G.H. Harding

LICENSED TO ILLEANA! — Seems like the one and only actress/author and film historian extraordinaire Illeana Douglas is on quite a roll heading from summer into autumn. After earning a remarkable three starred reviews in the book trade from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, her new book was just declared One of the Year’s Best Film Books by IndieWire: https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/illeana-douglas-on-the-women-1235215874/

What’s the new book, you ask? Well, it’s called Jungle Red!: The Making of MGM’s The Women and it’s a doozy! Chock-full of what Douglas playfully refers to as a Tinseltown tale of “feuds, fights, and five-letter females,” you get the Golden Age of Hollywood—warts and all—across every scintillating page of Jungle Red!

Douglas—granddaughter of two-time Oscar winning actor Melvyn Douglas (his remarkably nuanced performance opposite Peter Sellers in 1979’s classic Being There still holds up!)—knows a thing or two about a thing or two in Hollywood. She’s also a crackerjack writer of the tallest order, able to elicit an unexpected laugh—or tears—from a reader across the span of a mere page or two. This being her third book, a continued career of “pen to paper” seems all but assured.

And the lady is the living definition of peripatetic. After having just finished a co-starring role in comedienne and View host Joy Behar’s new play Bonkers in the Boroughs at Sag Harbor’s storied Bay Street Theater,she’s lined up now for a big book launch tomorrow in her native Connecticut at The Kate (a.k.a., The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center) and will be joined by NPR’s Colin McEnroe as moderator).

Everyone who’s anyone will be in attendance tonight night in Old Saybrook.

https://www.thekate.org/event/illeana-douglas-book-launch/

If that wasn’t enough, check this out—Sunday was the thirtieth anniversary of the great Brill Building musical dramedy Grace of My Heart (which Douglas made in collaboration with acclaimed Gas Food Lodging director Allison Anders). The film remains a favorite (John Turturro’s eccentric but heartfelt turn as a Phil Spector-esque record producer is a classic performance!) – and you can see it right now, either on Amazon Prime or over on the Criterion Channel. Check out the trailer to get a better look at a great film about great musicmaking.

Jerry Hall

SHORT TAKES —– Remember Jerry Hall? Paramour of Bryan Ferry; married to Mick Jagger and Rupert Murdoch? She’s 70 now with several daughters from Mick – check this out from The Telegraph in the U.K.: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/jerry-hall-interview-single-at-70/ …

Ted Lasso

Has this fourth season of Apple+’s Ted Lasso really been good.? I’ve found them mostly charming, but nothing like their first three seasons of unleashed dynamite. And, what the heck is Tracey Ullman doing there? The Hollywood Reporter called it mostly a dog’s dinner. Check this out: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/ted-lasso-season-4-episode-6-recap-1236697138/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6aa3fb661181560001c45e2c&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawUSIe5wZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMTZqdUZ3dndrSGFzNldDT2pzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEey0PyPMGwKvg9KM4fle76DzzbwoDfLlQgZrukCITgvDVVmPC0uz4AvmkAY4M_aem_tFq732Hc5pBZpw5IFyNeMg … I think this is a great saying: if you don’t kill time; it kills you ...

Just watched 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway; directed by Norman Jewison. Hold up for certain and that chess scene is astonishing … Goldmine’s Tone Scott and Rock Cellar’s Ken Sharp at Micky Dolenz’s 60th Anniversary how Saturday night at The United Theater Downtown in L.A. … Interesting to see Judy Judy’s-stepping down missive from her long-term running show in Monday’s New York Times and not in best-friend’s Cindy Adam’s New York Post column. Something must be up … Happy Bday Randy Jones … RIP Bob Mackie!

NAMES IN THE NEWS —– Brit Brashear; Toby Kebbell; Grolan Stationary; The House That Ruth Built; Tom & Lisa Cuddy; George Fabian; Mark Bego; Anthony Pomes; Stu Fine; Cory Robbins; Tony King; Pye Jackson; Tina Malave; Alison Martino; Lush Ice; Chuck Darrow; Eddie O’Loughlin; Thomas Silverman; Burt Conrad; Tony Mandich; Paul Chase; G&W Photo; Heather Moore; Dave Peaslee; Paul Iorio; Lee Jeske; and SADIE!

Images on this page have been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

There are dates New Yorkers remember, and then there is September 11.

Today marks 25 years since the morning that changed New York City, America and, in ways we are still living with, the world. A quarter century has passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. Yet in New York, 25 years has never been enough distance to turn 9/11 completely into history.

Too many people remember exactly where they were. Too many families still live with an empty chair. Too many first responders and recovery workers have become sick or died because they went toward Ground Zero when everyone else was trying to get away.

On Friday, September 11, 2026, Manhattan will remember.

At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the 25th Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony begins at 8:40 a.m. The Memorial Plaza ceremony is private and reserved for family members of those killed in the September 11 attacks and the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing, although the ceremony will be streamed online. The Museum itself will be closed to the public for the day.

As it has for nearly a quarter century, the heart of the ceremony will remain remarkably simple: the reading of the names. Names rather than numbers.

Family members will read the names of those lost, interrupted by moments of silence marking the terrible chronology of that morning—the moments when the planes struck and when the towers fell. For the first time this year, the ceremony will add another moment of silence for those who survived September 11 itself but later died from illnesses and injuries associated with exposure to the toxic dust and debris. That addition matters.

September 11 did not end on September 11. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, sanitation workers, volunteers and thousands of others spent days and months breathing the air around Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, the consequences continue. The FDNY itself has marked this anniversary with Resilience, a film examining the continuing health toll among World Trade Center responders, alongside Remembering Judge, honoring beloved FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, officially recorded as Victim 0001.

Midtown will offer its own extraordinary remembrance.

At Bryant Park, 2,753 empty chairs will cover the lawn, representing the lives lost in New York on September 11. From 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., visitors can place a flower on one of the chairs. For the first 3,000 flowers placed by the public, Bank of America is scheduled to donate $25 per flower to organizations supporting New York’s first responders and their families.

There is something almost unbearably effective about an empty chair. We have seen the photographs of the towers. We know the number 2,753. But a chair represents the person who should still be sitting in it. That evening, Bryant Park will move from silence into music.

At 7 p.m., Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in the free New York Resounds, created to commemorate the 25th anniversary. The program begins with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and includes George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, Charles Ives’ The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, Haydn’s Symphony No. 44, the Trauersinfonie or “Mourning Symphony,” and the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10.

There could hardly be a more appropriate opening than Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

For all the politicians and dignitaries who will attend commemorations Friday, the enduring story of September 11 belongs largely to ordinary people who behaved extraordinarily: firefighters climbing stairs while others descended them; police officers, paramedics and Port Authority officers running toward danger; strangers helping strangers; ferry crews evacuating Manhattan; taxi drivers carrying rescue workers home; sanitation workers clearing debris; doctors and nurses waiting for casualties; restaurant workers feeding exhausted responders.

New York City is also bringing some of those lesser-known stories back onto its streets through Memory Markers: 9/11, a new digital project appearing on LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs. The geographically placed stories recall the largely forgotten places that became part of the response—including the Midtown warehouse converted into an Emergency Operations Center after the original center was destroyed and the taxi drivers who gave first responders free rides home.

Even Times Square will stop. At precisely 9:11 a.m., dozens of its famous digital billboards are expected to suspend their advertising and display only the time. It is part of the National Day of Service and Remembrance, an effort founded by 9/11 family members to transform memory into acts of service. For a place designed never to stop selling, flashing, moving or demanding our attention, even a brief moment of visual silence carries weight.

Then, as darkness falls, New Yorkers will look upward. The Tribute in Light will once again send two immense blue columns into the night sky from Lower Manhattan. Eighty-eight 7,000-watt xenon lights arranged in two 48-foot squares create beams that can be seen from as far as 60 miles away. They will shine from dusk Friday until dawn Saturday, recreating not the buildings themselves but their absence.

This year, the Tribute in Light becomes part of a national live broadcast for the first time. Cyndi Lauper, Lainey Wilson and Five For Fighting’s John Ondrasik are scheduled to perform, with David Muir, Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer hosting the 8 p.m. special from Lower Manhattan. Buildings throughout New York—including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, David Geffen Hall, One Bryant Park, the Intrepid Museum, One World Observatory and PAC NYC—will also illuminate in blue.

Twenty-five years is a strange anniversary. It is long enough that an entire generation of adults was not alive on September 11, 2001. Children now entering college know the Twin Towers only from photographs and video. To them, September 11 belongs to history in the way Pearl Harbor once belonged to ours.

