Manhattan: distance and movement

Last Tuesday I went to a Broadway show, Ragtime. I was in the front row, but surprised by how much the action did not feel real and a few feet away from me. Perhaps the performers were so skilled they didn’t seem like real people, or the sound so loud and sharp that it didn’t feel like people legit singing just over there. We seemed to have a proper chance of getting spit on us, yet I felt as if I was in a separate world. The biggest break in the feeling of vague unreality was when one of the actors on my side of the stage made piercing eye contact with me for a second or so. Which felt very close and warm and human, and I was kind of thrown by that too, though I liked it. The next day I saw Jonathan Groff perform at the start of a TIME 100 event. He did feel like another human right there in the room, but still somehow surprisingly distant. His song didn’t touch me, though my previous experience delighting in his presence on YouTube led me to have other expectations. And his song was Sondheim, which should also support other expectations. Toward the end he said something about—I think—his work being about connection with us all and being together, and that explicit thought reached me better than anything in the music. Having enjoyed the first Broadway show of my life the day before, and still being in New York, that evening we went to see another one: Every Brilliant Thing. It was a one-man show currently starring Daniel Radcliffe, and involved a lot of Daniel running on and off the stage and borrowing objects and asking audience members to briefly represent his high school teacher or vet or crush. It was also quite poignant. So if any performance was going to feel like a real person was in the same room as me, and like that person was reaching me emotionally, this would seem to have a good shot. And Daniel did seem like a real person over there. But I recognized the movingness of the story more than actually being moved. The play was about a long list of things in