Away, free sidewalk bands and roving theatre troupes! Begone, TikTok “Ratatouille”s! Broadway is back. A ticket was recently on offer for the opening night of “Springsteen on Broadway.” Face value: eight hundred and fifty dollars. A few minutes before the show, outside the St. James Theatre, Jordan Roth, the proprietor, explained that he’d beckoned Springsteen himself. “I called,” Roth said. “I said, ‘Only you can call us back to life.’ He knew instantaneously that that was true.” Roth, who has long, wavy hair, wore a white cropped coat over a frilly white shirt, with white pants, black platform boots, lots of rings, and a vintage handbag (“McQueen, McQueen, Rick Owens, Givenchy, and my grandmother”). “It means so much to everyone who will be in this building,” he said. “It means so much to everyone who’s not in this building, that we can be together onstage again.”
Some people were calling the evening a return to normalcy, which was true, at least for the Scarsdale and Saddle River sets, who buy a good percentage of Broadway tickets. Outside the theatre, dozens of protesters chanted and held signs. Their beef: the fact that attendees had to be vaccinated. Unvaxxed shouted at vaxxed, who sometimes shouted back, but escalation never threatened. “Antifa’s trying to start a fight, you guys!” a woman yelled through a megaphone, when news cameras approached; a few middle-aged belligerents milled idly. “No matter what you say to them, they’re not going to go away! They’re Antifa! ”
One of the shouters was Christine Salica, of Staten Island. “We’re individuals who believe in freedom,” she said. “We don’t agree with segregation. We don’t agree with discrimination. Especially, like, for Pride Month, for everything that’s all-inclusive—but you’re excluding people that aren’t vaccinated?”
The protesters’ signs looked identical to those seen at a similar recent demonstration, outside a Foo Fighters concert, in Los Angeles. A flyer promoting the Broadway gathering had urged protesters to wear bluejeans, a white shirt, and a red bandanna—Springsteen couture. Salica wore denim cutoffs; she said that, before this betrayal, she’d been a Bruce fan. Asked to name her favorite song, she paused. “ ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ ” she said, then added, “More like ‘Born in Nazi Germany’!” She continued, “There’s that other one. ‘I went out for a ride and I never came back.’ I don’t know the name of it.”
A fellow-protester, Michelle Bosco, joined in: “I grew up on Springsteen!” Was there a particular song that resonated with her struggle? “I can’t think of one right now,” she said. “But to segregate the very fundamental class of people that you tried to speak to . . .”
Showtime approached. Inside: maskless, giddy. There was Pete Buttigieg, with Chasten, in Row E. There was Little Steven, in his schmatte. Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, sat up front. Attendees, whose ticket revenue was being donated to local charities, seemed aghast by the scene outside, but also a little titillated. “I think there were anti-vaxxers,” Murphy said, from his seat. “Is that right?”
Springsteen took the stage and told his story of a childhood full of working-class stiffs. “We are living in troubled and troubling times,” he said. “I can understand the folks out on the street. These are scary times full of confusion.” He played “Growin’ Up,” “Thunder Road,” “American Skin.” Before the finale, he talked about friends through the years who had died. “Aw, fuck,” he said, as he wiped away tears. It really did mean a lot, if you could get in.
Natasha Katz sat in Row E with her daughter. Katz designed the show’s lighting. She’s done more than fifty shows on Broadway, and won six Tonys, but this was the most emotionally fraught opening. “I cried a lot!” she reported. During the pandemic, she was confined to her apartment. She worked a total of five weeks. “I was lucky,” she said. “We’ve all been alone for so long. The stagehands, and the ushers who open the theatre, the wardrobe people. All these people, they were all out of work. You have people who moved back in with their parents, or who left the business.”
When the exit doors opened, after the finale, the protesters had gone. A security guard said that they’d pulled out of there about thirty minutes after the show started. “Some of them asked us, ‘Where’s a good restaurant?’ ” the guard said. They ended up at Shake Shack. ♦
