Prune and Helen Mirren in The Audience

Pilgrimage to Prune

Located near the Bowery in a vintage storefront, restaurant Prune is known for the haute cuisine of bone marrows served with little spoons and classic simplicity of perfect radishes with butter and salt. Prune has a number of signature fruit juice cocktails, a small bar tucked in the corner, and only thirty seats.

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, who wrote the brilliant memoir Blood, Bones and Butter, is great at textures. The duck on grilled watercress is crispy. Rhubarb crisp is crunchy. Salmon is baked just until it’s flaky. Homemade tofu served warm, with edamame, is silky. The wait staff is down-to-earth. They don’t act like they work in a cult restaurant often billed among foodies as a religious experience.

Its weekend brunch is famous. It’s not, however, a great pre-theatre restaurant. Theatre Row has to judge eating establishments on their snappiness and ability to get us to the box office on time. Prune is about slow food—but they’ll wrap up that dessert or main course you didn’t get a chance to dig your little spoon into.

Helen Mirren in The Audience

For sixty years Queen Elizabeth II has had tea with twelve prime ministers on a weekly basis, through every kind of crisis. Most of the PMs are depicted in The Audience, including a totally unsympathetic Margaret Thatcher (as played by Haydn Gwynne), whom the Queen met with over a hundred times, in rooms that look chilly and cold. The one at Buckingham Palace is described in full by a footman, including the reupholstery of the chairs. The Balmoral set includes tartan, a glowing heater, and the misty mountains in the distance.

People speak of Elizabeth as being witty and sensitive, and how could she not be, played by Dame Helen Mirren. The playwright’s vision of the Queen is also athletic, outdoorsy, and a dog lover—a couple of trained Welsh Corgis are included in several scenes. She tells Gordon Brown (a miscast Nathaniel Parker) that her dream is to live full-time in the Scottish countryside.

The Queen’s hairstyle and costume evolve constantly, and even the handbag dangling from her arm. In one scene she clicks open the bag to offer a distraught Harold Wilson (played by Richard McCabe, probably a lot more charming than the original Wilson) a handkerchief, and flinches when he uses it and tries to return it to her.

Helen Mirren’s voice and body language change with great nuance to every age, including twenty-five, the year of the coronation. She says young Elizabeth had to curtsy to her parents at home. The current-age Elizabeth remarks to David Cameron that the future child of Kate and William, whether girl or boy, will one day be queen or king, bringing things right up to date. Long live the Queen.

This West End performance by “live” HD telecast was shown at the new NYU Skirball Center. At times the audience applauded, as though we were watching it onstage, as were people in 20 countries, at 700 cinemas.

The Nance and the Leopard at des Artistes

Risqué variety theatre known as burlesque is making a comeback at clubs like the Box in New York City. Imported from Victorian London, one of its stock characters was a so-called nancy man whose lines could be more outrageous than that of other performers. (In NYC burlesque theatre, an actress in drag, Murray Hill, currently plays this part.) Embodied by the great Nathan Lane, Chauncey Miles can’t stop himself from being increasingly outrageous the more he needs to tone down his act for his own protection.

In a new play by Douglas Carter Beane, The Nance, set in an era when gay behavior outside of the theatre could land you in jail, the entertaining Chauncey Miles is played by Nathan Lane as painfully in the closet. He goes so far as to be Republican and anti-Pinko, and feels that he must turn down a wonderful young man (Jonny Orsini), who loves him, in favor of easier-to-conceal chance hookups at the Automat. Cady Huffman plays an exotic dancer and fellow comedienne who can foresee change for society. Interspersing scenes of Chauncey’s struggle with onstage “cooch” acts like hers keeps the drama from feeling too tragic.

The ending isn’t tragic at all, and in it, Nathan Lane is at his most riveting. There’s an authentic period feel to the costumes and to a masterful set by John Lee Beatty that revolves to show the burlesque theatre stage, back stage and Chauncey’s arty apartment. The Automat set is very Edward Hopper.

Prix fixe at the old Café des Artistes

Portions aren’t huge at the three-course pre-theatre menu at the Leopard at des Artistes. But it’s incredible that you can now afford to eat at all in this art-filled palace on Central Park West! Be willing to eat very early or very late for the $35 pre- and post-theatre prix fixe, and make reservations.

Formerly bohemian hangout Café des Artistes, and once French, it became Italian when it changed hands and serves a specialty of grilled fish deboned at your table with waiterly flare. Risotto and ravioli were too al dente for our tastes, but that can be prevented next time by a word to the kitchen to overcook them.

The new back bar has a homey feel, with stacks of books and objets d’art and flattering lighting. We miss the murkier old L-shaped bar that served complimentary snacks of hard-boiled eggs, Ritz crackers and Liptauer cheeseball. The people who took over (Il Gattopardo is their other restaurant) made some improvements, such as a strategic mirror to better reflect the 1920s murals out front by Howard Chandler Christy. Surely a few of the models who posed without a stitch for Christy were stage soubrettes back in the day of The Nance.

