I took my brother to New York over the weekend, and since he is studying theater we obviously had to go see some Broadway plays during our trip. I know there are some places near Time Square where you could buy theater tickets at a discount, and in fact the hotel we stayed at was next to one of those places. When we saw how long the lines were, however, even hours and hours in advance of any show time, we decided getting discount tickets was not for us. So, we just browsed through one of the Time Out guides to see what was playing and walked around to the theater box offices to see what was available at the cheapest prices. We got tickets to “Young Frankenstein”, the Mel Brooks play for Saturday night for $47 a piece and tickets to “Rent” for Sunday night at $55 a piece. Although our seats were way, way at back of the theater since we got the cheapest, our view and ability to enjoy the performances was actually quite excellent.

We were a little wary about “Young Frankenstein” since although it had won some awards the review we read called it “bloated” and “unfunny” and the word of mouth was also rather mixed. I thoroughly enjoyed it, however, as did my brother, and I thought it was quite funny. I will admit that the ending seemed contrived. My brother told me that this is a weakness of many of Mel Brooks’ works because he focused so intricately on the buildup of the plot that the endings are often rushed. I don’t know any better myself so I’ll reserve judgment until I become better acquainted with more Mel Brooks plays.

I had already seen a small, local production of “Rent” a few years ago, but my brother hadn’t seen it yet, and this was the play he was most dying to see since it was going to be ending its run in New York this September 7th after 12 years. So, we had to go. Compared to my first experience seeing “Rent”, the Broadway production had better acting and a more impressive set. It was definitely worth seeing again. My only real complaint about “Rent” is that sometimes the message gets lost because everything is being sung and the music is so loud it’s hard to discern what’s being said.