I came back this week from a week-long holiday in
New York and it was absolutely fantastic!! I'd been once before and it was a horrible experience so I'd always been reluctant to go back but the pull of Broadway finally made me give in and I am glad it did.
I honestly had a GREAT time thanks to wonderful company, largely good weather, nice food (mostly different types of burgers, smoothies, and bagels), shopping (everything is so cheap there! Especially during the Memorial Weekend sales), a cool movie + TV locations bus tour (our tour guide was rather cute too and Matt Bomer's double on
White Collar hehe) and an astonishing amount of 9 Broadway shows in just 6 of the 7 days we were there. We also wandered around a lot to see touristy things (in fact on the last day I walked for 6.5 hours straight from the Upper West Side down to Battery Park and back - 200+ blocks!).
As our trip mostly comprised of seeing shows, some brief comments on the ones we ended up seeing:
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The Book of Mormon: Not quite as good as the West End production but still super fun and it was great to see some of the original cast members from the show do their thing
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Kinky Boots: Fantastic, despite the dodgy British accents. I really, really loved it. Such a sweet story, great voices and the number before the interval was done really neatly with dancing on moving conveyer belts. I'm currently obsessed with the soundtrack
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Newsies: The show I'd been most looking forward to (for over a year in fact) and I was not disappointed. Phenomenal choreography and music. We were sitting front row of the mezzanine (circle) which really is the best way to see it from as a lot of things happen higher up on the stage.
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Pippin: I thought the circus type first act was spectacular but it fell flat in the second half and the book really let it down. I wondered what the point of it all was? Still, worth it for the the first act which was really something else for musical theatre.
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Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark: Utter rubbish and a waste of my time! So regret going, would much rather have seen one of my top shows again...
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Peter and the Starcatcher (off Broadway): This was the only play I saw in NYC as the rest were musicals. This prequel to
Peter Pan was absolutely fantastic. Great story, very clever staging and use of props and incredibly funny too; easily one of the best plays I've ever seen (right up there with
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).
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Nice Work if You Can Get It: Wonderful old skool musical; sweet, funny and I had no idea Matthew Broderick had such a lovely singing voice.
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Murder Ballad (off-Broadway): Brilliantly new sung-through musical. Great songs and such a fantastic cast (Caissie Levy, Will Swenson, Rebecca Naomi Jones & John Ellison Conlee)! The staging was very different too, as it looked just like a bar with seats all around and most of the action taking place on the bar and the pool table, very different and fun.
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Annie: I was very impressed by lead Lilla Crawford as she had a fantastic voice, and bonus, Jane Lynch was Miss Hannigan! She was quite good, didn't expect that.
From the shows I saw I would most recommend
Kinky Boots,
Newsies and
Peter and the Starcatcher which I thought were all fantastic in their own way and I'd happily see them again (London transfers please!). I also loved the free playbills and really missed them at the West End shows I saw the last few nights.
For those of you who have me on Facebook, I've slowly been going through my nearly 1,000 photos and am putting them up in batches ^_^
I would love to visit Melvich Beach and Smoo Caves! Ahh maybe one day...
www.pagetostagereviews.com 
I know this will sound mad but it is like a French Italy and this was my favourite place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_E ... _(Seville) plus I really liked it as not many people spoke English but you can get by using your schoolgirl French as they have very similar words.
