Nitya Vidyasagar in "Monetizing Emma."

The premise may be cynical and disturbing, but Ossa and director Leah Bonvissuto keep the play engaging with dashes of humor and a surprising amount of plot twists. Though a few scenes wander, the writing and direction are overall sharp and focused; what the black box production lacks in fancy stage settings or costume design, it makes up for in drama and a heroine that you come to root for. Nitya Vidyasagar portrays Emma with an intensity and anxiousness that, by play’s end, seems completely well-founded in light of the machinations she must endure. Emma finds a resolution that’s worthy of her intelligence, yet the play may leave a somewhat unresolved, nagging feeling in the audience. Fictional reimagining or not, the age of Thackeray Walsh seems eerily imminent…if not already a slice of reality.

*******

Monetizing Emma plays at the HERE Mainstage Theater (145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick) through Aug. 25. Tickets: $15.

The Addams Family cast. All photos by Joan Marcus.

I will be honest: I can’t understand why The Addams Family got slammed by so many critics. For a show that provides such a quintessential Broadway experience – spectacular art direction, big-name stars, laugh-out-loud comedy, and crowd-pleasing musical numbers – judging it on anything other than its fun-spirited energy seems beside the point. Forgive me for siding with the masses who have applauded this family-friendly production. (Yes, I, too, snapped my fingers along with those familiar Addams Family theme-song notes in the overture.) When a show provides this much entertainment,  I can’t help but defend it:

Common criticism #1: “The plot is dull and unimaginative.” Gomez and Morticia Addams must face their worst nightmare: Their daughter Wednesday, 18, has fallen in love with a “normal” young man. His middle-America, whitebread family — the complete opposite of their morbid, creepy, kooky clan – are coming to dinner.

No, it’s not a nail-biting dark satire, but when it comes to this iconic franchise, plot is really second fiddle to the more important sell of this show – reconnecting us with familiar characters we have grown to love. For this purpose, the storyline is enough to highlight one of the Addams’ appeals: Beyond their twisted universe, they really are just people with desires and fears like the rest of us.  A daughter discovering first love. A mother feeling the pangs of mid-life crisis. A father learning to let go. For all their oddities, the Addams are strangely relatable.

What the show lacks in plot intricacy, it more than makes up for in artistic design. Death motifs may permeate the show, but the stage features an absolutely living and breathing set. The Addams family’s mansion, set in Manhattan’s Central Park, is a character all its own.  Staircases, windows, walls slide in and out through a menagerie of scene changes. Cemeteries take on an eerily romantic glow under a sprawling tree. Faint city skylines shimmer below a harvest moon. A ghostly chorus of  family ancestors strut in elaborate, period costumes. Innovative puppets add a magical, fantastical flair.  With big-budget Broadway glam, the Addams Family have never been more in style.

The Addams Family with their ancestors.

Common criticism #2: “Everything from the book to the music/lyrics is corny.” Indeed, the show likes to rhyme. (“Was Napoleon right for Josephine? Was nausea right for Dramamine?”) And yes, much of the music feels almost vaudevillian, allowing the overall effect to seem cartoonish. But what a crime this turned out to be: making Charles Addams’ beloved cartoon characters (first conceived for the New Yorker in the 30s) look like cartoons. That’s just unthinkable.

In a country where the Addams Family has been such an indelible part of our culture, every member of this macabre clan has license to be as much of a caricature as they want to be. This has always been a family of outrageousness. A show that milks their every eccentricity with campy humor – no matter how obvious, “low-brow,” or absurd (like Uncle Fester’s silly love affair with the moon) — isn’t necessarily doing them a disservice. It’s playing to the spirit of a family that has always been off their rocker. Corniness, in the hands of composer Andrew Lippa and writers Mashall Brickman and Rick Elise (Jersey Boys), can feel bizarrely charming. Jokes are funny BECAUSE they’re lame.

Bebe Neuwirth as Moriticia Addams and Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams.

Common criticism #3: “Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth squandered their talents on a show like this.” Oh, but these stars “squander” so well. Neuwirth brings a cool, suave, intentionally detached vibe to Morticia and leads those choreographed ensemble numbers with poise and ease. The night, though, belongs to Lane, who makes for one over-the-top, hyper-Spanish Gomez. The man is a master at turning simple things – like pausing in speech or holding a note too long – into comedic gold. Watching him manipulate each mannerism, tone, and line (“What I lack in height, I make up in shallowness”) makes you wonder why he was snubbed for a Tony this year.

He and the rest of this endearing cast – including Jackie Hoffman in a nutty turn as Grandmama – deserve much more credit than they’ve been given. Not seeing this show just because critics panned it … now that would be truly ghastly.

*********

The Addams Family has an open-ended run at the Lunt-Fontanne theater (46th and 7th). Tickets: $51.50-$126.50

Harry Conick Jr. Photo by Palma Kolansky

There are artists whose artistry comes primarily from laboring at their craft for decades, and then there are those for whom preternatural talent somehow flows through their DNA. While you could never say that New Orleans native Harry Connick Jr. hasn’t worked hard over the years to excel at music, acting, philanthropy, and seemingly everything else he turns his mind to, there is no question that when it comes to natural talent, he is one of the blessed.

“I was three when I started playing,” says Connick, who speaks with City Scoops on an overseas call, right before taking the stage for a concert in Istanbul.

“We had a piano in the house, and it was fascinating to me that you could press the notes on this funny-looking box and these sounds would come out. I just loved it. It was very accessible and interesting to me.”

Connick began playing in New Orleans clubs astonishingly early, at around the age of six or seven. Even in a city with music in its blood, this was an impressive achievement.

“I’d go down on the weekends and sit in with the guys in the band,” he says. “Clubs are open all day, and it’s very common to see kids there. I remember going to clubs and sitting in with musicians and hanging out with them. That’s part of tradition there, that young musicians come and play, and spend time around the older ones. That was my childhood. A lot of kids go out and play sports and do other things. I went to the French Quarter and played with these musicians.”

Anyone who sees Connick in concert will have no trouble believing that he’s been playing almost since his days in the womb. Connick headlines a limited Broadway engagement July 15-26 at the Neil Simon Theatre (250 West 52nd Street) and will make these shows special by improvising his set lists every night — deciding on songs on the fly, thereby guaranteeing that people who see more than one night of the run will experience a different show each time.

