chuckro | Off-Broadway Double Feature

Spent much of today with my mother, starting with the lunch buffet at Jewel of India, which was delightful as usual. Then we did a double feature (because my mother is a madwoman) of the Gazillion Bubble Show at 2:00 and The 39 Steps at 3:00. (My mother knows all the cheap-tickets tricks. Every last one of them. Including bringing homemade cookies to the guy who runs the cheap tickets service.)

The Gazillion Bubble Show was a good kids show that we saw about 45 minutes of (though there was only about an hour of it anyway). It stars a Vietnamese woman who lived most of her life in Yugoslavia; apparently she and her husband hold a number of Guiness World Records for largest bubbles and most people enclosed in a bubble. Fun show for kids, and really impressive when you don't really remember anything about the horrid math involved in surface tension. Bubbles within bubbles, bubbles full of smoke, bubbles sticking on smoke rings, the stage covered in a snowfall of bubbles, a bubble hat that was given to a child in the audience, and giant bubbles around children. Impressive stuff.

The 39 Steps was based on the Hitchcock movie (complete with punny references to other Hitchcock films) that didn't take itself seriously in the slightest. They utterly destroyed the 4th wall, the scenery was chewed to pieces, the whole thing could be described as ham and cheese. I loved it. The only thing it was missing was Statler and Waldorf in the balcony.