rush. Between that and my upcoming trip to the Guthrie Theater for the musical Little House on the Prairie, I'm definitely in pioneer mode.

According to Playbill, the cast will be headed by Will LeBow as Thomas Jefferson Calhoun, the head of the pioneering acting troupe; Mary Beth Fisher as Alice Calhoun, his wife; and Jeremiah Kissel as Edward Oldfield, a "utility player" who masquerades as a renowned British actor, despite actually being from Albany, New York.

I haven't heard of any of those performers, although I think LeBow is a well known Boston stage actor and director from his association with Shear Madness, the American Repertory Theater and the Huntington. Here's a profile from 1995.

It's hard to believe that I lived in Boston for five years and made it to the theatre a grand total of - once. (That I can remember). I saw A Chorus Line on tour during my freshman year of college. I didn't get back to Boston to see a show until decades later - when I took in a performance of Blue Man Group. (Very strange and once was definitely enough).

Okay, that's my short history of Boston theatergoing. Anyway, I'm making up for it now. In the past couple of years I've seen Parade at SpeakEasy Stage and the national tours of Sweeney Todd and The Drowsy Chaperone. I took a road trip to the Huntington twice last season, for The 39 Steps and She Loves Me, and I loved both of them.

So, there's much more to look forward to this season, including tours of Chazz Palminteri's one-man show A Bronx Tale and Dame Edna. In May, SpeakEasy is putting on Jerry Springer - The Opera. (Recommended for mature audiences. How exciting!) Also, I'll be adding a new theatre to my list when I see the legendary musical Follies at The Lyric Stage Company.

While I love going to Broadway, it's also been fun to discover what's available in my own backyard.