New Yorkers Turn Out in Droves to Welcome Obamas to NYC ---pix--->

It's a date! President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle make first visit to New York City

==snip==

“I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished,” the president said in a statement an aide read to the press.

After dining a little more than two hours at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant touted by New York magazine as a “seminal Greenmarket haven” that features food grown by chef and owner Dan Barber on his upstate farm, the president and first lady headed to the Belasco Theater to make curtain call for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

The play by August Wilson is about black America in the early 1900s, with residents of a boardinghouse recalling their migration from the sharecropping farms of the South to the industrialized North.

As the motorcade left the West Village and drove up Sixth Avenue to the theater, crowds of people, at times about eight deep, gathered on the sidewalks of the blockaded streets to wave as the Obamas passed. Some cheered. Cab drivers opened their doors and stood on the frames of their taxis to glimpse the president and first lady.

***

Before traveling to New York, the Obamas watched daughter Malia’s soccer game for an hour Saturday morning.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/theater/reviews/17turn.html

Wilson’s Wanderers, Searching for Home
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By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 17, 2009

Great works of art often tote heavy baggage. Yet the revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” a drama of indisputable greatness, feels positively airborne. Much of Bartlett Sher’s splendid production, which opened Thursday night at the Belasco Theater, moves with the engaging ease of lively, casual conversation.

Some part of you, though, is always aware that there’s a storm whipping within and around the breezy talk, a gale-force wind that picks up and scatters people as if they were dandelion seeds. That wind is cold, uncaring history, propelling an entire population of men and women, only 50 years out of slavery, as they try to find footholds on a land that keeps shaking them loose.

Set in 1911 and the second chapter (chronologically) in Mr. Wilson’s 10-play cycle of the African-American journey through the 20th century, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is about nothing less than the migration and dispersal of a race and culture, searching for an identity and home. At the same time this play, which takes place in a boardinghouse in the Pittsburgh neighborhood called the Hill, feels cozy, gossipy and domestic.

Its characters, embodied by one of the strongest ensembles in town, seem reassuringly knowable instead of fancy figures in an allegory. This is true even when they’re describing mystical visions involving bones walking out of the ocean.

An old man named Bynum Walker (Roger Robinson, in a marvelously centered performance) speaks of finding himself in a dreamland where the everyday is so magnified that sparrows are as big as eagles and then seeing, but with new eyes, the world restored to its normal proportions. That’s the scale of “Joe Turner” too. It is magically larger than life and exactly, precisely life size. So is Mr. Sher’s interpretation, which seems to take place in both a well-scrubbed, modest sitting room and a fairy-tale forest.

Though it was Mr. Wilson’s favorite among his plays — and that of many critics (including me) — “Joe Turner” was not a raging popular success in its first New York incarnation. Lacking the more obvious melodrama and sentimentality of his two Pulitzer Prize winners, “Fences” (1987) and “The Piano Lesson” (1990), it opened on Broadway in 1988, squarely between those two longer-running works, and lasted for 105 performances.

It would be a shame if this production doesn’t find a wide and enthusiastic audience. It’s an (almost) unconditional pleasure to watch. (I had problems with some overly mobile scenery, but more on that later.) Unlike many of the later Wilson plays and other high-reaching American dramas of social magnitude, “Joe Turner” seamlessly blends the ordinary with the extraordinary.

Much more than, say, O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh,” which similarly presents an array of American dream seekers in a closed setting, “Joe Turner” keeps its symbols up its sleeves instead of wearing them like cufflinks. This play disarms its audiences with folksy chitchat and homespun comedy before it dawns on them that what they’re watching — in its subliminal sweep and symmetry — is close to epic poetry.

==more==

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/nyregion/31obama.html?_r=1

==snip==

Hours before the show began, the Secret Service cordoned off the entire block of 44th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Broadway, where the Belasco is located. Outside the theater, as the actors in the play began to trickle in, one of them, Chad L. Coleman, signed autographs and spoke with reporters, wearing a broad smile and an Obama cap.

“There are no words for it,” he said. “I told people I got two in one: a Broadway debut and the president attending.”

Ernie Hudson, one of the show’s stars, insisted that the cast did not have butterflies.

“We’re all very excited,” he said. “You really can’t do anything differently. You always do your best show possible.”

The Obamas arrived at the theater in a black stretch limousine just before 8 p.m., but lines at the metal detectors delayed the show more than 45 minutes.

When the Obamas walked down the aisle to take their seats, “it was utter pandemonium,” said Tim Johnson, who was in the audience, and described a scene of shouting, clapping and a long standing ovation.

Meryl Streep sat a few rows in front of the Obamas, said Mr. Johnson, 52. “No one seemed to notice,” he said.

About 11:30 p.m. , the Obamas emerged from the theater. The president waved to a crowd waiting outside, and shook the hand of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.