Here Lies Love and Grill 21

Imelda and Ferdinand wait for nuptials to resume

She didn’t inspire loyalty, even among her close associates, and yet it seemed the world embraced the singing, butterfly-sleeved Imelda Marcos as a cultural icon. In Here Lies Love, a musical based on her life by David Byrne, with music and lyrics by Byrne, additional music by Fatboy Slim, Ruthie Ann Miles is a fantastic singer, dancer and actress, with sexy Jose Llana as Marcos. There are no seats – the audience is meant to dance and at times to follow synchronized dance steps. (Super choreography by Annie-B Parson.) During the marriage of Ferdinand and Imelda, everything came to a halt as an audience member was carried out, no doubt overcome by the smoke machines and throbbing disco music.

Here Lies Love is danceable, but too much time is spent making I.M. sympathetic or too stupid to know any better. Her shoe collection is left out, a debatable omission, but she is depicted as outraged when Ferdinand has an affair, while her own affair with actor George Hamilton isn’t mentioned. Still, we left the Public Theater humming the tunes.

Grill 21, on 21^st St. near First Avenue is one of only two Filipino restaurants in the city that we know of and serves amazing adobo chicken, pork, or shrimp, is so much better than the adobo chickens at Gourmet Garage (apologies to non-New Yorkers unfamiliar with their adobo chicken), as well as grilled milkfish, a specialty. Filipino cuisine is also known for exotic purple ube (yam) desserts, which are bright purple without food coloring. At the bakery down the block you can get a purple ube cake made by pastry chef Violet.

Room Service and Pippin

Fancy Pad Thai at Room Service

Room Service is here to serve you the haute Thai cuisine that you might find in an upscale hotel in Bangkok. Slate walls and enormous chandeliers suggest a swanky hotel lobby, the menus have room numbers, and waiters are dressed as bellboys. There is a steady lunchtime flow. This reviewer not long ago honeymooned in Thailand so was curious to see if the food compared. Pad Thai noodles (the classic) had pink coconut-beet sauce and tamarind juice, sprinkled with mango spears. Very fancy! The $12 Room Service VIP drink was a jumble of fruit and alcohol that tastes sweet and potent. I remembered these potent cocktails from my honeymoon. The menu includes traditional dishes as well as chef creations using lotus seeds, raisins, lychees. Thai pumpkin flan is not to be missed.

The musical Pippin hasn’t been on Broadway for 40 years, a hiatus that is due perhaps to its adult storybook nature. The audience was all abuzz and applauding as the lights were lowered. I then rethought bringing my 7 year-old to the show, anticipating the sexual undertones that would be over her head. There were many.

Prince Pippin, son of the conqueror Charlemagne, is on a quest for meaning and answers (“Corner of the World”), who finds answers and yet more questions. The current production courageously entwines Bob Fosse choreography with surreal circus acts created by Gypsy Snider. It works. Costume designer Dominique Lemieux shows us that every woman looks sensational in an acrobat costume with fringe.

Comedian Andrea Martin plays Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, and her “No Time at All” is a showstopper. I have two words: Hot Mama. Go see Pippin!

Bette Midler in I’ll Eat You Last and Firebird

Bette Midler in I’ll Eat You Last is so much fun as Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers, who represented Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway and (the lout) Steve McQueen, among many others. Entertaining us in her sunlit Beverly Hills mansion, Midler’s voice alone is hypnotizing as she imparts the principles that made her a great businesswoman: “To me ‘no’ always meant ‘maybe’.”

On a day in 1981, while Sue Mengers, agent to the stars, is waiting for her star client and best friend, Barbra Streisand, to call her and fire her, she dishes her best, most hilarious stories and picks out an audience member to come up onstage and refresh her drink, also to pass her the marijuana container (a silver box), from the side table.

We felt a little smarter, a little stoned, leaving the theatre listening to a recording of Bette Midler singing, which couldn’t help but remind us that she is a way bigger star than Sue Mengers was. It’s not a problem! Just what happens when you hear her uptempo Stoney End. In 1994 Midler started the historic New York Restoration Project, which spruced up parks and gardens everywhere in the city and that is now restoring gardens destroyed in the hurricane. She is the beloved queen of NYC on the basis of good works alone.

After 90 minutes in the company of the Divine Miss M we felt high and wanted caviar, vodka, drama. The opulent Russian restaurant Firebird answered the call. Star chef, Paul Joseph, has created a new Russian menu, for instance replacing noodles in the beef stroganoff with light gnocchi and making buckwheat blinis for caviar that are thin crêpes. Joseph’s version of beet salad uses peekytoe crab and cucumber. The amuse-buche of creamed, condensed carrot with truffle froth in a demitasse cup was the best thing we ever tasted.

