Last weekend my sister and I took a quick day trip down to NYC to see Idina Menzel on Broadway in the musical If/Then. And it was incredible.

For those of you who might not know who Idina Menzel is (though at this point I have no how you wouldn’t) she is the voice - both singing and speaking - of Elsa in Disney’s Frozen. She also originated the roles of Elphaba in Wicked and Maureen in RENT on Broadway. In short? She’s pretty damn talented.

I’ve been lucky enough to see her in concert a few times in the past, but this was different. This time it was in a musical, it was on Broadway, and we had front row seats.

My sister is a discount ticket finding genius and she was able to score us two front row center seats to see the show. I have no idea how she does it but it’s pretty damn impressive.

We ended up driving all the way into Manhattan instead of parking in Greenwich, CT and taking the train in. We were closely monitoring the traffic on the way there and saw that we had a pretty clear shot all the way downtown so we decided to go for it. I had gone to this great website the night before called BestParking - NYC that showed us where all the public parking garages were and provided you with discounted coupons. Some garages even allowed you to make a reservation ahead of time online. We ended up parking in a garage about 4 blocks from Times Square for $17/12 hours. That’s an insanely cheap price for parking in that area.

After a 3 hour drive we were both looking for a place to use the restroom and we found ourselves at the back entrance to the New York City Public Library. Neither of us thought it was the main library since we went in via the small back entrance, but we decided to look around anyway. And man are we glad we did! The NYC Public Library is amazing. It’s old, it’s elegant, it’s full of history, and overall it’s pretty damn impressive.

Those of you who know me well know I’m a huge disaster movie nerd. Especially natural disaster movies - total sucker for those. And the NYC Public Library was one of the main filming locations for the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Look familiar?

We then met one of my sister’s college friends in Bryant Park for a late lunch before walking down to the theater. Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect. There were huge, long lines of people waiting to get in and be seated. We walked up to will call to get our tickets and almost immediately after they handed them to us the theater opened and we were the first people to enter.

Now I’ve never sat in the front row (let alone front row center) for anything before and it was quite the experience. We were so close and we had to look up for most of the show but it was so worth the occasional neck stiffness.

A brief synopsis of the show: The musical If/Then revolves around a newly divorced 38-year-old named Elizabeth (Idina Menzel), an urbanplanner who moves to New York City for a fresh start. In the beginning she meets her friends Kate and Lucas in Madison Square Park. While Kate suggests that Elizabeth start using the name “Liz” and seek out new experiences, Lucas suggests that she go back to her college nickname, “Beth,” and start making professional connections in the city. “Liz” stays in the park with Kate while “Beth” leaves with Lucas, and the remainder of the show depicts two paths that Elizabeth’s life could take (synopsis mostly taken from Wikipedia).

Here’s a video of Idina Menzel performing the song Always Starting Over during the 68th Tony Awards this year. Stunning as always.

The show was amazing. The whole cast was superbly talented and the story line is unique and captivating. The music is wonderful and in fact the whole show actually comprised of mostly singing. In some musicals this can make the plot lines hard to follow but definitely not in this case. The story line itself could have been confusing due to the nature of the plot but they do a great job of separating the story lines of ‘Beth’ and ‘Liz’. If you’re ever in NYC and looking for a show to see on Broadway I highly highly recommend going to see this one.

However I don’t recommend driving into Manhattan on a Saturday and having to cross over Times Square. Twice. But if you do make sure you’ve seriously brushed up on your aggressive driving. You have been warned.

Have you ever seen a show on Broadway? Ever experienced the joys of driving in NYC?