New York day 3

Today was my 32nd birthday, Happy birthday to me!

Cyclops and I went on the 'uptown' bus tour around Central Park and Harlem.

It being hop on/hop off we hopped off for a picnic in Central Park (pictured) with fabulous food from a deli called Zabar's. The weather was beautiful yet again and we wandered round the park a bit and looked at the turtles in Turtle Pond before rejoining the bus.

In the evening we went to Chinatown for dinner, to Peking Duck House for some house specialty duck (yum) and pancakes.

We then went to see Daniel Radcliffe (yes, Harry Potter) in Tony award winning How to succeed in business without really trying. This is one of the hot ticket shows on Broadway just now, probably second to The Book of Mormon which is sold out til October.

It was a very entertaining show, with one of the best sets I've seen and some really slick choreography. Daniel Radcliffe was more than adequate in the role - not as brilliant at singing as the lead in the show we saw yesterday (although better than the singers we generally see in touring productions in Edinburgh) but he made up for that with his energy. He really threw himself into some pretty ambitious dancing. As possibly the most famous young film actor in the world it must be very exposing to put yourself out there and sing and dance live in front of thousands of critical people. He is only 21, and to lead something like that I thought was quite an acheivement. And for the most part the critics seem to think he has made a decent go of it. Those who have seen it before (pre-revival) seem to have had certain expectations of how the role would be interpreted and Daniel Radcliffe has done it quite differently, playing the main guy as naively lucky (like his own 'OMG I can't believe I'm Harry Potter' right place at the right time type styling) as opposed to cold and calculating. This has had mixed reaction from the critics but I thought it worked really well and that DR was genuinely witty. There is a clip here from the Tony awards showing the big rousing number at the end, which I saw both before and then after I had seen the show. First time I thought it was a bit amateurish but now I would say that you need to see the show and understand the character to appreciate DR's performance in this song and just how funny he is.