“It’s not often I play that many nights in a row, so for our sanity, we change it up a lot,” says Connick. “I’ll be playing some songs I recorded recently, some that I recorded a long time ago, and stuff I’ve never recorded.”

Connick, accompanied by a band of between 16 and 20 musicians, uses special computer software that allows his band members to call up sheet music to his songs in seconds.

“I know what song I’m gonna start with, and for the first couple of songs we’ll have an idea of where we’re going,” he says. “But after that, it’s wherever it goes. I’m thinking about it as the show goes on.”

Connick at a session for “Your Songs,” his 2009 collection of popular classics.

Connick’s expertise has been appreciated far and wide of late, even on the country’s most popular television show, “American Idol.” His appearance as a mentor went so well, it instantly spurred speculation that Connick might replace “Idol” judge Simon Cowell.

While Connick could have easily treated the appearance as a quick and simple cameo, instead he set standards for himself to ensure that contestants get the most from his expertise.

“I’ve had mentors and I know what they do, so I just wanted to do as much as I could,” he says. “It was a chance to really help the contestants out, because that’s what a person with experience does for a younger person. That’s how the music goes forward.”

While Connick began playing at three, learning classical piano and music theory throughout his childhood, it wasn’t until he was thirteen that he began his relationship with the man who would become his greatest mentor, jazz pianist and patriarch Ellis Marsalis.

“Ellis was everything at that point,” says Connick, who played back then with Ellis’ son Delfeayo, since Marsalis boys (and future stars) Wynton and Branford were older. “I was taking all kinds of different music classes, but Ellis’ tutelage was the most valuable, because he was on the scene, playing. He set a bar that was so high, it instilled a work ethic in all of his students that I still use to this day.”

Given his great experience in this area, he battled the Idol producers to let him play mentor his way.

Connick leading an orchestra during the recording of “Your Songs.”

“The day the kids went into the studio to record, I had a rehearsal. I said, ‘I wanna be there when they record,’ and [the producers] said, ‘You can’t, because you have to do camera blocking for the show.’ And I said, ‘We’re gonna have to work this out, because I can’t let them go in the studio and not be there. They don’t have to use me when I’m there, but I have to be present for them in case they decide they want me for something.’ So they rearranged it, and I went to the studio. I was there for them.”

When asked about the possibility of replacing Cowell, Connick tells City Scoops that he has not been formally approached about the role as of press time, and that if he were offered the job, there would be much to discuss before he could consider accepting.

“There’s just a huge amount of questions that I would have — it’s a big time commitment,” he says. “I would have to really sit down with them and figure out what they had in mind. That’s a big, big chunk of time, and I have a lot of other things on the plate.”

While the position of “American Idol” judge would seem too high-profile a gig for most to even consider turning down, Connick relishes the freedom to bounce between projects, like his current Broadway stint, which he considers a far different animal than playing a traditional series of concerts.

“It’s one thing to play a concert in the city,” he says, “but being at a Broadway house, especially one as legendary as the Neil Simon, really has a magical feel to it. I don’t think of the Broadway houses as concert halls. I think of them as jewels that dot the city. They have incredible histories and a special meaning for people because of the shows that have been there.”

Connick’s affinity for the city runs deep. While he currently lives with his family in Connecticut, he moved here from New Orleans when he was 18. He had hoped to get signed to Columbia Records, which had already signed his friends Wynton and Branford. While he accomplished that goal before long, he did pay his dues, living for about a year at the 92nd Street Y, and living the life of the impoverished artist.

Connick in the studio for “Your Songs.”

“I had some friends who were well-connected, and they’d take me to dinner now and then, and I’d get a chance to see how rich people lived,” he says. “But I was just slumming it, man. I was living at the Y, and just walking up and down streets trying to find places that had pianos so I could ask them if they needed a piano player. That’s how I spent my first year there.”

Connick played video games with his friends at the Y when not playing piano at places like Chez Josephine, the recently shuttered Empire Diner, and Our Lady of Good Council on 91st Street.

Signing with Columbia led to several album releases, but his real big break came when director Rob Reiner asked him to write music for his film “When Harry Met Sally.” The film took off, and so did Connick’s career.

“I started getting a lot of work, and people wanted to hear the music from that movie,” he says. “They wanted to hear big band stuff, because that’s what [that music] was, and I had never really played with a big band before that. So I went out on tour and found myself having this big band, and I needed to write because I didn’t have any charts. So I started writing for the big band and went from there.”

Since then, Connick has had success as a pianist and singer with small jazz combos and big bands alike, and he’s been equally in demand as an actor. He’s appeared in blockbuster films such as “Independence Day,” Broadway shows like “The Pajama Game” (which earned him a 2006 Tony nomination for Best Actor), and had a recurring role on “Will and Grace” that did more to increase his public profile than anything he’s done to date.

“When you get on television, it’s a different type of celebrity than film. It’s very accessible,” he says. “There’s [more of] a distance with movie actors than with TV actors. Maybe it’s because you come to them on a TV show, and they go to you [in a movie]. It’s just a different dynamic. People come up to you and say, ‘How could you cheat on Grace?’ You’d have to take a step back and realize what they were talking about.”

The strangest thing for Connick about his time on “Will and Grace” was that it made him a household name among people who had no idea he was even a musician.

“I’d be playing in some city in Iowa,” he says, “and they’d say, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’d say, ‘I’m on tour,’ and they’d say, ‘Doing what? Playing music? Really? We didn’t know you played music.’ That took a little getting used to.”

Connick lends a hand for New Orleans Habitat Musicians Village.

While Connick enjoys the multifaceted nature of his career, his greatest satisfaction to date has been the assistance he was able to provide to his beloved hometown after Hurricane Katrina. Connick recalls his heartbreaking view of the city in the disaster’s aftermath.

“When you have to go around town in a boat, that kind of freaks you out,” he says. “Seeing the convention center and all the people there was really bad. Everything was just underwater, man. It was a chaotic time. It was very, very disturbing, because the last thing you think of when you think of a beautiful little city is chaos. It was pure chaos. Everyone was running around, no one knew what to do, and there seemed to be no end in sight. It was very disheartening to be around that.”

In light of the tragedy, Connick and Branford Marsalis came up with the idea for New Orleans Habitat Musicians Village, an effort that, in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity, provided homes for musicians who were displaced by the hurricane. Eighty homes and five elder-friendly duplexes had been completed as of last September, and a 150-seat performance center, the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, is also in the works.

