Sean & Jean's Picks and Pans: La Muse East Village and Sir Comedy

I wanted to do something for Sean last weekend, something a little different and fun so I went searching online for events in the area and found a comedy show in the dome at the Queen Mary. The dome used to house the Spruce Goose but now is used for events. It's huge; seats 2500 people and Sir Comedy Knights was having a show there. The headliner was Rondell Sheridan of That's So Raven and they had another comic plus a magician on the bill as well as strolling magicians. Sounded like fun so I bought two tickets for $25 each and then looked for a restaurant to have dinner. Here's the link for their website: http://www.sircomedy.com/. I had eaten at a creperie in Long Beach called La Creperie Cafe which was very good. When I did a search on Yelp they had some good reviews and some bad but La Muse had much better reviews in all, so I thought we'd try that for something new. They close early on Sunday's so I made our reservations for 5:00 pm and ended up inviting some friends who live in LB as well as our friend Meg who lives in the house in front of us which was no problem. When we got to La Muse it was clear why it wasn't a problem, they were pretty dead. The waiter was very nice and attentive, offering wine suggestions and making little jokes which was nice. However, I have to say it did not live up to the reviews. The crepes were decent but not as good as at La Creperie and it was fairly expensive. The dessert crepe we tried was good; nutella, bananas and strawberries but it really seemed to Sean and I that being a creperie was a second thought for them. They had a much larger selection of wines than crepes; I'd guess that they started out as a wine bar that didn't take off and decided that hey, wine is French and crepes are French, let's combine the two! I'd suggest going to La Creperie if you are in the area.

Sir Comedy was... interesting. As I mentioned, the space is HUGE, not only in that it holds so many people, but because it's a dome the ceiling is very high and echoing. When we got to the Queen Mary we went on the ship first and had a drink then walked all over looking for ghosts because, as you may or may not know, it's supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the US. We didn't have any luck finding aparitions, so we went over to the dome. We ended up waiting outside because we were early and the first "kid friendly" show was still going on. We could see that there were not many people in the audience and really no one was waiting with us, so we wondered how full the second "adult" show would be. I have to think the promoters did not market the event very well because we estimated that there were approx. 35 people in the audience. In a room that seats 2500 this is pretty sad. The comics were funny and the magician was good, but we were as amused by the irony of the situation as by the comedy. I'm attaching a couple of pictures so you can see what I mean. Hopefully they will do a better job of advertising future shows because it must have been disheartening for the performers to look out at all those empty seats.