When the Great White Way took on a life of its own
Michael Riedel’s latest book ‘Singular Sensation’ is about Broadway in the ’90s
In his revelatory first book about Broadway in the 1970s and ’80s, “Razzle Dazzle,” the writer Michael Riedel made a typically immodest claim: Broadway savedNew York City. And in Riedel’s sequel, “Singular Sensation,” Broadway gets to enjoy its just rewards. And, boy oh boy, does it have fun.
When Riedel, the longtimeNew York Post columnist, picks up the mantle in 1991, royalties from worldwide productions of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” are filling Andrew LloydWebber’s coffers with so much cash, he barely knows what to do with all that money. Sowhy not take an intimate story about a fadedmovie star and her impecunious gigolo and turn it into a gilded mega-musical with a flying mansion and enoughwarring divas to fill any swimming pool on Sunset Boulevard?
Hey, whyworry that none of that stuffwas really needed in any palpable artistic sense? Did not “Miss Saigon” wow’em with a helicopter? Lloyd Webber had to compete with CameronMackintosh. In the 1990s, Broadway still was actual show-business and not a fight for moral righteousness.
But LloydWebber’s fin de siècle indulgences signal an end in Riedel’smind to the British dominance of the musical theater through such properties as “Cats,” “Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the Opera.”
Riedel’s new narrative, covering the era through Sept. 11, 2001, argues that the 1990swas the decade when American figures started to reclaim Broadway fromall those whiskers, masks and barricades and that, in doing so, they announced themselves with substance and artistic invention.
A young man named Jonathan Larson sat in his East Village apartment and dreamed up “Rent.” Disney won the lottery by taking a risk on an avant-garde creative named Julie Taymor and handing her both Elton John and an assignment to take an animated cartoon called “The Lion King” and bring families back to Broadway. (She did, although it nearlywent very wrong.) And a writer named TonyKushner had a feverish dream about an angel, followed the death of a friend fromAIDS.
Not only didKushner write “Angels in America,” he actually got it to Broadway, buoyed by the kingmaking power of theNew York Times theater critic Frank Rich, writing in a happier era for critics. You know, back when readers would still search hungrily for a lucid newsprint review and had neither Facebookwalls nor identity politics as easy modes of counter-attack.
Of course, these American producerswere benefit
ing fromall the rehab done by the Brits on a hithertoarcane industry that, by the 1990s, was generating levels of profit for its hits that eclipsed mostHollywood grosses. And I’d argue that the uber-narrative of Broadway in the 1990s was not so much a switch in power across the Atlantic, although thatwas true, but a realization that, in the theater, therewas money in political substance, emotional heft and in paying attention to a new generation with a whole lot of disposable income but little taste for tired revivals starring RobertGoulet or Carol Channing.
By the 1990s, the island ofManhattanwas being colonized by Starbucks, and Brooklynwas filling up with baristas and brandname chefs. All those urban hipsters, terrified of losing the street cred they cultivated at the private universities that formed their ideas, needed shows that fulfilled their anti-suburban sense of selves. And many of them had the money to buy the tickets.
Nowa talk-radio host on NewYork’s 710WOR-AM, Riedelwas always an anomaly among Broadway observers and that is now truer than ever.
For one thing, he has a sense of humor, a relief when the American theater
is constantly self-flagellating or attacking its own or claiming to knowfar more than its audience. For another, he leans moderately to the right, whereas pretty much the entire theater industry either leans far to the irony-free left, or has pivoted there in public for its own self-preservation.
Plenty of the big-name creatives in his story rake in the royalties (or fight for their own pieces of the action) even as they affect disinterest in such tacky notions as branding or business. But Riedel sees through all that and pricks plenty of elite, puffed-up balloons. You don’t have to agree with him to enjoy the spectacle on the page.
Freed fromthe pressure of being a critic or reporter of record, Riedelwas able to write a must-read Broadway column in the 1990s. It worked mostly because its creator had figured out that most actors had little to say and that show-publicists peddled cliched narratives merely designed to juice ticket sales. The publicists traded access to Broadway stars for friendly stories— itwas ever thus in the entertainment business— and most starstruck journalists succumbed, if only out of terror of being scooped by the Times.
But Riedel had the sources, especially among
the powerful theater owners and group bookers who tend to knoweverything, to do his ownworkarounds. Better yet, he realized that the producerswere far more interesting subjects that the people whosework they produced. Well, with the exception ofMel Brooks and Edward Albee, the sweet-and-sour of the great Broadway take-out of the 1990s, and both wiser and funnier than most anyone.
Those producerswere a chatty crew back then, invariably willing to sell a rival down the river by revealing just howfew tickets they’d really sold in advance, as distinct from having reported as sold in Variety. Riedel loves producers (me too; they’re fun) and his book is filled with their antics, be that the chutzpah of a married couple fromNewJersey named Fran and BarryWeissler, who made a billion-dollar killing with the low-cost “Chicago”; the rise of the savvy Thomas Schumacher, who made a fortune for the suits at Disney; or the machinations of a Canadian mogul named Garth Drabinsky, who kept one set of books for his investors and another to fret over when he couldn’t sleep. Hewent to jail, and I don’t mean as in the last-but-one scene of “The Producers.”
Of course, all of this
Riedel juice nowfeels like nectar froma distant planet, as Riedel acknowledges in his post-pandemic introduction. Broadway is shuttered, the producers are nursing their losses in the Hamptons, the cool kids have all decamped for their parents’ old placeUpstate and when Broadway comes back, it is not liked to do so with gilded mansions all around.
Nope. Thewordwon’t be triumph but recovery. Riedel is reporting here on something that has gone for good. Or rather ill.
“Singular Sensation” ends with the bittersweet story of Sept. 11. Herewas Broadway’s finest hour. Incredibly, the Great White Waywas back in business by Sept. 13 at the behest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. You know, the old Giuliani, the one that commanded respect.
People needed to be close together and Broadway rose to the task. Now, with its ancient theaters and need for crowds, it finds itself a potential super-spreading event. No wonder the industry has decided to hibernate.
But it remains the talisman.
NewYork, and maybe even America, won’t feel normal again until Broadway shows return. That will be a night.
“Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway” by Michael Riedel is published by Simon and Schuster; Nov. 2020, $28.