Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I bet there are a few of you out there who are in love and loving it. Instead of attempting to go out to any restaurant in New York on Saturday the 14th, where they will be charging double for everything, stay at home with your sweetie pie, and opt for a lovely night at the Algonquin on February 16th. There’s a complimentary martini in it for each of you, and you can snuggle together in the comfort of one of the city's most welcoming rooms and watch a lovely piece of theater unfold in your laps.
Glimpses of the Moon is a swell production – "swell" as in We’re a Couple of Swells (music by Irving Berlin and Lyrics by Judy Garland...and wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the wall for that collaboration...). A swell is a member of the hoi polloi, a fashionable and stylish person. There seem to have been a lot of them in the 1920s, which is when this story takes place. And the Algonquin is the perfect setting, albeit a little small in the midsection.
Everything begins when you arrive and are given a program with a reproduction of a J. C. Leyendecker illustration for Arrow Shirts circa 1923. That, plus the complimentary martini and the oak paneling, should put you in the proper frame of mind. Glimpses of the Moon is based on a novel of the same name by Edith Wharton. It is frothy and charming and slightly irrelevant by today’s standards, but it is oh, so engaging.
For one thing, there is an excellent cast of talented performers/singers who perform without the aid of microphones – gadzooks! The story is about a young couple who are more or less adopted by the very, very rich when they decide to wed (for money, not love). They have chosen marriage because it will give them a chance to buy time, living off the kindness of their traveling benefactors who love to have their empty mansions occupied, and by hocking the many wedding presents they receive. With the bought time the young husband will finish his book while the young wife will do not much more than hobnob with them that’s got.
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