An Ode to Broadway Bloggers
An Interview with Lucky and The Mick
Tell us about yourselves.
L: Well, I’m a writer and editor who’s lived in NYC for eight years. I’ve written for lots of different publications, online and off, about all kinds of topics – health, entertainment, fashion, and parenting, just to name a few. I started my first web site when I was 18 and became obsessed, and I’ve had so many different blogs and sites since then. I also currently run a travel blog, which is my heart and soul. Besides theater, travel is my passion. I grew up in Massachusetts where I did a ton of community theater, and I used to have a really intense Boston accent. Like, I couldn’t properly pronounce the letter R until I was 18. And of course, I fully support the most important Boston team — the New Kids on the Block.
M: Like Lucky, I’ve been running websites since I was a teenager—I built my first when I was fourteen, writing the code by hand in Notepad—and I basically haven’t stopped. I grew up on Long Island then moved to New York City for college a decade ago and besides a few months spent living in Dublin, my heart and soul have been here ever since.
After school I did a stint in Professional Services marketing (I know, that sounds dirty, but it’s really just Architecture) and today I’m the Creative Director at a Direct Marketing start-up. In other words, I design websites—and emails and display advertising—all day long at my real job, too. I also frequently fret about the precise placement of headlines and occasionally present at conferences on things like Social Media and Search Engine Optimization. In addition to being an epic loud-mouth with an affinity for sex jokes and toilet humor, I am a natural redhead.
You have aliases on your Blog – Why Lucky? Why The Mick?
L: Funny story about how we got our aliases. They go back to our teenage years when we were obsessed with the band Hanson. That’s actually how The Mick and I met. We were both running weird, popular, kind of mouthy Hanson web sites in the late 90s. Actually, if you combined those two web sites and made them about theater and not Hanson, you’d have The Craptacular. We have a mutual friend who knows us well, and she gave us our nicknames. Every time I went to a concert back then, I always got backstage, so our friend started calling me Lucky. (I realize that this sounds kind of salacious and filthy, but I promise you, nothing even remotely salacious was happening backstage at Hanson. Not that I saw, anyway.) The Mick got her alias from the same friend, probably because The Mick is really redheaded and Irish.
Then I’m pretty sure those nicknames are perfect! Why blog about Broadway?
M: It probably all started with Hair in the fall of 2009. I mean, Lucky and I both always loved theater, but something about that revival really struck a nerve, and we began to consume and discuss theater obsessively in a way we hadn’t done in years. Analyzing Gavin Creel’s every note and wondering at Aaron Tveit’s beautiful bum was taking up a calculable percentage of our days.
At the time, there really wasn’t a website out there where we could read about the kind of theater things we cared about. There was no one speaking our language and we knew we couldn’t be the only people who felt that way. So one weekend in the dead of winter we sat in a café mainlining coffee and brought The Craptacular to life. I always believed we could do something compelling, and that there was a totally underserved audience out there, but I don’t think either one of us had any clue where we’d be a year and a half later. It’s been a pretty wild ride.
It seems that Hair is forever reviving, or popping up somewhere! Where do you find inspiration for your blog posts?
L: It’s a semi-magical process wherein The Mick and I drink lots of wine, and talk obsessively about the same theater-related things over and over again until we’re totally sick of them. Then we choose which of those things aren’t totally fucking boring, and we write about them.
Lucky – how did it feel to be in The New York Times?
L: It was wicked cool! I had such passionate feelings about the topic, and it made me happy that the Times responded to that. And I’m a total Times fangirl. I started clipping out Times articles and storing them in huge boxes under my bed when I was 11. Like, imagine being an 11-year-old Aaron Tveit fangirl. Then you grow up, and on one crazy night at the club, you run into Aaron and you make out with him. It was like the journalistic equivalent of that. Really, though, as someone who loves writing and journalism, it was a trip.
My mouth totally dropped open and then I chuckled, because when you think about it – that statement makes perfect sense! Where do you go for your Broadway News?
L: We follow everything. I mean, everything. Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, TheaterMania, Playbill, random newspapers and Hollywood web sites, which sometimes have Broadway news. We obsessively consume media, basically. We talk to people who love theater and see a lot of theater, who sometimes give us tips. We keep our eyes and ears open in New York. The news is everywhere.
First Broadway show you watched? Where? When? Who starred in it?
L: My first Broadway show wasn’t on Broadway. Growing up in the Boston area, I really only had access to the big national tours that came through town. My mom took me to see Phantom in the autumn of 1992 at the Wang Theatre, which is so opulent and enormous. It seats nearly 4,000 people – an incredible thing by New York theater standards. I was 12, and we sat in the second to last row. I know every single person who was in it, because I memorized the Playbill. The amazing Kevin Gray starred as the Phantom, and Christine was an understudy – Dodie Pettit. She would eventually become Kevin’s wife. My second show was Miss Saigon at that same theater the next year. Jarrod Emick was Chris. I have never recovered.
M: I was celebrating my ninth birthday when I saw my first Broadway show—The Secret Garden. This was, of course, just about the perfect first Broadway show for a young girl who loved to read, and will probably always stand out in my memory as one of the finest theater experiences I can even imagine having. The full original cast was still intact at the time, so I was lucky enough to see Mr. Mandy Patinkin, as well as Rebecca Luker, Daisy Egan, Alison Fraser, and John Cameron Mitchell, to name just a few of the actors who lit up that stage. I’m fairly confident in saying that show is probably the reason I love theater so very much—it was so perfectly timed in my life, and so beautifully realized, that it totally made an addict of me in the best way possible.
The very talented ladies of – The Craptacular! Like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter, you will most assuredly not be disappointed! I didn’t think anyone could top the hilarity of C. J. Hanke, but this just might have.. just kidding! (Maybe…)
-Ashley, September 2011