For Connick and Marsalis, this was an attempt to not just help out the city they love, but also preserve its musical culture.

Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. inspect their devastated hometown.

“Branford and I decided we wanted to do something to help,” he says, “so we came up with the idea of trying to get some homes built, [thinking that] hopefully it would entice some of the displaced musicians to come back. And here we are five years later, and we built 80 homes, and 80 percent of those homes are lived in by musicians and their families. And we just started construction on the $10 million music center, which is also gonna have teaching facilities, recording space, a community center with Internet access, and a toddler park. We’re just real proud of it.”

As a man with a history of having his every project turn to gold, Connick is hopefully on the money when he says that given both time and hard work, the city of New Orleans can return to its former glory.

“I think it’s getting back to normal. It’s day by day,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of physical and emotional destruction down there. It’s gonna take a long time for a city of that size to get back on its feet. It’s difficult to put into words how vast the devastation was, but five years have passed and it’s made considerable progress. I think that in five more years it’ll be even better, and hopefully just continue to flourish.”

For tickets to Harry Connick Jr. on Broadway, go to ticketmaster.com or call 800-745-3000.

Larry Getlen is the Editor-in-Chief of City Scoops Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/larrygetlen.

The dreaded bhut jalokia, otherwise known as the ghost chili.

Like most sources of pain, my penchant for spicy food dates back to childhood. At Mexican restaurants, my father would heroically drag his chips through the hottest salsa while I, his reverent daughter, tried to keep up. I wanted to be brave like my dad, the man who escorted me into haunted houses, sat me beside him in the front car of every roller coaster, and took me scuba diving in impossibly strong currents in perpetual search of sharks. By the end of my childhood, thanks to my fearless father, very little could scare me, and no food was hot enough for my tongue.

Just as heroin users need higher and higher doses over time, so do spice addicts require an ever-increasing progression of heat. My pizza is always hidden under a layer of crushed red pepper, and I’ve become immune to meals that drench normal Americans in sweat. So lately, I’ve been craving a good old-fashioned spicy-food high. I want the rush of endorphins, the tingle on my skin, the agonizing fire I used to feel in my mouth before I built a tolerance.

In search of the ultimate fix, I plan a mission: to find the dishes that only the most diehard pepper hounds would touch. No matter how daunting, I will eat the spiciest food that New York City has to offer.

My first stop is Brick Lane Curry House, home of the P’hall of Fame Challenge. Phaal, for the uninitiated, is the world’s hottest curry, and admission to the P’hall of Fame requires finishing an entire order.

The author, with the chef at Brick Lane Curry House — who wears a gas mask to shield himself from the heat of the spices.

When I arrive with three friends, Ganesh, our waiter, gives me pointers on completing the challenge: Eat the curry as quickly as possible; go easy on the rice; and avoid water, since drinking increases the effects of spicy food by spreading capsaicin, the active component of chili peppers, through the mouth.

At our table for four, only my friend Adam and I brave the phaal. I order mine with tofu, and Adam orders his with chicken. Lyndsey orders saag paneer, and Marc orders chicken vindaloo. Vindaloo is another spicy curry, but comparing it to phaal is like comparing Extra-Strength Tylenol to cocaine.

When the Travel Channel’s “Man v. Food” featured the Brick Lane P’hall of Fame Challenge, every diner in the restaurant gathered to watch, chanting, “Man versus curry! Man versus curry!” Adam and I enjoy no such fanfare. Our cheering team consists of Marc and Lyndsey, whose conversation sounds something like this:

Marc: I think Diana’s going to finish.

Lyndsey: I think Adam will.

(A few minutes pass.)

Marc: Looks like they both might.

Lyndsey (yawning): Great.

Marc: I would never do that. Unless I had a gun to my head.

Lyndsey: I’m so bored. When can we talk about something besides curry?

Personally, I wish they would stop talking about anything. Their voices only aggravate my agony. The heat in my mouth feels like lava, and I go a bit deaf as my ears fill up with a high-pitched ring. Halfway through my meal, I call upon my yoga practice to help get me to the finish line.

“It’s mind over matter,” I tell Adam, swallowing a fiery chunk of tofu. “And breathing. It’s all about breathing.”

“I’m channeling my masculinity,” he replies, glancing at my food, which is disappearing more quickly than his. I watch a drop of sweat slide down his temple.

The author with her Brick Lane victory certificate, proclaiming her a “Phaal Curry Monster.”

When I finally finish my phaal, I feel as though I’m encased in a cocoon. I observe the other diners and the exposed brick walls from a delirious distance.

“I think I’m high,” I say, as Ganesh rewards Adam and me with free beers and certificates of induction into the P’hall of Fame.

Despite achieving a higher state of consciousness at Brick Lane Curry House, by the next day, I’ve already convinced myself that the phaal was a cakewalk. I’m ready for a greater challenge. An Internet search convinces me that for the hottest food in all five boroughs, I’ll have to go to Sripraphi in Queens, where ordering my entrée “extra spicy” won’t suffice. The servers at Sripraphi are sick of puffed-up Americans claiming high heat tolerance and then sending their food back, declaring it inedible. In response, they’ve instituted a “no exchange” policy on their hottest dishes.

Diners on Chowhound.com’s outer borough message board suggest ordering an entree “pet mah,” which is Thai for “very spicy,” or “phet phet,” which means roughly the same thing. But other diners argue that those code words are yesterday’s news. “If you like your food HOT,” one commenter writes, “and I mean REALLY, REALLY HOT, ask for it ‘bomb.’”

On Friday night, Sripraphi hosts a mix of Thai and American diners. My spice-averse dining companion, Elana, orders chicken saté with peanut sauce. I order drunken noodles, then lock eyes with the waitress, raise my eyebrows meaningfully, and add, “Bomb.”

“What?”

“I want it bomb.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bomb!” I say. “Pet mah? Phet phet?”

The waitress looks me up and down, her eyes narrowed. “You’re not allowed to send it back.”

“I won’t.”

She shrugs and collects our menus.

“Hot as you can make it.” I grin bravely. “I can handle it!”

She raises an eyebrow, as if I’ve just announced that I’m ready for big-girl underpants.

Sripraphi’s drunken noodles — “bomb” style.

Maybe she doesn’t take me seriously, or maybe Thai food isn’t as hot as Indian food, or maybe the blend of ten spices that Brick Lane uses is unsurpassable. But compared to the phaal, my noodles are about as spicy as aspic.

