As our group of hungry, tired, Californians hurried into our hotel in the bustling heart of Times Square, the first thing I noticed about New York City, which I’d never been to before, was that it was very cold. Thanks to the wide range of classes we attended, neighborhoods we toured, and shows we watched, however, I ended the six-day Pinewood Performing Arts trip learning much more about the city’s rich artistic and cultural history.
On our first night, we visited the Top of the Rock, an observation deck at Rockefeller Center that gave us a panoramic view of the city’s soaring skyscrapers at night and a taste for the area’s strong, biting winds. Afterward, we skated around the Center’s ice skating rink, where I managed to fall backward five times, before attending our first Broadway show of the trip, “The Great Gatsby.” The show examines the lives of the newly wealthy in the 1920s. At the end, we had a chance to meet Ryan McCartan, who played Gastby and became popular in the show “Liv and Maddie.”
Our experience with “Gatsby” continued the next morning, when we had a dance class with the show’s dance captain, Mariah Reives. We learned a Gatsby-inspired routine to the catchy and upbeat song “New Money” before learning about Reives’s journey in the musical theater industry and her dreams of creating a business to teach dance. We explored Chinatown and Little Italy, trying delicious desserts and buying gifts, before our second show, “Operation Mincemeat.” The British musical, recently arrived on Broadway, told the fascinating story of how a corpse was used to send false information to the Germans in World War II. I was holding back cackles for the majority of the musical, but the few poignant moments in the otherwise catchy and upbeat show almost made me cry.
On Wednesday, we started the day with a stage combat class with Jared Kirby, who has been choreographing and teaching stage and screen combat for decades. We enthusiastically pretended to punch and slap each other for an hour. Then, we made our way to the August Wilson Theater, which was transformed into the Kit Kat Club, the setting from the next show, “Cabaret,” a classic musical, which follows the lives of members of a club in 1930s Berlin against the backdrop of increasingly popular Nazi ideology.
On Thursday, we attended an improv class hosted by the Broadway Comedy Club. Afterward, we had the chance to speak with Larry Rogowsky, a producer for the final show we were seeing that evening, “The Outsiders.” He told us how it felt to watch the years-long development and performance of a show, as well as his personal story of how he got involved in the industry. After a few hours of shopping in Times Square, we spoke with Hailey Hyde, sister of Pinewood Athletic Director Hannah Fanaika. Hyde, who recently joined the cast of “The Outsiders” as an understudy and booth singer, shared her experience breaking into the industry, auditioning for her role, and building a life for herself in New York City. The evening ended with an intense, gut-wrenching performance of “The Outsiders,” which only felt more powerful after we watched the actors persevere through some technical issues.
Although we only saw snippets of New York City on our trip, we still saw many of the ways it bustled with life and energy. It was still extremely cold, but sitting crammed together on the plane home, sharing highlight reels of memories, I’d never felt more warm.
