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      Bruce Springsteen Reopens Broadway, Ushering In Theater’s Return

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      On Saturday, “Springsteen on Broadway” became the first full-length show to take the stage since the Covid-19 pandemic forced performances to shut down in March 2020.I have seen the return of Broadway, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.In a city whose cultural soul had been shuttered for more than a year with boarded up windows and empty streets, it was Springsteen who called it back to life on Saturday night, his gruff and guttural rasp the first to echo across a Broadway stage to a paying audience in 471 days.Of course, “Springsteen on Broadway” is no traditional Broadway production — no mesmerizing choreographed musical numbers, no enchanted sets, no multi-page bios of cast members in the Playbill. The show consists of a man alone onstage; his ensemble a microphone, a harmonica, a piano and six steel strings stretched across a select slab of spruce wood.“I am here tonight to provide proof of life,” Springsteen called out early on. It was a line from the monologue of his original show — which ran for 236 performances, in 2017 and 2018 — and now it carried extra weight. That proof, he continued, was “to that ever elusive, never completely believable, particularly these days, us.”For the “us” that packed inside the St. James Theater — 1,721 filled seats, very few masked people, all vaccinated — that first arpeggiated three-note chord from “Growin’ Up” was indeed proof that the rhythms that moved New York City were emerging from behind a heavy, dark and weighty curtain.The 15 months that Broadway had been shuttered was its longest silence in history. In years past, strikes, hurricanes, blizzards and blackouts had managed to tamp down the lights on Broadway only for a few days, weeks or a month. But the pandemic forced the Theater District into an extensive darkness on March 12 of last year, as New York was quickly becoming the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States.And while marquee shows like “Hadestown,” “Hamilton” and “Wicked” are still awaiting their September reopenings, it was Springsteen who took one of the most meaningful strolls to center stage in Broadway history, and sang.Bruce Springsteen, left, and his wife, Patti Scialfa, taking a bow at the St. James Theater. They sang together on “Fire,” one of the new additions to the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the show largely hewed to the original incarnation, there were some notable additions, and new phrases, soliloquies and tales woven into the performance. Springsteen mentioned his new record, “Letter to You”; his new film of the same name; and his dismissed drunken-driving charges. (He was arrested after taking two shots of tequila with fans in Sandy Hook, a public beach that does not allow alcohol, and then hopping on his motorcycle.)But he also tried to make sense of the moment, of a long year filled with loss and isolation during the pandemic.“It’s been a long time coming,” Springsteen said to the crowd after finishing the first song, stepping away from the microphone and speaking directly to the crowd. “In 71 years on the planet, I haven’t seen anything like this past year.”He spoke at length of his mother, Adele Springsteen.“She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s,” he said. “She’s 95. But the need to dance, that need to dance is something that hasn’t left her. She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”And he addressed the civil unrest throughout the country.“We are living in troubling times,” Springsteen said. “Certainly not in my lifetime, when the survival of democracy itself, not just who is going to be running the show for the next four years, but the survival of democracy itself is deeply threatened.”He then launched into one of three new songs to the show, “American Skin (41 Shots),” a ballad written about Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, who was fatally shot in 1999 by New York City police officers.Amid the new material (including a new duet, “Fire,” with his wife, Patti Scialfa), the rhythms that marked the initial run of “Springsteen on Broadway” were quickly finding their groove. Hours before the show, a crowd amassed outside the side stage door, a relic of Springsteen’s earlier Broadway run when fans clamored for a glimpse of the rock star’s arrival every night.