NYC Part Three, April 11 Posters, Theater

 Today we had a stay-home-and-read morning, but the rest of the day was busy.

We took the subway into Manhattan and made our way to the Poster Museum. It is a small museum that has thousands of posters, but limited space for exhibits. There were two exhibits on display. The larger was of travel posters advertising NYC. They were fabulous with lots of posters featuring early air travel as well as train travel. We took some photos of the early United Airlines posters with Otis in mind.

The second exhibit was devoted to just one poster artist, Dawn Baillie who is known for innovative posters for movies. She got her first break by designing the poster for Dirty Dancing. She broke a lot of the traditional rules about sizing of the photos on the page. An example would be Little Miss Sunshine with the top being just yellow. 

We lingered at the museum which is a quiet place for coffee/bathrooms in a busy city.

Then, we made a short walk to Mareluna Italian restaurant. Everything was good. We split an app of sauteed calamari and focaccia bread. Mark had pasta carbonara and Barbara had eggplant parmesan.

Then - off to the Irish Repertory Theater to see Philadelphia, Here I Come!, a play by Brian Friel. The play was fantastic - well acted, well written. But, even more of a treat was that our friend, Ciaran Byrne, was in it, playing a stuffy senator and an old priest. The play is set in 1962 in a fictitious village in Donegal. It premiered in 1964 in Ireland and came to Broadway in 1966 and was nominated for a Tony that year. It became the longest running Irish play in Broadway's history. It is now part of the curriculum in Ireland. The play centers around Gar who has tickets to go to Philadelphia to live with his aunt. His father is remote and silent. The love of his life married a richer man. But, he is torn by memories and hopes for some communication from his father. The play's cleverness revolves around two characters playing Gar simultaneously - one the public, quiet Gar and the other, the "private" Gar. The characters, played by David McElwee (public) and A.J. Shively were in synch and provided comedy and poignancy. 

Afterwards we gathered in the lobby and met 4 of Ciaran's friends from his tennis club. Then, we took an Uber home and went to bed around midnight!