Our waiter suggested infused vodka produced in house in a dozen varieties. He coached us to start with a savory rather than a sweet: the senses-awakening horseradish vodka, served chilled and in a chilled flute.“Vodka must be freezing cold,” he said. It was entirely unrushed – so rare. We ended with lavender creme brûléeand Russian tea.

As with other restaurants moving with the times, it is permanently restaurant week at Firebird, which offers a two-course prix fixe for $21. The tasting menu allows you to range over the entire menu. Pretty bars upstairs and down are full of crystal vodka bottles (but amber bottles too) and lead on to opulent, tasseled nineteenth-century dining rooms decorated with costumes and artwork associated with the Stravinsky ballet The Firebird. Among the statuary and gaslights and draperies, we felt like Lara in Doctor Zhivago on her date with Komarovsky – only better.

This Round’s On Us and Il Buco

The six-year-old indie Nylon Fusion Theatre Company has a festival of well-chosen short plays four times a year. Led by Ivette Dumeng and a glamorous team of actors, the evening has an unexpected effervescence. An open bar near the stage encourages audience – and cast – to down a few drinks and be happy. The plays are all funny, and there’s an uninhibited party atmosphere, but also serious acting going on.

In Searching for Armstrong by James Harmon Brown, two brothers divide up their father’s estate, each accusing the other of having stolen a thing of value: a signed photo of Neil Armstrong in his space suit. Finally one of the brothers fesses up.Lucas Beck and Adam Belvo look nothing alike but were totally convincing as brothers, and kept us rooting for both of them.

Racine Russell and Andrew MacLarty

There was an intermission after Owed, by Joseph Samuel Wright – a wife meets her husband’s “bimbo,”as she calls her, face to face. Pooya Mohseni and Kate Garfield are both amazing in this gem, directed by Shira-Lee Shalit. These brief plays go as far as they can go, and there isn't a dud in the bunch.

While audience members mingled during the intermission, some with complimentary gin, others with a glass of the Nylon Fusion’s “signature sangria,” a fight broke out backstage between actors and spilled out onto the bar area. It seemed unlikely to come to blows. Yet, for a minute or two, it was believable enough that audience members took cover. It’s a testament to the freshness of this company that they’d even attempt something like that – and carry it off.

Right down the street from the Gene Frankel Theatre, and close to the Public Theatre, is the highly esteemed Il Buco, where everything you taste will be exceptional, including the bread dipped in olive oil.

The décor is Italian country kitchen. The menu is a poem. You’ll notice that all the main courses are similarly priced, so there’s no point in ordering chicken when you can have fluke or something exotic. The Italian kale version of caesar salad and a half portion of risotto or pappardelle will run you about fifty dollars, with one glass of the sommelier-choice wine at ten dollars a glass. You have to be prepared to pay the piper, but after dining at Il Buco, you’re excited to start cooking better at home, and that perhaps should be the test of a great restaurant experience today.

Matilda the Musical and Un Deux Trois

The 1996 film of the Roald Dahl Matilda is my 7-year-old daughter’s favorite movie, and in the first 10 minutes of “Matilda the Musical” on Broadway, both she and I knew that this is going be a hit! The clever lyrics, percussive movement, and glowing, alphabet block set captivated us. Also, there is the empowering message that you can create your own destiny.

The new characters that have been added absolutely enhance the story.Two faves include Rudolpho, Mrs. Wormwood’s slick and slimy ballroom-dance partner who slithers and undulates across the stage, and the all-knowing librarian, who listens uncritically to the 5-year-old Matilda’s stories. The most exciting, twisted, and hilarious performance of all is Bertie Carvel in drag as the tyrant headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. Surprisingly, children are not frightened by his stern and wicked portrayal. I refuse to divulge more, but he’s a scream in the phys ed number.

Our Matilda (four actresses play her) looked the part, but seemed more a film than stage actor. It was difficult to understand her British accent. (She may improve with practice—this was a preview.) Bravo, Royal Shakespeare Company! We had to get the brilliant soundtrack, with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin, and can’t stop listening to it. Her favorite? Telly,sung by Mr. Wormwood, who proudly learned everything he knows from the telly.

Around Café Un Deux Trois (One Two Three) are plenty of intimate, red banquettes, tall mirrors, chandeliers, and a romantic bar for late at night. A brunch menu makes it a pre-matinee destination on weekends. It doesn’t keep white place mats and crayons on the table for children specifically, but that and its noise level (because of high ceilings) make it a place where a child can feel perfectly comfortable.

The weekday lunch prix fixe includes a much-ordered daily soup and a made-in-house rustic pâté served with celeriac salad on radicchio. Apart from too much tilapia on the menu, there are steak frites, moules frites, a creamy Quiche Lorraine, and other French bistro fare, as well as le burger and a choice of salads (which many restaurants have done away with, replacing anything sandwich- and salad-like with the high-priced scourge “small plates”). It’s probably nobody’s favorite restaurant, but achieves its status from being around so long that practically everybody has a memory of a kiss in one of those banquettes.