THE SHOWS DID GO ON
2 days after attack, B’way returned
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Broadway took a brief but unprecedented intermission, and a rattled city struggled to make sense of the plot.
The Theater District went dark that tragic Tuesday and the day after as grieving performers, crew members and audiences stayed home watching the onslaught of horrific news — many unable to get to Manhattan following the closure of the city’s bridges, tunnels and entire transit system.
But in a display of strength and resilience, New York’s biggest cultural symbol reopened on Sept. 13, 2001, bringing a much-needed distraction to a devastated city and reaffirming theater’s crucial role in a time of national tragedy.
For actor James Harkness, who was in “Aida” at the time, reopening Broadway just two days after the attack on the World Trade Center was the right move.
“In times of crisis,” he said, “people need something to divert their attention. People need a place to escape to, and that is something that theater has always offered.”
Despite the overwhelming response, Broadway’s reopening was not an easy feat, and it did not save every show that season.
Before 9/11, Broadway was having a fantastic year. There was record attendance, with 11.9 million people in seats, and the industry saw its highest ticket sales ever, grossing about $666 million, according to the Broadway League’s 2000-01 season statistics.
Mel Brooks’ stage adaptation of “The Producers” was a major hit that year, winning 12 Tony awards, while “Rent,” “Aida” and “Kiss Me, Kate” were still going strong.
Jed Bernstein, president of the league from 1995 to 2006, said the mood in the city’s theater community was “very optimistic” when the sun rose on Sept. 11.
“It was a beautiful late-summer day,” he told the Daily News. “In fact, the weather was fantastic that entire week.”
Bernstein was at a coffee shop downstairs from his office that morning when the owner came over and told him a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Like many people, he initially thought there was an accident. “I finished breakfast and went upstairs, and my colleagues were all sitting in the conference room watching television, and it became clear that this was not an accident. This was really, really serious,” he recalled.
Across the city, New Yorkers responded to the ashen scene in lower Manhattan with shock and grief.
T. Oliver Reid, a Broadway performer who was in between shows after “Follies” closed in July 2001, asked his friends and family never to call him before 10 a.m. because of his schedule. But shortly after the first plane ripped into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., his phone rang.
For the next two hours, Reid said, he and a friend stayed on the phone and watched the news. After they finally hung up, Reid hopped on the subway line and headed downtown to check on friends. When he got off the train, he met a grim sight: “People walking in the streets and coming indoors with all of that soot and that ash that was all over their clothes.
“Everyone was shell-shocked,” he told The News.
At Bernstein’s office, meanwhile, he and his staff got on the phone with theater owners and producers to address the big question, “Are we going to perform that night?”
“I mean, nobody knew,” Bernstein explained. “The scope of this thing was unfolding so rapidly that nobody quite knew what the dimension was going to be.”
As the day went by, it became even more evident that it would not be an ordinary night for Broadway. Another attack was confirmed on the Pentagon, the FAA grounded every plane in the country, and the city shut down as authorities investigated new threats. Officials feared that Times Square and its surrounding area could be the next target.
The Broadway League decided it would be impossible — and perhaps insensitive — to perform that night or on the next day.
The tragedy touched the lives of many people directly or indirectly involved with Broadway. The local firehouse, Engine 54, Ladder 4 and Battalion 9 at W. 48th St. and Eighth Ave. lost 15 men — the most of any house in the city.
Calvin Gooding, the husband of LaChanze, a Tony Award-winning actress who would later star in “The Color Purple” and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” died at the World Trade Center, as did the wife of production manager Sam Ellis, who had just helped produce “Broadway on Broadway,” an annual outdoor concert that had aired on TV the night before.
On Sept. 12, Bernstein was asked to join a meeting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, NYPD and FDNY brass and the heads of other city businesses. Giuliani told the group that it was “vitally important” to get the city back to normal to “send a message that we would survive this, that we are vibrant and cannot be defeated,” Bernstein recalled. Bernstein told Giuliani that Broadway could reopen as soon as the city reopened its bridges, tunnels and transit system. The mayor assured him that would be done.
Later that night, producers and theater owners met to discuss the logistics of reopening and agreed to do so on Thursday — despite not knowing if people would show up.
“There was a feeling that, ‘How can we be singing and dancing? Look at what happened. How can we be doing a silly show, or even a serious show?’ ” he said. “People were emotionally overwhelmed. Not that a plane would hit a theater necessarily, but is it appropriate to be playing in a theater?”
Some theater workers opposed the prompt relaunch, wondering why they had to go to work in a national crisis, Harkness recalled.
Bernstein said that as Broadway reopened, he visited about five or six different shows. Some were crowded; some were not. At the beginning or end of almost
every performance, either an actor or a producer would give a short speech about how important it was for people to gather together. Some even sang “God Bless America” from the stage.
“I think that the general impression was that people who had been at home for 48 hours watching these horrific images were grateful to be together and to be gathering as a group,” Bernstein said. “People wanted to be out. They wanted to see humanity.”
While people were glad to see Broadway back up and running, many were still afraid of gathering in large groups or visiting Times Square.
That took its toll.
Within two weeks, five shows were permanently closed. Attendance at the Palace Theatre, where “Aida” was running, shrunk. The show typically enjoyed near-capacity crowds that summer, but the week of 9/11, average turnout plunged to roughly 40%.
Bernstein said the Theater District buckled under months of “considerable uncertainty,” but did not experience a “financial disaster.”
Broadway’s numbers went down slightly in the 2001-02 season, with attendance dropping below 11 million for the first time in five years. The district would soon experience another steady growth, reaching a record 14.77 million tickets sold in 201819, the last year before the COVID-19 shutdown.
One tool used to bring audiences back was showcasing Broadway’s talent to the nation. On Sept. 28, hundreds of theater pros — Matthew Broderick, Glenn Close and Paul Rudd among them — recorded a video singing “New York, New York” at Times Square to bring crowds back to theaters.
Twenty years later, the city’s theater community is again recovering from a much longer shutdown. While the ongoing crisis brings different challenges, the dark days after 9/11 showed Broadway has what it takes to recover.
“With the help of thousands of people, both inside the Broadway industry and outside, Broadway became a symbol of New York’s struggle to be resilient and to survive,” Bernstein said.
“It almost became an act of patriotism to see a Broadway show and support the livelihoods of people who are involved with the show, but even more importantly to put a stake in the ground and say, Thank you.”