By Jon Pareles
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/arts/music/bruce-springsteen-broadway.html
September 27, 2017
Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
“Springsteen on Broadway.” For the songwriter who rose from bar gigs on the Jersey Shore to become a symbol of empathy for working-class America, who has been playing arenas for nearly four decades, the simple juxtaposition seems like a clash of scale and style. Is this an intimate concert, or a theatrical event? Mr. Springsteen says it’s something else, and that an extended Broadway residency is the statement he wants to make now.
It started at the White House. On Jan. 12, in the last weeks of the Obama administration, Mr. Springsteen played an acoustic concert in the East Room as the Obama family’s parting gift for about 250 staffers. For Mr. Springsteen, who takes every performance seriously, it was a moment of reckoning. He carefully assembled a set list spanning his career; he illuminated the songs with spoken stories and memories echoing “Born to Run,” the autobiography he published in 2016.
“There was a lot of storytelling, which goes back to our early days at the Bottom Line when you were in front of a couple of hundred people,” Mr. Springsteen said in an interview at his home studio in Colts Neck, N.J., recalling the Greenwich Village club where his shows in summer 1975became a sensation. “It worked in a very, very intimate setting.”
Heading home from Washington, Mr. Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, and his manager, Jon Landau, thought more people should experience a performance like that. “The way he combines the spoken words with the songs he’s chosen to do sounds like a very simple thing,” Mr. Landau said. “But it’s a real piece of performance art.”
Thinking that only Broadway could offer the kind of elegant, intimate experience they were looking for, Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Landau scouted theaters available from all three of the major Broadway owners — Shubert, Nederlander and Jujamcyn — before deciding on Jujamcyn’s Walter Kerr, one of the smallest. “They were really connecting with all angles of it — trying seats in all different locations, standing on the stage, coming back multiple times,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters.
In Broadway terms, Mr. Springsteen is planning a one-man show; unlike in his arena marathons, he’ll be onstage for two hours with a baby grand piano and an “array of guitars,” he said. But he intends to offer something different from a typical concert, where the songs and spoken words will add up to what he calls a “third entity.”
“This isn’t a rock concert transported onto a small stage,” Mr. Roth said. “This is an experience of storytelling through word and through song, and that is what we do on Broadway. That is what the theater is.”
The production uses seasoned Broadway hands. Its lighting designer,Natasha Katz, won Tony Awards for “Once” and “An American in Paris”; its sound designer, Brian Ronan, won Tonys for “The Book of Mormon” and “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” and a Drama Desk award for Sting’s musical, “The Last Ship.” But the show doesn’t have a director. To manage a ticketing demand rarely seen on Broadway (outside of blockbusters like “Hamilton”), Mr. Springsteen’s tickets are being sold via Verified Fan, a Ticketmaster system that aims to cut down on scalping. Still, tickets are going for $700 to $2,400 on StubHub.
“Our idea was to respect Broadway as a unique place and to try and to do what’s customary as long as our creative needs were being met,” Mr. Landau said, listing off what he called “the conventions of Broadway”: “The show starts, there’s absolute silence. People stay in their seats.” He added, “It invites a certain decorum and a certain atmosphere that is very conducive to the nuances of what Bruce does with this particular show.”
In Colts Neck, Mr. Springsteen led me through his home studio, a long, wide-open room with row upon row of guitars — “the land of 1,000 guitars,” he said with a laugh — along with assorted keyboards and drums, where he has worked on most of his music for a decade. In an adjoining room that’s part kitchen and part living room, sipping a bottled water, Mr. Springsteen was thoughtful and jovial, weighing his words — he speaks in full paragraphs — but laughing at himself any time he saw the possibility of pretension. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.
What was the mood in the White House when you played there?
The feeling was the same there as it was here (laughs). There was obviously the shock and concern.
Did it affect what you played?
I didn’t want to do something that was all about that. My thought on it was, well, I’ve had a long writing life, and over those years I’ve set out a certain set of values. And the best you could do at that particular moment was just to find a show that expressed those things as best as I could. There’s nothing Trump-centric about what I’m doing. My idea was really just to present the work that I’ve done for the past 40 years or so and let it speak for itself. I didn’t feel like I needed to get on a soapbox or be real ideological about it. I wanted the night to play very naturally, and be broad enough to be about all the things I’ve written about over the years. And in that way, in the contrast, it would comment.
You’ve been singing for decades about people who are unemployed, cast aside, left behind — a forgotten working class that apparently turned to Trump in 2016.
I think it’s still very difficult times, in the sense that the deindustrialization that occurred in the ’70s and ’80s was really devastating to a whole segment of the population. And those issues were never really addressed by either Republicans or Democrats. It’s a complex problem. It involves global technology, and I don’t really know the answers. But I know that there was a large part of the population that ended up disenfranchised and I think that Trump did tap into those feelings with a lot of his rhetoric at the time. He’s very good at knowing what people want to hear.
Let’s talk about Broadway. Yours may well be the only show there that doesn’t use a director or a scriptwriter.
That’s me! (laughs) That’s me! I’m going to direct myself onstage and I wrote up the script on my own. It’s a pretty basic show. It’s going to feel like a garage workshop basically, and I’m going to play my songs and tell my stories. So it wasn’t something that called for a whole lot more than that.
Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
You’ve got a lot of experience at shaping a show.
That’s what I’ve spent my life doing. That was a big piece of the craft. If you came up in our generation of musicians, you were mentored by the great craftsmen of how do you make a show move, how do you make a show go. Sam Moore from Sam & Dave, and of course James Brown, those were the great masters of momentum and how you keep a show going. And that moves over to an acoustic show. It has to have its rhythms. [For this] the tricky thing was finding how to tell some stories without it slowing down the rhythm of the show. But it’s all instinctive at this point. Really, John Hammond [who signed Mr. Springsteen to Columbia as a solo songwriter] would love this show. This is the closest thing to what I would have done at Max’s Kansas City in 1973, when I was coming up by myself.
