"The Ride" * USA - Fasten Your Seat Belts and Embrace the City
New York experience called “The Ride": Who’s onstage? Who isn’t? ...
(Photo by Emily Berl/The New York Times - “The Ride”: Passengers on this new theatrical bus tour wave to the Midtown throng, which waves back)
New York,NY,USA -The New York Times, by EDWARD ROTHSTEIN -October 14, 2010: ... The new bus ride/city tour/improv show/New York experience called “The Ride”: One business-suited passerby on 42nd Street was so intoxicated by the Broadway melodies being broadcast by our passing bus that he dropped his briefcase and leapt into a vaudeville tap-dance routine right out of a 1930s musical, a woman flashed us the other night on West 57th Street by lifting up her shirt, and a late-night deliveryman on East 43rd Street was so caught up by the passing tour’s blaring hip-hop soundtrack that he spun and flipped into a virtuosic break-dance routine... She broke into laughter after her feat, watching the transparent-sided bus, with its three rows of stadium seats mounted sideways like a portable theater, filled with shrieking passengers... In this, it turns out, she played right into the tour’s hands. So did we all. Because by the end of this 75-minute, 4.2-mile “Ride,” which is making its debut this week, the guides who had led us from West 42nd Street up to Columbus Circle and back had the bus singing a karaoke version of Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York” ...
(Photo by Emily Berl/The New York Times: Joe Cummings and Amanda Johns recreate Alfred Eisenstaedt's 1945 sailor-and-nurse photograph for passengers on "The Ride")
You don’t really know what to make of “The Ride” at first... Each night a crew of more than 60 technical people, street performers and tour-guide actors with improv-comedy experience tries to combine these diverse styles into an atypical tourist bus ride that costs $59 or $65, depending on the departure time. Plans are to run 364 days a year, with up to 156 rides each week... And this happened in the tour’s final moments, as “The Ride” featured a transparent busload of passengers waving and singing “New York, New York,” as listeners in the streets stared, watched, ran along or even, eventually, joined in. The street is quite a ride... Labels: art on buses, rare buses
posted by Unknown @ 11:37 AM
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