Elana swipes a piece of cauliflower from my plate and takes a cautious bite. “You don’t think that’s hot?”

“It’s hot,” I say. “But it’s not…hot.” I’m starting to feel like a male movie star or a governor, dissatisfied with even the most beautiful strippers.

I know what I need. I hoped my quest wouldn’t come to this, but I’m resigned: To achieve the spice high I really crave, I will have to eat a ghost chili, straight up.

Grown in India, the bhut jalokia, or “ghost” chili — so called because whoever eats one will want to die to escape the pain — is the world’s hottest pepper. Even the tiniest sliver can render a hot sauce nearly unfit for human consumption. Ghost chilies are so potent (four hundred times spicier than Tabasco sauce) that the Indian military uses them in biological weapons. YouTube offers a smattering of bhut jalokia home videos: A man takes one bite and compares his agony to that of a woman in labor. Another man rocks back and forth on the floor, curls up on his couch in a fetal position, then, hours later, moans that he needs to go to the emergency room.

I ask Adam, my phaal partner, to join me in a bhut jalokia tasting. He asks me if I’m insane, but when I show up at his apartment with a bag of dried ghost chilies from Kalustyan’s, he nibbles one with me. Our mouths are instantly searing.

Ten minutes later, however, the burn has decreased, and I’m feeling let down.

“Adam,” I say, “I’m going to eat a whole one.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“That one little bite was child’s play!”

“You could get ulcers.”

I pluck a pepper from the bag and bite the whole thing off its stem.

“Ulcers!” Adam repeats. But then he eats one, too.

The heat makes me lightheaded. “Holy God,” I say.

Adam nods. “That’s hot. Wow.”

The pain intensifies second by second,

becoming so fierce that I’m soon writhing in my chair. I try to stay calm, but instead of breathing slowly, I find myself sucking air through my mouth to cool my tongue. This strategy, though, only worsens the burn, as does sticking my tongue out and fanning it with my hand. Whimpering doesn’t help, either. After fifteen minutes, Adam and I give up. We sit in our chairs, stunned.

Finally, Adam cracks us each a cold beer. I press my tongue to the bottle. Of course, beer also worsens the burn. I consider jumping to my feet and running through the apartment like a person on fire, screaming, “Help me!” But nothing can help me now. Eating a ghost pepper is not a mistake that can be undone. The only solution is general anesthesia.

I’m about to tell Adam to push me out the window when he asks if I feel sick.

“No. Why?”

By way of response, he runs for the bathroom.

I wait in my chair, finishing off my beer,

wondering if I should be jealous that he’s vomiting. Would throwing up bring some relief, or merely provide a fresh wave of fire?

Adam returns. I pause in fanning my tongue to study him. He looks shaky.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Then I resume my tongue fanning.

Within thirty minutes, the burn starts to cool. This is a pleasant surprise, because in the YouTube videos, the chili-eating men (and they are always men) suffer for hours. I chalk up our good fortune to having eaten the slightly tamer dried version.

“I feel awesome,” I say, blissed out on a full-throttle body buzz. I’m sitting in lotus, as if preparing to levitate. Life is groovy. But Adam’s cheeks are still drained of color, and sweat pastes his hair to his temples. I try to make a sympathetic face, but Adam’s one of those jock types who’s built of solid muscle. He’s a guy who’s not above flexing, or above mocking me for being a vegetarian. So I secretly find his suffering funny.

A few hours later, walking home, I’ve all but forgotten the ghost chili. After getting sick, Adam made a full recovery and went out for wings to reclaim his masculinity. I thought we were in the clear. But true to its name, the ghost returns to haunt me. More accurately, it punches me in the gut while I’m heading south on Central Park West. I sit heavily on the curb and rest my forehead on my knees. I feel sweat dampen my upper lip.

I call my mother from my cell phone. “I ate the world’s hottest pepper with my friend Adam, and I’m dying.”

“Why would you do that?” she asks, alarmed. “Lie down! Drink water!”

I imagine trying to combat the ghost with water. The ghost laughs, winds up, and socks me in the digestive tract. I moan and hail a cab.

At home, I chew Pepto-Bismol tablets, lie in bed, and squirm for an hour and a half until the pain finally begins to subside. I promise the ghost that I will never again eat spicy food. I’m reminded of mornings when I have promised some other invisible force that I will never again drink vodka if he’ll please, please let me live through my hangover.

Later that night, talking to Adam, I’m ashamed to admit that ultimately, the ghost reserved its worst torture for me.

“That sucked,” Adam says. “I have no desire to ever eat one of those things again.”

“But that buzz! I had such a fabulous buzz.”

Adam pauses. Then he asks, “Why am I craving phaal?”

I think about the phaal we ate and my mouth waters. “I am, too,” I say. “This is sick.”

We decide to return to Brick Lane Curry House soon. My spicy-food-abstinence oath is as hollow as my recurring alcohol-abstinence oath. And New York City, peddling the world’s hottest pepper, requiring spicy-food code words, and encouraging its residents to fry their tongues, is the ultimate enabler.

Diana Spechler’s debut novel, “Who By Fire,” is available now through Harper Perennial. For more information, go to dianaspechler.com

One of the best things about living in New York City is choice. From bars to entertainment to variations on Famous Original Ray’s Pizza, New York offers limitless alternatives. So big is this metropolis that it even offers sports fans a choice of professional franchises in all four major sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—a situation unrivaled anywhere else in America.

People from smaller burgs across the country often have no choice. They are born into their team loyalty, tied to it like medieval serfs bound to the land. And just as a life of backbreaking labor in the fields entails endless suffering, so too does being an obligatory fan of a team like the Cleveland Browns or the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the case of Browns fans, the heartache has even included the relocation of the franchise. At least a medieval peasant in England rarely had to face the prospect of his villiage moving to Flanders.

There are even Americans whose geographic remoteness means they essentially have no home team. People in the Great Plains states are as far from a major-league sports franchise as they are from decent Thai food. And what kinship does someone from Pierre, South Dakota, feel with teams in Kansas City or Minneapolis, the closest cities with major sports franchises, but which are still as far from them as New York is from New Brunswick, Canada? And that’s not even the most extreme example. What about people in Alaska? Do they root for Seattle teams because they’re in the same hemisphere? Alaskans may be able to see Russia from their houses, but they’d have to be in orbit to make out Washington State.

