Uptown Takes Broadway Spotlight

There's a great article in the Tribune about how Broadway/New York is featuring two plays about Broadway/Uptown, and how our little community is taking center stage:

Star turn for Uptown: Thanks to 'Donuts' and a megawatt 'Steady Rain,' Montrose is about to intersect in a big way with Broadway -- the one in Manhattan

You could call it coincidence. Or something in the air. Either way, the Broadway spotlight this fall is going to land as never before on the streetscape of one particular city. In fact, that attention is going to land on one particular neighborhood of one particular city. Prepare, Uptown, for your double-barreled Broadway moment.

Further in the article is this lovely description:

"Uptown really is as it was," says Uptown Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th). "Apartment hotels. Grand architecture. Entertainment venues. Over the top. In your face. A port of entry for different waves of immigrants and refugees, some of whom always remain. It is a sensational place to people-watch. You can be whomever you want to be here. Yet people who have lived here always seem to come back to get married."

Uptown is a neighborhood of sharp cultural contrasts. It is parochial and internationalist; friendly and edgy; neighborly and lonely. Gentrification is always in the air, but perennially tentative. And its outsize streets convey a certain anonymity, a key factor in two new plays that have urban change as important themes. "Up here," says Smith, "you really don't know with whom you are rubbing shoulders. Everybody's here."

Read the entire article here - and play "where is it really" about the locations in the dramas.