“It’s just epic to have the Boss open us back up,” said Giancarlo DiMascio, 28, who drove down from Rochester to see the show (his 49th Springsteen concert). “It’s big for New York, its big for arts and culture here, and to have this open up is a sense of normalcy.”A line began to form at the theater and eventually snaked down 44th Street, as fans clad in vintage Springsteen paraphernalia — old concert T-shirts, Stone Pony shirts and a few Springsteen face masks — were eager to get inside and see a stage in person for the first time in months. But, true to Broadway form, plenty of theatergoers staggered in just as the house lights were dimming, including Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Steven Van Zandt, the actor and guitarist for Springsteen’s E Street Band.The transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, standing left, and Steven Van Zandt, seated center, were among the famous faces in the crowd at Saturday night’s performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’ve been a Broadway fan for as long as I can remember, and this has been a challenging year,” said Jacob Persily, 26, from Monmouth County, N.J. He said he had been to “hundreds” of Broadway plays but had never seen Springsteen (though he lives around the corner from Springsteen’s gym in New Jersey). “I’m also a health care worker, so it’s been a challenging year in many other ways.”Outside the theater, dozens of anti-vaccination protesters gathered, shouting and harassing attendees. A similar group had come to protest the Foo Fighters concert at Madison Square Garden last week. Both performances required proof of vaccination to attend.But for many in the audience, it felt good to be back in the theater, back to live music, and just simply “back.” But other fans, for whom music — and particularly Springsteen’s music — brings an irreplaceable form of comfort, the show felt especially important.Kathy Saleeba, 53, drove from Rhode Island for the show. A self-described “No. 1 Bruce fan,” Saleeba said she had seen 51 Springsteen shows, many with her childhood friend Jane.In 2005, Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer, Saleeba said, but the two continued to go to as many Springsteen shows as possible, and they even met the Boss in Connecticut in 2008 before his show. He ended up playing a song for her, “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart.”On Saturday, Saleeba brought a picture of Jane, who died in 2016, along with the lyrics printed out from “Land of Hope and Dreams.” She hoped to give it to Springsteen in person.A line stretched down 44th Street as ticket holders waited to enter the St. James Theater. Audience members were required to provide proof of Covid-19 vaccination, and entry times were staggered.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Springsteen on Broadway” is part concert, part comedy, part tragedy, part therapy, but also so much more in an undefinable sum. It’s a performance and a conversation, with a hero and an icon baring himself onstage, offering a portrait of his life through his own eyes, his own voice, and how he has seen the world.It’s a show that reckons so rawly with loss and change in an unfair world, and even Springsteen at one point choked up, tears winding down his face as he recalled all those he’s lost: his father, his bandmates, his friends.“I’m glad to be doing this show again this summer because I get to visit with my dad every night that I’m here, and it’s a lovely thing,” he said, wiping his eyes.Though through somber resilience, Springsteen also finds ways to celebrate.In paying tribute to Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the larger-than-life saxophone player from the E Street Band who died 10 years ago this month, Springsteen recalled when “Scooter and the Big Man” took the city on and whispered rock ’n’ roll stories into the ears of millions. “He was elemental in my life,” Springsteen said, softly vamping through the chords of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” “And losing him was like losing the rain.”Like so many in the audience, I too lost a “Big Man” in the pandemic. My cousin Big Nick, who had a heart so big it could have been the inspiration for Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” was one of the more than 600,000 American people who succumbed to the coronavirus.And so has this city grappled with extraordinary loss, where almost every street, block and building, every inhabitant and every visitor has been forever changed by the pandemic.As I, and so many others, shared the pain of Springsteen as he recounted the death of his friend, and promised to “see ya in the next life, Big Man,” there was also comfort in seeing him onstage again, on Broadway again, and all of us, strangers and not, together again in music.And when Springsteen belted out the climactic third verse to “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — “Well the change was made uptown and the Big Man joined the band” — the only audible sounds were cheers. More