If the upside of choice is having a choice, however, then the downside is having to make a choice. How do New Yorkers choose between Yankees and Mets, Giants and Jets, Knicks and Nets, or the hat trick of Rangers, Devils, and Islanders in hockey?

The equation here is complicated by the fact that so many New Yorkers are transplants from elsewhere in the U.S., or immigrants from other parts of the world. American transplants often maintain their loyalty to the sports teams they grew up with. You can see them at Citi Field or Giants Stadium wearing their hometown colors with pride or prickly defensiveness, depending on the quality of the team. Given the relative success of most New York sports franchises, those transplants who do switch loyalties tend to have the sort of bandwagon mentality that will no doubt guarantee them success in whatever field of endeavor brought them to New York in the first place.

Immigrants, meanwhile, tend to either adopt local teams out of a desire to assimilate, or spend their time wandering the streets looking for a bar that shows rugby matches.

Native or long-term New Yorkers, meanwhile, wind up with the enviable choice of rooting for perennial winners or sometime winners, since every current major New York sports franchise has won national championships. As romantic as the notion of a lovable loser is, the closest New York can come these days is a lovable just-occasional winner. Still, if there are no true long-term underdogs in New York, there are teams that are occasional dogs, and the reasons for choosing to support these longer shots are varied. Sometimes it’s a yearning to identify with the closest thing New York can provide to a dark horse. Long-time New Yorker Mike Batistick has family roots in Cleveland and chose to support the Mets and the Jets over the more dominant Giants and Yankees because, as he put it, “My teams have always sucked.” It’s a relative sucking, compared to Cleveland, but in a city that loves its winners, you take what you can get.

Family tradition also often plays a role, in a positive or negative sense. Kris Lo Presto grew up on Staten Island and became a Giants fan because of family ties: “I wanted to stick it to my old man,” says Lo Presto. “He’s a Jets fan.”

For the choice that truly sheds light on the psychology of one of the world’s most complex cities, though, you have to look toward baseball, which revolves wholly around the looming presence of the New York Yankees. The gravitational pull of the Bronx Bombers affects everything in the sports cosmos, and their influence and power inspire the same awe, loyalty, and resentment as the city they represent. It’s almost impossible, therefore, to be a Mets fan without consciously not being a Yankees fan. As Batistick puts it, rooting for the Yankees is “like rooting for Microsoft.”

However you feel about them, the Yankees are impossible to avoid—they’re the Duane Reade drugstores of New York sports. Die-hard Yankees fans have no qualms about backing a winner. Long-time fan Frank Cammarano probably sums up the Yankee fan sensibility best with the quote, “winning is always good,” a sentiment that should probably be posted on every sign in New York City.

If it’s hard to find an offset to Yankee swagger in the current roster of New York sports teams, a perfect one exists in our nostalgic past. The Brooklyn Dodgers counterbalanced steely Yankee dominance with an endearing futility that has outlived the departure of the team by over half a century. If there’s a stereotype of New Yorkers as infuriating and arrogant in the Yankee mold, there’s another popular image of longtime city dwellers as amiable, resilient, and long-suffering—the very image of the beloved “Bums” of Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Dodgers were so beloved that they have fans today who were born after the team ceased to exist—fans like attorney Jeff Minde, who maintains an expansive and affectionate shrine to his team on the web.

Minde inherited his love for the Dodgers from his father, Jack Minde, whose first-ever baseball game, on April 15, 1947, also happened to be the first major-league baseball game for Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier that day. During the 1940s and ’50s, the Brooklyn Dodgers lost six of seven World Series match-ups to the New York Yankees, managing to win only the 1955 contest. For Dodger fans like Minde, the Brooklyn Dodger/New York Yankee rivalry is ongoing, even if one of the rivals is not. Minde sums it up as a matter of class warfare. “It’s sort of like two Americas,” he says. “The Brooklyn Dodgers are the working guys, and the Yankees represent capitalist interests. They even wear pinstripes!”

The Brooklyn Dodgers have a continuing appeal that other long-gone sports teams simply don’t. Boston doesn’t pine for the departed Braves, Louisville doesn’t mourn its vanished Colonels, and Los Angeles seems to be thankful that all of its NFL franchises left town. But the legacy of the Dodgers continues—even in a town that already has a cornucopia of professional sports teams. It’s nice for New Yorkers to know that if they can’t live with the many choices they have, they also have the added option of living in the past.

Mukherjee, Johnson, Levin, Miller

In 2003, local musician Lloyd Miller was asked by his wife, a teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, to write and play some songs for her second grade class’ production of “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”

Miller found the show far more satisfying than performing for sparse crowds of jaded Williamsburg hipsters at one in the morning, and enjoyed the experience so much that he duplicated it soon after.

“I got some guys together and asked them to do a show of songs from the Gilgamesh show,” he says. “We did a kids show, and we got a really good response. So we decided to do another one, and we kept getting asked to do more.”

Seven years later, the band that evolved from those performances, the Deedle-Deedle-Dees, is one of the prominent bands on New York’s kids rock scene.

Within a genre that began with former Del Fuegos member Dan Zanes, bands have emerged over the past decade that play music for kids far evolved from the “Wheels on the Bus” claptrap previous generations of kids (and parents) had to endure.

The Dees consists of accomplished musicians who create songs that fascinate children, but don’t make parents want to poke needles in their ears, a la Barney the purple dinosaur. Their music blends rock, country, bluegrass, dixieland jazz, rockabilly, reggae and more, with lyrics that focus primarily on historical figures and events such as in the songs “Aaron Burr,” “Underground Railroad,” and “Nellie Bly.”

Miller, the band’s main songwriter, developed a love for writing historical lyrics while working on a film project.

“I was interning for a film company, and they asked me to read this book ‘Burr’ by Gore Vidal, and I came up with songs as I was doing all this research,” he says. “I would often have songs going around my head about obscure historical things, and I didn’t really have an outlet for them because if I was playing at some club in Williamsburg, it didn’t really fit into my set.”

While some might think that writing for children would restrict a band’s subject matter, Miller says the exact opposite applies.

“When writing for adults, my singer/songwriter stuff was always confessional, and my variety shows had a dirty comic element to them,” says Miller. “With the Dees, though, it was, ‘Oh, I’m performing for kids. I can write about whatever I want.’”

This sense of freedom for the band extends to the music as well.

