Two debuts in the city

New York City really is a special place. Case in point, over the past three evenings, I twice got to sit in cramped Manhattan theaters and take in “debut” performances of two very different kinds of productions with two very different kinds of audiences. And they were both amazing.

On Saturday night, I hit up the Shovel Knight Live concert, a live performance of selections from the now-legendary video game Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight, for the uninitiated, is an amalgamation of the best that 8-bit Nintendo games had to offer, combining elements of Mega Man, Castlevania, Duck Tales, Mario, and modern technology and design sensibilities, and the result is one of my all time favorite games.

It’s taken on new meaning for me as my son has also more recently fallen in love with the game and the franchise. He’s gotten so into it that he wrote back stories for some of the characters and designed new ones to add to the bunch.

One thing we both love about the game is its soundtrack, predominantly composed by Jake Kaufman. It is vast and varied, as each of the bosses in the game has their own level and boss theme and there are side characters with their own tunes as well. And each track is carefully arranged with old school Nintendo chiptune instrumentation, meaning they sound as if they could have come right out of the 1980s.

So how do you take these classic chiptunes and bring them to life? Get Charlie Rosen from The 8-Bit Big Band to arrange them! I fell in love with that band during the pandemic, and I saw three of their concerts in 2022, where they performed several of my favorites from other video games live.

So this Shovel Knight concert was right down the middle for me. And wow, did this concert deliver!

Notably, this was the first time any of this music had ever been performed live in an official capacity, and it was breathtaking hearing it reimagined for a 10-piece band. Jake Kaufman himself was present and said as much in a speech at the end of the concert.

It was a throwback to my own musical journey - first as a performer in my youth, then a remixer of video game music in college - and I came away enthralled, moved, and inspired. To do what, I’m not sure yet. But it was everything I hoped it would be.

Then, last night, I saw the first live New York reading of You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!, a play about coping with the inevitability of both death and the planet’s destruction. I came in knowing nothing about it and having no expectations, and I came out of it thinking deeply about my grandfather who passed away nearly 30 years ago.

The play starts with a man named Greg receiving a diagnosis for terminal pancreatic cancer, and it focuses on him, his wife, his gender fluid child, and their friends, neighbors, support groups as they all work through it all.

As the family works through the stages of grief, Greg himself starts to see parallels between his own inevitable death and our planet’s inevitable death (whether by our hand or the sun’s), and he starts tying together dream visions of Greta Thunberg speaking to him with speeches that his child’s boyfriend gives about climate change. In directly conflating the end of his life and the end of the entire planet, he begins devoting his final moments to rekindling a connection with nature, literally destroying his own yard and asking real, actual nature to replace the sterile fake green carpet.

After he passes away, the family notices yellow butterflies return to patches of the yard, while a micro-wetland has attracted a frog in another section. It’s maybe not a miracle, but just a little bit of nature’s magic. He’s given his family something to remember him by.

The play calls out that there are three deaths. The moment you die, the moment you are laid to rest, and the moment your name is spoken for the last time and you are truly forgotten to the cosmos. And while the play didn’t overtly call it out, we probably have the most actual agency and control over our third death - how we are remembered.

The play closed by asking everyone in the audience to speak the name of someone they’d like to remember, someone whose name they’d like to say for the first time in a while, someone who they’d like to delay that third death for.

Everyone said their chosen name at the same time as the lights went dark.

I chose my maternal grandfather, Mihir Nath Das. I wrote about him in a piece about finding my own roots a few years ago:

“He was a witty man who helped me pronounce Rabindranath Tagore’s name by telling me to say ‘robin donut’. He was a well-traveled scholar who spent a few years teaching chemistry in the United States in the 1950s. And he was someone with whom I shared a special bond – I was his only grandson, and he was my only living grandfather.

I vividly remember the last days I spent with him. I watched him laboriously walk from one room to another, oxygen tank in tow, as he suffered from the final stage of the emphysema that eventually took his life. I was a teenager when he passed away, and I missed him tremendously, angry that a preventable disease took him away from my family.”

I hadn’t spoken his name out loud in years, and I wanted to. I had to. So I did. Chills ran through my body. A tear welled up in my eye. It was nice to bring him back, feel his presence, even see his silhouette, if only for a moment.

It’s kind of amazing to get to have these types of experiences on a regular basis. So many things happen in this city that it can make the incredible feel mundane. But I choose to be amazed. It’s amazing to see the first live performance of some of my favorite video game music. And it’s amazing to be so moved by a reading from an up-and-coming play. This is a special place.