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      Diego Cortez, a Scene Shaper in Art and Music, Dies at 74

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      In ’70s and ’80s New York, he elevated Jean-Michel Basquiat in a huge show he curated, helped found the Mudd Club and worked with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson.Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s Downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought the 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to public renown, died on Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.The cause was kidney failure, his sister, Kathy Hudson, said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.Mr. Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was a founder of the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundary-pushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by the rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Mr. Cortez found in West Germany.Then came the “New York/New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cutting-edge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Mr. Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds that he’d been immersed in since he moved to New York City.He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Ms. Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” Alana Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1, said by phone. “He was very persuasive: we started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”He added, “Diego was the epitome of cool.”Mr. Cortez recruited more than 100 artists for “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at what is now the exhibition space MoMA PS 1 in Queens. The show brought wide renown to Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.MoMA PS1 ArchivesIn a maximalist show that Mr. Cortez packed with existing and future stars, Basquiat was introduced to a wider world. Known first for his graffiti art, he had morphed into a painter who incorporated images of angular people and symbols with words and phrases. The show, for which Basquiat created about 20 new works, brought him to the attention of dealers. By the time he died in 1988 at 27, he was a superstar.“What makes this work is the intensity of the line,” Mr. Cortez said in 2017 when the Basquiat portion of “New York/New Wave” was partly restaged at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. “Jean-Michel was really more of a drawer. It keeps that innocent aspect, that childish aspect that’s important, because it’s slightly not adult.”Mr. Cortez remained linked to Basquiat long after the P.S. 1 exhibition. He curated a few more shows of his work; advised his estate and served on its authentication committee; acted as a consultant to Julian Schnabel when Mr. Schnabel made the film “Basquiat” (1996); and played a bit part as what the credits called a “fist-fighter at the Mudd Club” in “Downtown 81,” another film about Basquiat, from 2001.Mr. Cortez stood before a painting of him by the photorealist painter Curt Hoppe. “Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” a colleague said.Curt HoppeJames Allan Curtis was born on Sept. 30, 1946 in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the video artist Nam June Paik.He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to the video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the Downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Ms. Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Mr. Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers.And he’d say, “Time to go.”Mr. Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, the innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.Laurie Anderson and Mr. Cortez at a benefit in New York City in 2013. She was inspired to base a song on one of his early jobs in New York, as a museum security guard.Cindy Ord/Getty Images“His main goal was to to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister Ms. Hudson, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.In addition to her, Mr. Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.Patti Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Mr. Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life. “He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Ms. Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.” More

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      Control of New York’s Stages Remains in White Hands, a Study Finds

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      The Asian American Performers Action Coalition is hoping for a season of change when theaters reopen.As New York’s theaters prepare to reopen following the twin crises of a pandemic and rising discontent over racial inequity, a new study which found that both power and money in the theater world have been disproportionately controlled by white people is calling for “a fundamental paradigm shift.”The study, by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, found that at the 18 major nonprofit theaters examined by the group, 100 percent of artistic directors were white, as were 88 percent of board members. On Broadway, 94 percent of producers were white, as were 100 percent of general managers.The study offers a direct challenge, not only to theater leaders, but also to those who fund the institutions, saying, “it remains to be seen whether or not the multitude of antiracist solidarity statements and pledges to diversity will result in real action and systemic change.”“Our expanded leadership stats confirm that almost every gatekeeper, employer and decision maker in the NYC theater industry is white,” the coalition declares in a letter introducing the study.They examined the 2018-19 New York theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — looking at every Broadway show, as well as the work of the nonprofits.The coalition called particular attention to a dearth of shows about Asian Americans. “Even as the industry has made small gains in diversity in recent years, particularly at the nonprofits, our work at AAPAC has shown that Asian-focused narratives remain consistently minimized and overlooked,” the report says.Among the other findings:Using publicly available tax forms, the coalition calculated the public and private contributions to nonprofit theaters, and said that $150 million went to the 18 big nonprofits in the city that it referred to as “predominantly white institutions,” compared with $12.6 million to 28 theaters of color.At the theaters studied, 59 percent of roles went to white actors, compared to 29 percent for Black actors, 6 percent for Asian American actors and 5 percent for Latinos (the coalition uses the gender-neutral term Latinx).Creative teams were less diverse, with 81 percent of writers being white, along with 81 percent of directors and 77 percent of designers.The report gave grades to individual theaters, and declared the Public Theater to be the most diverse, and the Irish Repertory Theater to be least diverse.The intense focus nationally on diversity issues has prompted an increase in research about race, gender and disability within the theater industry. A coalition of groups doing such research, called Counting Together, formed in 2019, and this month introduced the CountingTogether.org website, hosted by the Dramatists Guild and the American Theater Wing, to make the research more readily available. More

