Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2016: Paramour, Cats, Waitress, the Radio City Rockettes perform
It’s here everybody! It’s early on Thanksgiving morning and we are huge fans of parades, so we’re up bright and early (actually, it’s not even bright yet) on the West Coast in order to watch the East Coast version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We’re going to be here to provide you a few assorted updates on the Broadway-based first hour over the course of the morning, so be sure to refresh the page! Grab your coffee, and check out what we’ve gotta say about this year’s spectacular. It’s the 90th year for the Macy’s Day Parade!
Opening number – Hey, it’s the Muppets! The Swedish Chef is singing about something but we can’t understand him! We’ve only been up for about half an hour and this feels a little like some sort of fever-dream. Our intrepid / possibly overly-caffeinated hosts told us that apparently the band on the Muppets have an actual name.
Also, there were clowns. All of a sudden this is a Thanksgiving nightmare for some people. We never thought we’d be brave by saying that we’re not afraid of clowns, but there you go.
Holiday Inn – We’ve never seen this musical, which is probably a recurring theme for much of the rest of the day since we apparently don’t go out much. What’s going to be a recurring theme throughout the night is that we don’t really care all that much about whether or not people are singing live — it’s Thanksgiving! Enjoy the silliness of it all!
Waitress – It’s really weird watching people talking about baking pies while also standing outside of the flagship Macy’s store in New York. Granted, this was still a lot of fun. The movie’s great, so we gotta assume the musical version is, as well.
Cats – Speaking of surreal, how weird is it watching people in elaborate cat makeup sing “Memory” this early in the morning? It’s odd, but hey, “Cats” has beautiful music. They could do this every year if they wanted.
Paramour – We were waiting until Hayley Williams popped out and started singing. (Okay, that was a cheesy joke.) This is the Cirque du Soleil musical, if that wasn’t clear watching some of the strongman routines that played out at the front of this.
Hairspray Live – We discuss this further over at this link, but this was every bit of fun as you could possibly hope for.
Radio City Rockettes – They’ve arrived, and they’ve officially high-kicked us into the next hour. We gotta say, there’s still something fun about seeing them, even if for the most part we know what their routine’s going to be year in and year out. (Photo: NBC.)