It seemed as if the subway station and Grand Central were even more mobbed than usual last Friday night! I didn't think of the-night-before-Halloween as a busy travel day, but my goodness, there were tons of people to fight through to make it to the train. Thankfully, my pals and I all found each other at the train's gate to ride up to Irvington. Normally, it's about a 45-ish minute ride, but we kept stopping because of a sick passenger in a train ahead of us. So it took us a bit over an hour to arrive, which was kind of a drag because it shortened our dinner/drink time. We went to a Mexican restaurant, La Chinita Poblana, near the theater. We figured we had enough time to eat, if we didn't dawdle, then get to the theater on time. Well, ha ha. The restaurant had recently been reviewed in the New York Times, so it was quite busy, though we did get seated right away. We ordered our margaritas and guacamole first thing, then our entrees. The drinks and guac were delicious, but we began to wonder where our food was. At about 7:45 (Carrie had a 8pm curtain), we asked our server to check on where our food was. She wandered into the kitchen, then wandered back out, but instead of coming back to our table, she went to the bar to talk to someone. We're guessing she was trying to find out what she should say to us about the delay in our food. She finally came over to us and said our food would probably arrive in about ten minutes. We said, well, that's not going to work. Can we just cancel it? The way she quickly agreed led us to believe that they hadn't even started making our entrees yet. I guess they just weren't prepared for the rapid increase in their business because of the good review. But still. At least the drinks were tasty.
We ran over to the theater and, as we entered, heard singing. I thought, wait, they've started already?! I should've taken the elevator, but instead we dashed up the stairs to the box office to get our tickets. Thankfully, the show itself hadn't started, there was some kind of pre-show music beforehand. Since we came in the middle of the pre-show, I'm not quite sure what was up. Maybe they were supposedly the 'warm-up band' for the prom? Because they did take the 'you're in the high school gym' theme pretty far. The pre-show speech asking us to turn off our phones and stuff were done in character by the musical's two teacher characters. This was maybe a little bit clumsy, I hate to admit. Referring to us as kids at an assembly didn't really work out all that well. But I guess it led us directly into the show...
Anyway, the cast was young and energetic and giving their all, but, as I said above, they were pretty hamstrung by the show itself. And the tempi of all the songs - WAY TOO SLOW. Slow does not make things scarier, it makes things longer and more boring. In my opinion, of course. The special effects were rather lackluster and since everything started on a crazy heightened level from minute one, there was nowhere for anyone to go. So, no escalating terror, no real suspense. Which is too bad.
Most of the strong feelings I got during the evening were directed at the woman sitting in front of us who brought her toddler with her. A TODDLER. A TODDLER DOES NOT BELONG AT A PRODUCTION OF CARRIE!!! I almost started crying, thinking of that kid seeing a mother beat up her daughter who started her period. I'm thinking that child will need some therapy when she enters puberty and she won't know why. And then they didn't leave at intermission! I thought, if that kid is still awake when Carrie's mother stabs her, I'm going to cover the kid's eyes myself!!! Thankfully, the kid was asleep. But I worried more about that little girl throughout the evening than I ever did about the characters on stage. I think that says the most about the production.
Afterwards, we went back to my dear friends' gorgeous apartment for some post-show thoughts, and had a great time just laughing, drinking wine and (sorry) replaying the parts of the show that didn't work for us. Like the stuffed body that flew across the room during the end scene where Carrie is killing everyone in the gym. Oh my. They should really rethink that. Anyway, we had a good time, even though we never had any dinner and we didn't enjoy the show as much as we might've hoped.
After breakfast, we drove around the beautiful towns looking at the fall foliage. We were going to go into Lyndhurst to drive by the castle and check out the beautiful nature, but they were charging $5 per person (not per car) to drive around the grounds, so we opted out. Instead, we drove through Tarrytown and then Sleepy Hollow. When we came upon the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, we decided to drive around and look at the beautiful scenery there. It's about 90 acres, set around a babbling brook and lovely, peaceful surroundings. We didn't do the walking tour, since we were on a bit of a schedule, but we did drive through some of the acreage and just kept exclaiming over how beautiful the area is. What a lovely spot for your final resting place. The graves were quite old, from what we could see, and there were also beautiful mausoleums and other architectural pieces around the grounds. I definitely want to go back and take the full walking tour to see things from up close. 
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