You’ve done solo acoustic tours in 3,000-seat theaters, for“The Ghost of Tom Joad” and for “Devils & Dust.” How is this different?
Those were more concert experiences. The sets would change. This is a locked-in piece of music and script that I’m going to be performing pretty much the same on a nightly basis. It’s a solidified piece of work. And I think the intimacy of the venue is going to really affect it, to make it quite a bit different from the acoustic tours. Though I don’t know if I’d be doing this without the experience of doing them. When I recorded “Nebraska” back in the ’80s, I didn’t tour on it because I wasn’t sure if I could.
Are you using video?
Basically it’s a one-man show. There’s no production beyond the stage, some lights and some very high-quality sound. I thought anything beyond the song and the story ended up feeling too rigid and distracting. It happens every time we go to do a tour, you know?
You did a VH1 Storytellers with some extensive spoken interludes [in 2005].
That would be the closest thing to what I’m doing now. When I did the VH1 thing, Elvis Costello came up to me later and said, “Gee, it created some third entity.” And that’s what I’m interested in doing with the show. I’m playing familiar music, but I believe it will lead you to hear it with very fresh ears by the context that I set it in. I always make a comment that when things are working in art, one plus one equals three.
I think an audience always wants two things. They want to feel at home and they want to be surprised. And I go out every time to do those two things. I try to make people feel that they’ve come to some place that they’ve known for a long time, and then also try to surprise them with some new insights or new forms or new energy or just a new way of doing something. You’ve got to have that X factor. If you don’t have that, you’re dead in the water.
Do you go to Broadway shows?
We go on occasion. I saw “Hamilton.” I guess that was the last thing I’ve seen. It was great.
But you didn’t try to write a Broadway musical.
That’s tough! I salute the guys that have given that a shot. It’s not the same rules as pop music writing. It’s a completely different format, and I think it takes a set of completely different skills. It’s not like, oh, I’ll write 12 songs and kind of stick them together somehow. The guys I know who tried it really gave a good shot at it. My friend Sting, I thought, did a great job [with “The Last Ship”]. But it’s a different thing conceiving it from the beginning to the end. I admire all the Broadway writers, Sondheim, who have been able to do that so magnificently, but it’s not something I could ever do. It just seems too hard.
And then I’ve never really been good at, say, writing to script. In other words, “Now I need a song about [a certain subject].” I’ve never written like that. I’ve always written about what’s pressing itself upon me to write at a given moment. I’ve never sat back and said, well, I need a song about Trump, or I need a song about this happening or that happening. When I’ve crossed over with topical songwriting, even that was something that began as, you’re angry about something or you want to say something. That’s the feeling that comes up first.
With your book and with “Springsteen on Broadway,” you’re surveying your whole past. Are you also writing songs?
I've finished a record. I had some inspiration. When you’re locked into a period of creativity it’s very similar to being hungry all the time. You have an appetite to write. It’s one of the nicest feelings in the world for a songwriter because you know what it is to be without that appetite. Once you lock into that, then you’re feeding yourself. Everywhere you go you’re hungry. So I might come up with a verse sitting at the kitchen table, I might be asleep and wake up in the middle of the night and run upstairs to my writing room and come up with another verse or two. Literally I do it anywhere and everywhere and that’s a nice place to be. It doesn’t happen that often.
Writing the book must have made you think about your life story.
I really never had planned on writing anything. So when it came around, yeah, obviously, you draw a story from your story. I supposed you’re contextualizing your own life for yourself, and in the course of it you’re trying to have an honest hand.
It’s one of the things that I’m sort of glad it exists. Just for your kids — your kids really don’t know much about your life, you know? We had our kids late, I was 40 when our first son was born, and they showed a healthy disinterest in our work over all the years. They had their own musical heroes, they had their own music they were interested in. They’d be pretty blank-faced if someone mentioned a song title of mine, and I always looked upon that as that we did a good job. I know that none of my kids have read the book, though I imagine someday they will perhaps. I kind of like that. My job, it’s a strange job, it’s an eccentric line of work. And it’s not comparable to anything else and it can be difficult to be around it. As I say in the book, I know a lot of kids who wouldn’t mind seeing 50,000 people boo their parents. But I don’t know how many would want to see those people cheer their parents. It’s just not right (laughs).
The book explains that you’ve always been a musician. You never really had a 9-to-5 job. But “Springsteen on Broadway” is five nights a week for five months. It’s steady work.
That’s a real job. This is my first real job, I think (laughs). That’s the one thing I’m going into with a certain sense of faith. I go, well, I’m not using myself so totally physically on a nightly basis. And I’m not using my voice — you know, you’re not screaming. But the mental energy that it takes to do it is the same. People come to see you be completely, completely present. Any time you’re trying to do that, it takes a lot of energy.
You say the show and stories are locked in — won’t that become repetitive for you?
I’ve played “Born to Run,” many, many times. I’m sure if we went on the internet we could find out how many. (laughs) But the key is, you have to approach it not as a repetition but as a renewal. And to do that your spirit has got to be 100 percent present. But it’s a new audience every night. There’s new faces, there’s new opportunities. Those songs have been very good to me over the years, and in return I try to be good to them. So you have a chance of renewing the emotion and the spirit in that music on a nightly basis. That’s the place I work to get to every night when I’m onstage. I think that if the foundation of what you’ve built is built well, you’ll be able to inhabit it on a nightly basis and your audience will come in and it will feel like they’re seeing it for the first time. (laughs) That’s my plan, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment