When Springsteen on Broadway opened in October 2017, TheInfomancer expressed great interest. He almost never asks for anything, so when he does, I do whatever it takes. We have seen Bruce in concert since the early 1980s. I have seen him live more than any other performer, except for the now-retired early music group Anonymous 4. That pretty much encompasses my musical tastes from one end to the other.
The prices were astronomical and sold out almost immediately. But there was a lottery, where Verified Fans through Ticketmaster could put their names in for two $75 tickets. It was a nicely run lottery, where the day after I had done that, I would get an email saying “Sorry, GA” you didn’t win. I tried for one performance every week or so, on a night I was sure we could actually go.
On Wednesday this week, there was a message on my phone that – fanfare please – we had won. For the next night. We were dazzled. So on March 15, 2018 we went. (It was a week after we had seen Hamilton: an American Musical. Yes, that was too much, but that’s how it happened.)
Yeah, it was great. For two and a half hours (no intermission, how did a man only a year younger than me do that without a bathroom break?) Bruce told stories. And sang. He had a Teleprompter, a lot of his guitars, and a piano, and while it might have looked casual it was as tightly scripted and controlled as any fine novella or play. I have a hard time remembering what songs he sang (mostly older ones) in part because he reworked and replayed those songs, those songs he must have sung hundreds of times, so that each one was a revelation. The guitars clanged like church bells.
He talked, and he sang, about his childhood, his father, his mother, his sister, Clarence. His neighborhood, his early days playing. His wife Patti Scialfa, “queen of my heart.” She sang two duets with him.
Bruce Springsteen is the preacher in the church of rock and roll. He rumbled out the first tale, shouting: “DNA. Talent. Practice. Sex.” A lot more words than those, a litany of how he came to music. He had us laughing and shouting from the first.
His tale of his mom was the first one that brought me to tears. His mom is 92, “seven years into Alzheimer’s” but he talked about her as his support, his rock and roll dance partner, and touchstone and foundation of his family. She was a legal secretary, and his evocation of her in her high heels and her lipstick and her pride in the work she did was, simply, magnificent.
Near the end, the lapsed Catholic (“You can never leave”) said The Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, so simply and directly that the parts of the audience who have that prayer in our bones said it along with him.
We were only allowed photos during the curtain calls. But I took some, of course.
Physically, there was a lot going on there in my case. We were in the mezzanine, which made for vertigo on my part. We were up three flights of stairs, but I knew that ahead of time, so I and my cane made it up and made it down. I did lose TheInfomancer at one point, causing panic and tears but our phones brought us back together. I am good for nothing after 5pm, but Bruce didn’t do matinees. Crowds terrify me, but this was a very caring crowd, where the people who could actually see me (small, round, white-haired, people tend to look right over my head) made way, let me into the restroom first, and generally behaved like people. Good people.
Here’s a review of Springsteen on Broadway’s review in Rolling Stone when it first came out. The show is substantially the same.
girasoleazzurra 