I feel like a broken record because I am always saying how much I love going to the shows at the Pantages and how much they have benefitted my life. Not only are they awesome entertainment, but they also give a sense of routine or normalcy with my life. When I’m going through a crazy time and I have a show coming up, I know I will take that time to go and that I’m going to have a great time. Or if I’m feeling down for one reason or another, I know the show is going to get me out and social and I’ll be in a better mood. I still can’t believe how much I get out of having my season tickets, but it always makes me so happy when I see a show coming up.
I’m going to write about this a bit out of order by talking about the show first. This time, the show we saw was “Summer” which is the jukebox musical about Donna Summer.
For most jukebox musicals, I know going into it that I will probably know a bunch of the songs even if I don’t know that I know them. Since I’m not a big music person, I expect that I won’t know songs by the name or artist. But they are familiar when I hear them and that’s exactly what happened this time. The show was good and I enjoyed the music, but I wish they had shared more about her life. I thought there was a lot of interesting stuff that was starting to be talked about but then didn’t go into them much further. But since the show was done without an intermission, there’s only so much you can put into a show without making it too long.
But before the show, Dani and I went to dinner at Wood & Vine. Going there is one of our favorite pre-show dinner locations and we were worried about what we were going to do when our shows move to the Dolby soon. When we sat down for dinner, we ordered and then looked at what restaurant options would be over there. There are a lot of chain restaurants so we wanted to find anything interesting and unique. We weren’t having much luck, but we decided that we would have some time to do the research. We wanted to focus on our awesome dinner at Wood & Vine instead of looking up other places.
We got some of our familiar favorites and some new things as well. The Cesar salad was so good! It was really garlicky which I love. We were debating getting another salad but decided to wait until after we had everything else. We also got the vegan risotto with mushrooms which was incredible. It had great seasoning and was very flavorful. The mac and cheese and pork are favorites of ours and I figured we’d get them because we always love them. And for dessert, we were torn on what to get and we shared a few of our favorites and said they could surprise us. We got the banana caramel and butterscotch, which were perfect ways to end the meal.
While we were eating, the manager Wally came over to talk to us. We love chatting with him before the show because he always shares fun things with us about what happened when he saw it or things we should look out for. He was the one who told us that there wasn’t an intermission and I was so grateful he told us before we were sitting in our seats. And we talked about what we were going to do when the shows move to the other theater.
Wally mentioned how there is the subway and I had completely forgotten about that until he mentioned it. There’s a stop right next to both theaters so it would be easy for us to do that. We also could take a rideshare from one place to the other. And there may be some sort of shuttle service that we could use too. Knowing all this made me feel so much better about our dinner options for the other shows because it wouldn’t be too hard to eat where we like to go and still make it to the other theater. We may have to do things a little earlier to make sure we have enough time, but that’s a minor change we would need to make. I would be much happier going to our favorite restaurants a little earlier than having to try new restaurants and maybe not enjoying them as much. Wally gave us a lot to think about and I’m so glad we discussed this so Dani and I can figure out exactly what we want to do.
We still have 1 more show at the Pantages before they switch. And then it will be a very different experience seeing a musical at the Dolby because we will be sitting in a different area than we are used to and it’s a much bigger theater. But I think that even in the new theater, the shows are going to make me just as happy as I am seeing them at the Pantages.
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