New York still carries the physical memory of that morning. Those of us who were here remember the missing-person posters. We remember the photographs taped to walls and fences. We remember the smoke. We remember the firehouses covered in flowers. We remember looking at strangers differently because, for one extraordinary period of time, strangers weren’t quite strangers anymore.

That may be the part of September 11 worth remembering most carefully 25 years later. The terrorists destroyed buildings and murdered thousands of innocent people. What they did not destroy was New York. For a time, they actually revealed it.

Tomorrow there will be 2,753 empty chairs in Bryant Park. There will be names spoken aloud at Ground Zero. There will be flowers, moments of silence and music. At 9:11 a.m., Times Square will stop selling us things. And after the sun goes down, two blue beams will rise into the Manhattan sky.

Twenty-five years later, New York is still keeping its promise.

We remember.

25th Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony and livestream

American Symphony Orchestra: New York Resounds

September in New York is when the city snaps back to life, and the cabaret rooms and conversation stages are already filling with some seriously intriguing names. Sylvester Stallone, Heated Rivalry, Ariana DeBose, Linda Eder and Tony Danza are among those bringing star power, stories and music to the month ahead. From intimate performances to conversations that take us behind the celebrity curtain, September offers plenty of reasons to pull up a chair and listen. T2C takes a look at who’s talking, who’s singing and where you’ll want to be.

54 Below: 254 West 54 St. 9/8 – 9: Claybourne Elder: Can I Tell You Something?; 9/11-12; Charles Busch Sings Johnny Mercer; 9/13: Ben Franklin In Paris; 9/16: Michael Cerveris: The Other Part; 9/18 -19: Ute Lemper: Celebrating Marlene Dietrich’s 125th Birthday; 9/22: Seth Sikes with Tedd Firth: Together at Last! Feat. Marilyn Maye; 9/23 and 27: Linda Eder; 9/24 and  26: Orfeh: Unbound and 9/29 – 30: Jeanna de Waal: Songs I Love to Sing.

92 Street Y: 1395 Lexington Ave. 9/9: Jaclyn Smith in Conversation: Beyond Charlie’s Angels; 9/17: STARZ’s Outlander: Blood of my Blood; 9/18: Cabaret Conversations: Lindsay Mendez; 9/23: StarTalk Live! with Neil deGrasse Tyson: Lost in Space; 9/27: Gloria Steinem in Conversation with Katie Couric: An Unexpected Life; 9/28: CBS Sunday Morning at 92NY: Sylvester Stallone in Conversation with Tracy Smith: The Steps; 9/29: Harry Connick, Jr. in Conversation — Babe: Elaboratio and 9/30: Fashion Icons with Fern Mallis: Ian Schrager.

Eliane Elias

Birdland Jazz: 315 West 44 St. Every Monday Jim Caruso’s Cast party; Every Monday and Tuesday: Vince Giordano leads The Nighthawks; Every Sunday Gabrielle Stravelli Trio;  9/ 15 – 19: Eliane Elias; 9/21: A Night With Nicole Henry and 9/28: Karen Mason.

Karen Mason Photo by Maryann Lopinto

Carnegie Hall: 881 7th Ave at 57th St.

Chelsea Table & Stage: Hilton Fashion District Hotel, 152 W 26th St. 9/9: An Evening With Mairéad; 9/13: Charlie Romo.

Dizzys Club Coca Cola: Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street. 9/4 -6: Ann Hampton Callaway I Get A Kick Out Of Cole.

Don’t Tell Mama: 343 W. 46 St. 9/9 and 16: Jeff Harnar: Blame It On My Youth; 9/10: Tanya Moberly: Repertoire With Sean Harkness; 9/24: Tanya Moberly: Repertoire With Ian Herman; 9/26: Steven Carl McCasland: Everybody Rise!

Laurie Beechman Theatre: at the West Bank Café: 407 West 42 St. 9/5:Lillias White Live At The Beechman; 9/8: Alice Ripley and John McDaniel; 9/12: Andrea McArdle’s Broadway On Demand; 9/16: Lorna Luft; 9/16: Lauren Marcus; 9/24: Lorna Dallas and 9/27:Donna McKechnie.

Donna McKechnie

Madame George: 45 West 45th: Broadway Night Mondays.