“I feel like we change genres song by song,” says band member Chris Johnson, who plays piano, banjo, and several other instruments. “It never feels like we’re strictly a rock and roll band. We could play some form of jazz if we wanted to, or punk, or Cuban, or whatever. That’s one of the most appealing things about the band to me.”

The Dees’ latest CD, “American History + Rock & Roll = The Deedle Deedle Dees,” illustrates this throughout, segueing from the soothing island reggae of “Do the Turnout” to the dixieland clang of “Growl Growl”; from the hillbilly stomp of “Tub-Tub-Ma-Ma-Ga-Ga” to the country melancholy of “The Brooklyn Bridge Song.”

While the band already possesses a broad musical range — Miller switches off between acoustic guitar and stand-up bass; Johnson adds accordion, baritone ukulele, and more to the mix; and while Miller does much of the singing, most of the band contributes vocals — that range became even greater recently with the addition of guitarist Ari Dolegowski, a longtime friend of the band. Dolegowski was named an official member to augment the work of longtime Dees guitarist Anand Mukherjee, who’s been taking time off of late to focus on his newborn son.

“Ari brought a really important folky sensibility to the band,” says Dees drummer Ely Levin. “His knowledge of American bluegrass and klezmer adapts well to the kind of songs we’re playing now.”

New member Ari Dolegowski

“Ari’s a natural addition to the Dees, since everybody here is adaptable to different musical styles, and over the years I’ve found that that’s a very rare thing among musicians,” says Miller. “I played with one drummer I really liked [in the band’s early days], but he was only able to play music that sounded like Bob Seger or AC/DC. I’d try to play a song that was not ‘boom, boom, boom,’ and he wasn’t able to do it. These guys and Ari really get it when we shift gears. It’s odd — even among people who are highly trained, it’s very hard for musicians to shift gears.”

With this broad musical diversity, the band’s songs often evolve greatly from Miller’s initial concepts.

“When I come up with a song, it comes to me in my head sort of fully formed,” says Miller. “Then I bring it to them, and it takes on a life of its own. We have a song on our most recent album called ‘Party Girl’ that was a very rootsy, Band-ish, harmonica and acoustic guitar kind of tune. But then we started jamming on it, and it took on this whole new life. Ely started playing this beat, and I was playing a G, and then Muk [Mukherjee] started playing a G?5dim9 with a ?12 or something, and it turned into a pseudo Afro-pop song.”

In addition to the music itself, Miller creates aspects of the show specifically for kids to latch onto.

“A couple of years after I started the Dees, I started teaching toddler classes, and I’d find that there are certain songs that kids really connected to immediately, and certain songs that would make them drift,” says Miller. “So now, I think of something that will physically involve kids in the music. We have this song called ‘Nellie Bly’ where kids do a call and response with us. Another song, ‘Henry Box Brown,’ has a motion where the kids hold onto their legs and pretend they’re in a box. We also have a song about Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi [“Tub-Tub-Ma-Ma-Ga-Ga”], where the kids have a dance for each of those people. There’s this immediate thing they connect with.”

Kids also connect with topics that reach beyond the simplicity that accompanies much of the genre.

“A lot of kids music has to do with the experience of being a child from the point of view of a child, like, ‘I’m so scared, it’s my first day of school,’” says Miller. “That never had any interest for me. It’s a selfish thing, I can write about what I want — quirky stuff.”

This sensibility helps give the Dees their individuality, setting them apart from much of the kids music scene.

“We write what we want to write, and it’s not specifically for kids,“ says Miller. “I’ve had a number of conversations with other children’s musicians where they’re like, ‘I’m doing this thing, and kids are gonna like it.’ That’s not the way we think.”

“We never talk about kids and their reactions to our music,” says Johnson.

The band’s avoidance of pandering extends to their appearance, as they shun childish presentations such as the bright red, yellow, and blue of acts like The Wiggles.

“I’ve heard from a number of parents, and the thing that’s unique to us is that [parents] like being able to see a real band during the day,” says Miller. “They like that we don’t wear primary colors.”

“It doesn’t feel like we’re overly marketing

ourselves,” says Levin. “We’re just an actual band doing what we do. We’re not trying to brightly color ourselves to get a kid’s attention, and I think adults understand that.”

“There’s definitely a goofy element to our shows,” says Miller, “but there’s also Muk, who often used to play wearing sunglasses, and had no interaction with the crowd whatsoever. I remember people talking about him and being like, ‘It’s so great to have a guitarist who’s like a real guitarist — the guy who’s untouchable.”

“And, we’re legitimately hungover, just like real bands,” adds Johnson. “It doesn’t work against us.”

The band does make one concession to kiddie showmanship with their band nicknames, which are derived from historical figures. Miller is known on stage as Ulysses S. Dee, Johnson is Booker Dee, Levin is Otto von Dee, Mukherjee is Innocent Dee, and Dolegowski is Moby Dee.

Given their unique approach to multigenerational music, the Dees see themselves as carving out their own niche.

“A lot of the opportunities for kids music right now are in preschool,” says Miller. “The goal of a lot of bands is to be on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, and that’s not what the Dees do at all. Those aren’t places that would have any interest in us.”

As such, the band has been designing events around their particular strengths, including a monthly series of Saturday morning shows at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn that include child participation and guest musicians such as cast members from the Broadway show “Fela.”

“It’s a Dees concert, but the structure of the show is a variety show,” says Miller. “So we have a host who’s a kid, a special guest who gets interviewed, an author who reads a book, or a musician who plays a song. Every month we have something different.”

Each of the Knitting Factory shows revolves around a theme. In March it was women’s history, in April it was baseball, and in May it was Fela Kuti and protest music. The show returns from its summer break on September 11 with a special two-hour show celebrating the release of “Many Hands,” an album that raises funds for Haiti featuring the Dees, Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants and more.

Miller sees the shows as the template for a possible television pilot that might also wind up as clips on YouTube, but the band is quick to point out that TV stardom is far from their goal. The Deedle-Deedle-Dees simply want to make music that several generations can enjoy, and hopefully inspire some kids along the way to do the same.

“We approach this as musicians who love just about every type of music you can imagine, and also try to make it interesting for music heads to listen to,” says Johnson. “Musicians could hopefully listen to this and be like, ‘Yeah, I dig what that drummer’s doing. I dig those chord changes.’”

“We’re like The Velvet Underground,” adds Levin. “We want every kid who listens to us to wanna be a musician.”

The Deedle-Deedle-Dees play Fort Greene Park on July 28, and the Knitting Factory on September 11. For more information, go to thedeedledeedledees.com.

