*President Barack Obama kept a campaign promise he made to his wife Michelle and whisked her off to the Big Apple Saturday night to see a Broadway play.

"I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished," the president said in a statement an aide read to the press.

After grabbing a two-hour dinner at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant touted by New York magazine as a "seminal Greenmarket haven" that features food grown by chef and owner Dan Barber on his upstate farm, the Obamas arrived at the Belasco Theater to see the August Wilson play "Joe Turner's Come and Gone."

The production is about black America in the early 1900s, with residents of a boardinghouse recalling their migration from the sharecropping farms of the South to the industrialized North.

As the motorcade left the West Village and drove up Sixth Avenue to the theater, crowds of people, at times about eight deep, gathered on the sidewalks of the blockaded streets to wave as the Obamas passed, reports the Associated Press. Cab drivers opened their doors and stood on the frames of their taxis to glimpse the president and first lady.

The Obamas left the theater after the play and were greeted by more cheers from enthusiastic bystanders along New York streets as they headed back for the flight to Washington.

The White House declined to say how much the trip was costing taxpayers, and even before the smaller jet left Washington, the there-and-back trip drew criticism from the Republican National Committee. The RNC issued a news release that chastised Obama for saying he understands American's troubles, but then hopping up to New York for "a night on the town."

Noting that General Motors is expected to file for Chapter 11 protection on Monday, the news release said: "Putting on a show: Obamas wing into the city for an evening out while another iconic American company prepares for bankruptcy."

Before traveling to New York, the Obamas watched daughter Malia's soccer game for an hour Saturday morning.