Ariana DeBose Photo by Genevieve Rafter Keddy

The Café Carlyle: 35 East 76 St. at Madison Ave. 9/8 – 19: Tony Danza: More Standards & Stories; 9/21 -26: Susanna Hoffs: and 9/29 – 10/3: Ariana DeBose.

Alicia Witt

The Cutting Room: 44 East 32nd St. 9/12: ALICIA WITT; 9/14: BROADWAY TAKES ON THE 80S; 9/17: BROADWAY SINGS ABBA

The DJango: 2 Avenue of the Americas. 9/18: Lee Taylor and 9/29: People of the Earth.

The Iridium: 1650 Broadway. 8/29: Papa Chubby

The Pierre Hotel, Two E Bar & Lounge: 2 E 61st St.

Sony Hall: 235 W 46th St. 9/21: Twin Peaks: A Conversation with the Stars

The Triad: 158 W. 72 St. Street. 9/5L: The Dozen Divas Show

The Town Hall: 123 W. 43 St. 9/27: Roger Daltrey A Great Night Out; 9/28: Stagedoor 50: A One-Night-Only Concert celebrating 50 Years of Stagedoor Manor Benefiting the Entertainment Community Fund and 9/29:  Heated Rivalry! Release

There is something deeply unsettling about encountering Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov shortly after someone you knew has taken his own life.

We recently lost Josh Grisetti to suicide at 44. Josh seemed to have everything: extraordinary talent, intelligence, humor, a career, people who cared about him and presumably decades still ahead. Yet what someone appears to have from the outside tells us very little about what it feels like to inhabit his life from within. Sitting through writer-director Laura Strausfeld’s 100-minute adaptation, The Real Ivanov, I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Chekhov’s Ivanov (Sam Underwood) is a provincial Russian gentleman of property in his 30s who has reached the unbearable realization that he is not the man he intended to become. He is educated but aimless, broke, his estate is failing, and his wife is dying of consumption. Worse, he no longer loves her and wonders if he ever did. He sees his own failures with excruciating clarity and hates himself for them, but possesses neither the energy nor the belief necessary to change.

That is what makes Ivanov so difficult and, for certain people, so painfully recognizable. This is not simply a play about depression. It is about what happens when you cannot stomach your own existence as it has become. Human beings find innumerable ways to escape themselves—alcohol, drugs, sex, work, food, addiction, distraction, but what happens when you are too sensitive to what you see, including what you see in yourself, and none of the exits actually takes you away?

Chekhov wrote Ivanov in the 1880s, when depression was neither understood nor treated as it is today. Ivanov is surrounded instead by people who diagnose him morally. He is selfish. He is weak. He is cruel. He is lazy. He should pull himself together. Some of those accusations aren’t entirely wrong, which is what makes Chekhov far more interesting than a simple portrait of a suffering man. Ivanov behaves terribly. The tragedy is that he knows it.

His wife Anna (Ivory Aquino) has given him everything. She is dying from consumption, knows her husband no longer loves her, and nevertheless clings desperately to what remains of their marriage. Ivanov betrays her, berates her and then despises himself for doing so. Anna’s devotion has become its own tragedy; in refusing to relinquish the man who has emotionally abandoned her, she gradually relinquishes herself.

Hovering around them is Anna’s pompously moral doctor, Eugene Lvov, played by a miscast and oddly out-of-place Elijah Guo. Elijah Guo fares considerably worse as Lvov, Anna’s pompously moral doctor. Guo seems completely out of his element onstage, delivering a performance without the technique, authority or theatrical presence the role requires. Lvov should be maddening in his absolute conviction of his own righteousness; here, the character becomes irritating for entirely the wrong reasons.Lvov is certain of everyone else’s moral failings while remaining remarkably blind to his own. Chekhov understood this species of human being particularly well: the person so convinced of his own righteousness that judgment itself becomes a character flaw.

Ivanov’s uncle is played with considerable spirit by Jordan Lage, although he sometimes seems to have wandered in from a somewhat different production. Sam Adegoke plays Ivanov’s shady cousin, who oversees the failing estate and begins the evening by pretending to shoot Ivanov—a gesture that becomes considerably darker in retrospect.

Amelia Mason, Sam Underwood all photo’s by Russ Rowland

Then there is Sasha, played with luminous subtlety by Amelia Mason, Sasha has been mad about Ivanov since girlhood and believes she can rescue him from himself. Her love is genuine, naive and dangerous in the particular way love becomes dangerous when we convince ourselves that wanting to save someone means we actually can.

