With a Little Bit of Luck

Jan Maxwell in Scenes from an Execution.

For someone's who quite the introvert, I've had an interesting couple of days Twitter-wise.

On Wednesday, Time Out New York ran my interview with multiple Tony nominee Jan Maxwell, who surprised me by revealing that she plans to retire from stage acting after her stint in Scenes from an Execution with PTP/NYC. By the time I logged on to Twitter to tweet the article around noon, it was already trending with more than 100 tweets.

Michael Urie hides from Patti LuPone in Shows for Days (not because he was texting).

Then, that night, I attended Shows for Days, a new play at Lincoln Center's Off Broadway space starring Patti LuPone and Michael Urie. The performance has now become famous/infamous because a woman sitting by the left side of the stage (maybe in the second row?) was using her smartphone during the beginning of the second act, and as the first scene came to an end, LuPone walked by her while she was delivering her final lines, took it out of her hands and exited the stage.

It was a beautiful moment, so perfectly timed it almost looked like it was part of the show. And it solved a problem without breaking the flow of the play. Despite the late hour when I finally got home, I knew I had to tweet this before I went to bed:

Without breaking character, Patti LuPone snatched a rude woman's phone and walked offstage at Shows for Days tonight. Will they never learn.

— Diane Snyder (@DianeLSnyder) July 9, 2015

I have never gotten such a response to one of my tweets: 23 favorites and 18 retweets. The Guardian even used my tweet in their article.

Both instances were heavily reliant on the luck factor. And that's a big factor in social media success — one that even the so-called experts have no control over.

Generation of Ad-Blockers

This Adweek article suggests that election ad-spending could be headed from TV stations to social media because more millennials get their political news from Facebook instead of television.

There's just one problem with that cause-and-effect scenario, however. According to this 2014 piece in the Guardian, millennials are big consumers of free ad-blocking browser extensions: 41 percent of them block Internet ads.

Interesting to see that German courts have been siding with consumers.

Differences in Age Differences

Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight.

It's interesting that the Gigi creative team was so concerned that people would be revolted by the age difference between Gaston and Gigi that they ineffectively made them nearly the same age. But the age difference between Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight in no way detracts from the power of their story. Didn't care for the former, but loved the latter.

Some Pleasure in Fish in the Dark

Rosie Perez and David in Fish in the Dark.

I didn't expect to enjoy Fish in the Dark as much as I did. That's not to say I had a great time. Larry David's Broadway debut as actor and author is only moderately amusing, but since the appeal of his popular HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm always eluded me, modest enjoyment was more than I expected.

I loved Seinfeld, which David co-created, as far back as when it was called The Seinfeld Chronicles, but I don't find him very engaging as a performer, either onscreen or onstage. Fortunately, he's surrounded by enough talented Broadway veterans — in particular, Jayne Houdyshell, Marylouise Burke and Lewis J. Stadlen — that it's not as big a problem as it might have been if Fish in the Dark were a star vehicle instead of an ensemble show with an 18-member cast, huge for a play.

Not that I find these characters any more likable or interesting than the ones that populated Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I only had to spend two hours with them, not revisit them week after week, which was fine. Now I have no need to see any of them ever again.