Jollyship/the Stokes Mitchell

Two exciting things happened this morning, and it’s only 9:10am.

First, last night, my friend Jaime Green over at Surplus e mailed a group of us that there was a “rumor on the internet” that tickets would be going on sale this morning for the ONE NIGHT ONLY revival of Jollyship the Whizbang at The Public Theater. Here is the Times review from Jollyship’s run at Ars Nova two springs ago. It begins, “Pay no attention to this review, because nothing in it will adequately
convey the demented brilliance of ‘Jollyship the Whiz-Bang,’ a puppet
show within a rock show (or perhaps it’s the other way around) now
occupying Ars Nova.” You can listen to the music here.

I actually had to name drop my client Gabriel Kahane to the Ars Nova people to get a fourth ticket to Jollyship the first time around, so thank goodness Jaime has her finger on the pulse of theater internet rumors this time. My lawyer friend was given the task of getting the tickets this morning because I assumed she got up earliest. WHAT IF I OVERSLEPT.  Lawyers don’t oversleep.

Jollyship tickets secured and e mails to colleagues in the UK, Iceland and Germany answered, I decided 8:30am was as good a time as any for a chicken wrap and coffee, and trotted down to the deli. I got my mail en route and whose smiling face was looking up at me? Brian Stokes Mitchell’s. This postcard tells me he has a concert  at Town Hall on April 17th, and I immediately e mailed my sister that we should get tickets for our mom, who I hope is not reading, for Mother’s Day.

So thank you Jaime and thank you Town Hall postcard, for letting me know about two things I am going to now pay for and go see. But this is what I really want: I want a website on which I can enter my zip code and the names of the artists I want to see in my city. I then want to be e mailed when tickets go on sale for their concerts in my city.

For example, I would type in:
Pierre Laurent Aimard
The Emerson String Quartet
Anything to do with Thomas Ades
Frightened Rabbit
Michael Cerveris
etc.

And you all would type in:
Hilary Hahn
Eric Owens
The King’s Singers
etc.

(See what I did there?)

I posted this on Twitter this morning and got a couple responses, thank you @hollychickman and @disconotdisco. There’s SonicLiving, self-described as “the Internet’s leading concert discovery service,
connecting music fans online and in-person through communities created
around live shows of their favorite bands,” and iLike, which gives “personalized concert alerts from your favorite artists in iTunes.” The thing is, I don’t need Pandora-esque taste helpers; I know what I like, generally, and just want to know when I can see it here. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? The site could just scan presenter and community listings for names, and you could enter the distance you’d be willing to travel from your zip code.

Tourfilter.com looks good, but the shows have to be submitted by fans or the venues and there don’t seem to be any classical shows. (Yet?) From the website:

We wrote a program to download all the area club listings daily,
search for bands we liked, then send out email. That’s Tourfilter. And
it’s not just for us, it’s for everyone (chances are, we’re in your
city or coming soon).

Tourfilter allows you to:

• Track as many bands as you can think of and send you an email when a show is announced.
• Combine your friends’ calendars into one place.
• Get show updates via RSS and iCal.
•  Search for concerts and tickets nationwide.

And writing of my wants and needs, I would also like a site that tells me what the listenerships/readerships of radio stations, newspapers, magazines and blogs, all in one place. Does that exist? So rather than sorting through a magazines “media kit,” I could just type in name and it would spit out a number.

So those are the two things I want for Christmas, if anyone was wondering. I already bought myself the Star Trek movie, so don’t worry about that.