Sasha’s wealthy, fumbling father is wonderfully played by Spencer Aste, who at moments reminded me enormously of Chip Zien. Sarah Long plays Sasha’s cold, stingy mother, while Kimberlee Walker supplies the giddiness as a widow intent upon marrying into royalty. Around Ivanov, friends, relatives, creditors and acquaintances continue talking, wanting, judging, scheming and living while he becomes progressively less capable of doing any of it.

Soph Metcalf, Amelia Mason, Spencer Aste, Sarah Long, Sam Underwood, Jordan Lage, William DeMeritt, and Kimberlee Walker all photo’s by Russ Roland

Strausfeld is right to cut Ivanov to 100 minutes. Chekhov’s point does not become more profound simply because we spend another hour getting there. The difficulty lies instead with a company composed largely of actors whose experience is rooted in television. Screen acting and stage acting require different muscles, and Chekhov is particularly unforgiving of the distinction. The camera can capture a thought barely registered across an actor’s face; onstage, that thought must somehow travel across the room without losing its truth. Here, some performances remain at camera scale while others are pitched toward the theatre, leaving the company without a unified language. The problem isn’t that Strausfeld has cut too much Chekhov. It is that not everyone onstage knows how to make the Chekhov she retained reach us.

Initiative Productions is fledgling, and it shows. The cast does not gel into a coherent world. Performers seem to be working in distinctly different acting styles; several roles are miscast, and some of the supporting performances simply aren’t yet equal to the demands of Chekhov. Strausfeld understands what she wants to say with the play, but she needs a company capable of speaking the same theatrical language.

Underwood initially left me uncertain, but his Ivanov grew on me as the evening progressed. There is something appropriate about not immediately being seduced by this man. Ivanov isn’t a romantic hero waiting for us to understand him. He is difficult, exhausted, unpleasant and increasingly trapped inside himself. Underwood eventually finds the suffocation underneath that behavior, and by the conclusion I understood the journey he was attempting.

Jiyoun Chang’s scenic design is minimal, with rugs spread across a planked floor delineating four locations. Ella Matza dresses this cross-section of humanity largely in tans and creams while separating Ivanov visually in black and white. He is already apart from them before he finally removes himself altogether.

William DeMeritt, Soph Metcalf, Sam Underwood, Sam Adegoke, Spencer Aste, Elijah Guo, Jordan Lage, Sarah Long, Amelia Mason, and Kimberlee Walker All Photo’s by Russ Roland

Strausfeld’s strongest theatrical idea comes at the end. A long red carpet becomes the setting as the people surrounding Ivanov chatter, posture, judge and reveal the extraordinary shallowness and narrowness of the world enclosing him. Humanity keeps talking while Ivanov is running out of reasons to listen. The staging becomes almost suffocating, and suddenly the uneven production finds the play’s pulse.

Sam Adegoke, Sam Underwood, Amelia Mason, and Spencer Aste all photo’s by Russ Rowland

That sequence struck me particularly hard because it didn’t feel confined to nineteenth-century Russia. Look around now. We live in a culture of relentless noise, judgment, performance and certainty. Everyone has an opinion about everyone else. Everyone knows what another person should have done, should have felt, should have overcome. We rarely know what is actually happening inside the person standing beside us. Some people can shut that noise out. Some cannot. Some people survive the ugliness of the world by refusing to look too closely. Ivanov’s tragedy is that he looks at humanity, looks at himself, and cannot look away.

I think that is where Ivanov will divide its audience. Many people will simply see a privileged, self-pitying man behaving badly and wonder why everyone around him doesn’t walk away. They aren’t necessarily wrong. Others will recognize something considerably darker: the moment when a person sees both the world’s ugliness and his own flaws so clearly that he can no longer find a place within either that he wants to inhabit.

That doesn’t make suicide noble. It doesn’t make Ivanov a hero. And it certainly doesn’t tell me why Josh Grisetti made the decision he made. That belongs to Josh, and none of us left behind gets to pretend we know the entirety of another person’s final interior world. Losing him made Chekhov’s play land differently for me.

We are extraordinarily good at looking at another person’s life and inventorying the reasons they should be happy. Talent, love, success, youth….possibility. We are considerably less capable of understanding that none of those things necessarily tells us what that person sees when they look inward.