Larry Getlen is the Editor-in-Chief of City Scoops Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/larrygetlen.

1. In order to purchase a key to the privately held Gramercy Park, you need to meet which two requirements?

A. Live in a building that faces the park
B. Be the descendant of a key holder
C. Pay an annual fee
D. Write an essay about what exclusivity means to you

2. What was Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park named after?

A. Prized coating from historic-monument fish and chip shop
B. Artillery battery stationed there first by the Dutch and later by the British
C. Most ecologically damaging component of former landfill on the site
D. The “Assault and” was dropped following a city council vote in 1963

3. If you wanted to play hipster kickball on Tuesdays, you would take yourself to

A. McCarren Park
B. Fresh Kills Park
C. Red Hook Park
D. If I wanted to play hipster kickball, I’d stab myself with a bottle opener

4. How did Union Square get its name?

A. Named after labor unions who held the first Labor Day parade there in 1882
B. Named after the union of the thirteen states in 1776
C. Named after the union of Broadway and the former Bowery Road
D. Named after “squares” who very politely protested against beatniks in 1963

5. Which of these is a real park in Queens?

A. Preston Q. Mosholu Park
B. Doughboy Park
C. Flushing Meadows-Budweiser Park
D. Queens has parks?

6. In which New York park can you find the fountain from the credits of “Friends”?

A. Central Park
B. On a sound lot in Los Angeles — and don’t let a cabbie tell you otherwise
C. Wait, that show was set in New York?
D. Central Perk isn’t a real coffee shop?

7. Harlem River Park is home to which of the following?

A. The Crack is Wack Playground
B. The West Harlem Polo Club
C. The tallest tetherball pole on the eastern seaboard
D. The Heroin is Harrowin’ Memorial Seesaw

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) is a quizmistress, spelling bee host, and professional nerd who recently premiered a one-woman show about punctuation.

Answers: 1. A and C 2. B 3. A (brooklynkickball.com) 4. C 5. B 6. B 7. A

The garden at Le Jardin Bistro. Photo by Guillaume Plecy.

The garden at Le Jardin Bistro could be a sun-dappled courtyard almost anywhere in France, covered as it is by a trellis adorned with grape vines that also scale the surrounding buildings.

That French feeling is reinforced by the well-executed, traditional bistro fare, such as toast with a creamy pate de foie gras that arrives warm enough to melt the fat, a boneless poached salmon special with nary an imperfection in its chilled pink flesh, or a cool and vaguely tomato-inflected steak tartare.

Finish with the tarte tatin, a caramelized apple tart served warm atop custard with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream. Dinner for two, with wine, coffee and dessert, will run $120-$150, tax and tip included.

The garden at the modern Italian ViceVersa echoes the sparse interior decor, with red paving blocks, statues at one end, and candlelight when the sun sets.

The pasta at ViceVersa is commendably light and served with hard-to-resist accoutrements. The ravioli is stuffed with a smooth goat cheese and served with mushrooms and truffle oil, while the “Strangled Priest” pasta features a rich duck ragout lurking beneath.

There are also seafood choices aplenty, including a seared salmon coated with sesame seeds and served with horseradish sour cream; giant, super-sweet yet salty prawns served with meaty cannellini beans; and daurade — a fleshy, slightly coarse Mediterranean fish — that is simply baked with lemon, giving it a buttery interior. Full dinner for two will run in the $150 range.

Surya offers a sedate decor under a canopied courtyard that holds about twenty, and menu items that abound with anything-but-sedate spices that increase in effect over the course of a meal.

While most dishes here have some degree of spiciness, you can test your mettle against the lamb vindaloo, which also comes in a chicken version. The meat is cubed and tender, but served in a ridiculously fiery sauce. If your eyes are still tearing after you’ve gone through two glasses of water (the worst thing you could do, by the way — see page 4 — Ed.), the waiter may kindly bring you a small plate of lemony yogurt that quickly counteracts the heat.

Chicken and lamb are the restaurant’s only meats, and are offered in various combinations. The hama chicken was baked in a clay oven and covered in a buttery sauce that was only mildly spicy, while boti kabab masala is lamb similarly cooked but served in a tomato cream sauce. Shrimp and salmon are also available.

Two people drinking beer can have a hot time here for $70 to $100.

Le Jardin Bistro
25 Cleveland Place
(btw Spring & Lafayette)
lejardinbistro.com
212.343.9599

Surya
302 Bleecker Street
212.807.7770
suryany.com

ViceVersa
325 West 51st Street
212.399.9291
viceversarestaurant.com

What does the future hold for New York City? This is a question endlessly speculated on by everyone from scientists to filmmakers, and their answers tend to break down into two categories: idealistic utopian visions, and apocalyptic nightmares. The idealistic visions tend to come from the scientists, while apocalyptic nightmares are more the province of moviemakers. This works out well, since it would be very disturbing if scientists were seriously predicting that giant mutant lizards would soon emerge from the East River to begin devouring New Yorkers. Conversely, nobody wants to watch a movie about happy people bicycling around a city powered by smart renewable energy sources. To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who predict a dour future if we don’t mend our ways, but they generally also offer a version of an eco-friendly paradise as an alternative, to entice us into changing our act.

Utopian visions of the New York of the future have changed over the years. In the ’50’s and ’60’s, future New York was portrayed as a technological marvel, in line with the confident hope that people of the eras to come would invest in scientific progress. The dominant modes of transportation, therefore, were to be either Jetsons-style hovercraft or the ubiquitous jet pack.

I’m all for flying vehicles, but I’m not sure I want them in the hands of New York City cabbies — and if they are, then they better have horns. And it’s never been made clear where these flying cars are going to park. Knowing New York, vast areas of the airspace over the city of the future will be zoned, “No hovering, 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., except 11:00 p.m. Sunday to 8:00 a.m. Monday, loading or unloading only. Alternate-side airspace cleaning regulations in effect.” As for jet packs, I’ve almost been killed enough times by restaurant delivery guys on bicycles. I don’t want to be mowed over at 1,500 feet by a guy with a rocket on his back carrying an order of chicken vindaloo.

Today’s utopian visions of future New York tend to focus more on the environmentally friendly aspects of tomorrow, as befits our more ecologically aware society. In these scenarios, many long-buried streams and springs throughout Manhattan have been restored, creating recreational space and another place for homeward bound nightclubbers to urinate. In today’s conceptions of tomorrow, everyone seems to get around by bicycle or streetcar, making me think that the world of tomorrow will bear an odd resemblance to the world of 1890, minus the bowler hats and handlebar mustaches. Actually, since the energy is generated by windmills, there’s an element of New York circa 1690 in there as well.

One thing the future visions from the 1960s and today have in common is that everybody seems to be deliriously happy. Whether they’re pedaling past a restored stream on the Upper East Side or jet packing to work at Spacely Sprockets downtown, everyone looks like they’re ready to party like it’s 2099. In the future, evidently, we’ll have already invented something to relieve the angst that radiates from the faces of present-day New Yorkers.

Cinematic depictions of New York’s future tend to be less benign. New York has been destroyed on film by everything from a poorly rendered beast from 20,000 fathoms to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s been struck by tsunamis, meteors, and a combination of flood and freezing that turns Manhattan into a skating rink punctured with skyscrapers. On film, future Gotham has become the stomping ground for melanin-deprived zombies, warrior gangs, and a grotesquely over-acting Kurt Russell. In that film, 1981’s “Escape from New York,” Manhattan has become a maximum security prison, home solely to immoral, hardcore criminals. That vision of future New York came true to a degree, but it’s just lower Manhattan, and the criminals work for Goldman Sachs.

My favorite futuristic depictions of our city are the ones in the History Channel series “Life After People” that show what would happen if all human beings suddenly vanished, from moments after the disappearance to several million years down the road. In the case of New York, the first effect would be no more lines at Whole Foods. Next, subway trains would stop running almost immediately. Wait — I think that’s already happening.

After two years with no people at all, the rent on a one-bedroom apartment would finally drop to under $2,000. Dogs would revert to the wild, so within a few years the Upper East Side would become home to roaming packs of shih tzus and bichon frises. Within 50 years, the city would become a decaying shell of abandoned buildings and collapsing infrastructure—kind of like the New York of the 1970s, but without the great bands.

After 250 years, the knishes on the abandoned food carts will begin to decay. The nice thing is that 500 years from now, work on the 2nd Avenue subway line will remain roughly on schedule. Styrofoam literally lasts forever, so ten million years from now that stack of white containers beside the deli steam table will still be there. If you ask me, so will the rigatoni. Finally, no matter how far into the future you go, Michael Bloomberg will have amended the term limits law to allow himself to remain as mayor.

(From left:) Robert Britton Lyons, Levi Kreis, Eddie Clendening and Lance Guest. All photos by Joan Marcus.

Unlike most jukebox musicals, Million Dollar Quartet doesn’t just roll through a roster of songs but actually weaves them seamlessly into a simple but passable plot: Sun Records owner Sam Phillips (Hunter Foster) — the “father of rock ‘n’ roll” — is trying to hold onto the company of young talent he has discovered. He’s already lost Elvis (Eddie Clendening) to RCA Records and doesn’t know that Johnny Cash (Lance Guest), a chart-topper by this point, is about to jump ship as well. Master guitarist Carl Perkins (Robert Britton Lyons), writer of “Blue Suede Shoes,” is bitter that Elvis stole his spotlight and credit and is hankering for another hit. And newcomer pianoman Jerry Lee Lewis (Levi Kreis) is eager to prove himself among these burgeoning recording legends.

Shortly before Christmas in 1956, these eventual rock ‘n’ roll greats mesh their personalities and their talents together in Memphis, singing gospel numbers  like “Down by the Riverside,” later released on a record. The show, however, also reimagines their meeting by throwing in many of their greatest hits, like “Hound Dog,” “Walk the Line,” and “Great Balls of Fire.” Elizabeth Stanley, playing the girlfriend Elvis is rumored to have brought to this session, rounds out the cast with memorable covers of her own, including a tastefully sultry “Fever.” The result is a truly captivating production — filled with both high-octane energy and soothing a cappella harmonies — showing without a doubt why such music became so iconic in American history.

As musicians and impersonators, the four leads of Million Dollar Quartet capture the essence of these Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers. Clendening as the young Elvis doesn’t quite sound exactly like the King, but channels enough good looks to be swoon-worthy. Guest as Johnny Cash is almost the opposite — not a complete lookalike but a deadringer in that deep bellow of a voice. I was most impressed, however, by Lyons, who tears up the guitar with virtuosic gusto; and especially Kreis, who steals the show by putting some serious steam into that piano AND for playing the likable, flamboyant goofball of the group. (That Tony nod for Best Featured Actor is well-deserved.) When the four pose and reenact the famous photograph taken of the musicians mid-jam, they create one of the most poignant moments on Broadway.

Levi Kreis, Eddie Clendening, Elizabeth Stanley and Hunter Foster

Throughout the production (directed by Eric Schaeffer), we get to know the fab four not only as musicians but as people. We see, for instance, a young unsure Elvis, timid in his singing style until Phillips mentors him. “Sing to me the way you sing to Jesus,” coaches the producer. These characterizations wouldn’t have been possible without a narrative, written by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux, that complements the music rather than competes with it. Flashbacks, asides, and scenes slide in and out of the rousing musical numbers easily and naturally, unlike the truncated style of Jersey Boys, which annoyingly didn’t finish songs because of intrusive dialogue. For a jukebox musical, Million Dollar Quartet has the best balance between music and narrative I’ve encountered so far. (And in a season of disappointingly book-less musicals, I was glad to see at least some sliver of humor and dramatic tension mixed in.)

Levi Kreis, Robert Britton Lyons, Dude, Lance Guest, Eddie Clendening

By the end of the show, the four stars throw it all down for an out-of-this-world, glitter-tux encore of greatest hits. My friend and I may have been sitting among a sea of salt-and-pepper hair in the audience, but everything about the atmosphere at this point felt insanely youthful and unbridled. A woman in front of us waved her hands in the air. People clapped and sang along. Jaws hung open at the backwards guitar playing and other crazy shenanigans. In these moments, we see the magic of an era in all its glory — more so than in any other rock musical also nominated for a Best Musical Tony this year (American Idiot and Memphis). Phillips, with the wisdom of a visionary, said it best: “This rock ‘n’ roll thing ain’t a fad — it’s a damn revolution.” Million Dollar Quartet makes you believe every word.

4/5 Stars

*************

Million Dollar Quartet has an open-ended run at the Nederlander Theater (41st street between 7th and 8th). Tickets: $45-125.