The Real Ivanov is an uneven production of a play that is anything but easy. Initiative Productions needs to become considerably more rigorous about casting and establishing a unified acting style. Strausfeld’s adaptation sometimes moves too quickly, and not every member of the company can carry what Chekhov demands.

Amelia Mason can. Spencer Aste can. And, ultimately, Sam Underwood got me there. More importantly, Chekhov got me there.

This production will not resonate with everyone. I don’t think it is supposed to. There are people who will look at Ivanov and never understand why he cannot simply get on with his life. There are others who will understand him immediately. After losing Josh, I wish considerably fewer of us did.

The Real Ivanov: Lynn F. Angelson Theater,  through September 19. Tickets and information are available at The Real Ivanov.

Forget simply cutting a ribbon. To officially open House of Spells, the UK’s wildly popular immersive fandom destination made its New York debut with something far more fitting—a little magic.

Video by Magda Katz

More than 100 leaders from Broadway, tourism, hospitality and government gathered Wednesday morning as House of Spells officially opened the doors to its first U.S. flagship at 234 West 42nd Street, but the real showstopper belonged to British illusionist and AMAZE star Jamie Allan.

Rather than pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Allan invited audience members to call out random numbers. The choices appeared completely unrelated—until the finale. Before our eyes, those seemingly random numbers transformed into the exact date and time the spell would be broken, officially bringing House of Spells to life. The room erupted.

It was the perfect opening for a place where imagination isn’t confined to the movies—it’s something you can actually walk into.

Created by visionary founders Khaja Hussain and Rafeeque Olikkathodi, House of Spells began in the United Kingdom in 2016 and has become a destination for fantasy lovers, gamers, anime enthusiasts and movie buffs. Its first American home couldn’t have picked a better address than Times Square, where fantasy and reality have always shared the same stage.

Walking through the 20,000-square-foot space feels like stepping through a portal. Around every corner another universe waits to be explored.

Marvel fans will find Spider-Man, Deadpool and Captain America. Jedi can browse Star Wars collectibles, while Hogwarts hopefuls can choose from magical wands worthy of Harry Potter himself. Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Fantastic Beasts, Vikings, Stranger Things, DC Comics, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, KPop Demon Hunters, Anime and dozens of other fandoms all coexist under one enchanted roof.

Whether it’s a Baby Yoda backpack, a rare Lord of the Rings tankard, Batman’s miniature Batmobile or collectibles that are difficult to find anywhere else, House of Spells is designed less like a traditional store and more like a treasure hunt.

“As they say in Game of Thrones, ‘Winter is Coming’…to Times Square as we bring the fandom universe to what always feels like the center of the universe,” said Jaime Vidal, President of USA Operations at House of Spells. “Coming to the country’s most iconic entertainment capital is the perfect U.S. launching pad for us, and we can’t wait for visitors to explore the wonders, magic, mystique and enchantment of House of Spells Times Square.”

“The ultimate fandom destination is no longer across the pond in a galaxy far, far away—it is right here in Times Square, the beating heart of Midtown Manhattan,” said Tom Harris, President of the Times Square Alliance. “In a neighborhood where magic happens every day, we welcome House of Spells and its mystical charm to the Crossroads of the World.”

Julie Coker, President and CEO of NYC Tourism + Conventions, welcomed the attraction by noting that while visitors from the United Kingdom already top New York City’s international tourism market, House of Spells is arriving with plans to stay, giving even more travelers a reason to make Times Square part of their itinerary.

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal praised the opening as another milestone for the neighborhood, noting that more than 50 million visitors pass through Times Square annually and calling House of Spells’ decision to locate its first U.S. flagship there another testament to Manhattan’s place as one of the world’s premier destinations for retail and entertainment.

Council Member Carl Wilson celebrated the attraction as a place where fans of every generation can immerse themselves in the worlds they love.

For Allan, whose AMAZE recently celebrated its 500th performance, the new attraction captures the same sense of wonder that theater has always inspired.

“House of Spells is such a magical place and exactly the kind of thing I would have wanted to see growing up,” Allan said. “It brings together communities, geeks—in the nicest possible way—and all of us that believe in the impossible. Like a theater, the architecture and design of the shop really transport you.”

And that’s exactly what House of Spells does. It doesn’t ask whether you’re a wizard, a superhero, a Viking, a Jedi or simply someone who still believes imagination should have a place in everyday life.

It simply opens the door and says, welcome to the fandom.