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      ‘I Needed It’: A Well-Timed Outdoor Theater Opens on Little Island

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      The island’s first performances, by Broadway Inspirational Voices choir, were post-pandemic catharsis for both the singers and the audience.The timing could not have been better.After the pandemic drove New Yorkers outdoors for everything from dining to haircuts, a 687-seat al fresco amphitheater opened for its first ticketed shows over the weekend on Little Island, the new oasis on the Hudson River, offering a new place for those tentatively re-emerging into crowds again to gather for open-air performances.The amphitheater opened with an emotionally rousing performance by Broadway Inspirational Voices, a professional choir run by Michael McElroy that is made up of chorus members who sang in Broadway musicals like “Ain’t Too Proud” and “The Lion King” before their theaters were shut down and they were thrust into unemployment.Some cheered, and some wept at the return of sights and sounds that had been in short supply during the many months of strict limitations: of hundreds of people piled into the curved wooden benches of the sleek new amphitheater, few of them masked, watching the sun set over the Hudson as a choir belted out “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin.”Michael McElroy, leader of Broadway Inspirational Voices choir and an artist in residence at Little Island, who started working on the show in January.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe choir, made up of Broadway musical actors, performing at dusk. The audience cheered and wept at the return of live entertainment.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAt the show, McElroy urged the audience to reconnect with one another, opening with the line, “After the darkness, there is always the light.”Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“This is the first time that I’ve been here, and I’m overwhelmed,” said Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island, before entering the amphitheater for Sunday’s performance.Although an outdoor theater was always part of the plan for Little Island, Diller had no idea how useful it would be as the city emerges from a pandemic — offering culture-starved New Yorkers a place for performances as indoor venues slowly begin to come back to life. “It’s the exact right moment,” he said.His family foundation will bankroll the first two decades of the park’s operations, which includes six days a week of arts programming. Without tickets to the amphitheater, visitors can perch themselves atop one of the island’s overlooks to peer down at the performances. Or, if they’re lucky, they can stumble upon one of the artists hired to perform at various spots on the island, like intentionally placed, well-paid buskers.The audience on Sunday. The sun sun set over the Hudson as a choir belted out “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThis weekend’s program was designed as a sort of post-pandemic catharsis for both the singers and the audience, some of whom rose from their seats to sway and clap along with the choir. It was shepherded by McElroy, whose homiletic interludes urged the audience to reconnect with one another, opening with the line, “After the darkness, there is always the light.”The evening of musical theater and gospel music was punctuated with drama and dance — which revolved around the themes of reawakening and reconnection. The actress Phylicia Rashad delivered a monologue about rediscovering the inner child; Daniel J. Watts and Ayodele Casel imitated sounds like thunder and a babbling brook with their tap shoes; Norm Lewis sang a commanding rendition of “Go the Distance” from “Hercules.”“Out of this space of necessary, required isolation, we come into a place that was created for community,” McElroy said in an interview.The evening featured musical theater, as well as gospel music, drama and dance — with themes of reawakening and reconnection. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe show was McElroy’s last major performance with Broadway Inspirational Voices, a group that he founded in 1994, at a time when his friends were dying of AIDS and he saw a need for spiritual healing. Twenty-seven years later, McElroy has decided to leave the group to focus his time on other creative pursuits, as well as to serve as the musical theater chair at the University of Michigan.But first, McElroy wanted to put together a show that filled a new spiritual void created by the current pandemic.So in January, McElroy, an artist in residence at Little Island, started planning for a live concert scheduled for June, not knowing how quickly the city would be able to get vaccinated and return to see live theater. For the initial rehearsals, which happened on Zoom, members of the choir would gather virtually to go over the music and ask questions, then mute themselves when it was time to sing.In May, the choir moved to a spacious recording studio, where they sang socially distanced and masked. And at the end of the month, they started rehearsing in a park, and then eventually, on the island itself, which floats over the Hudson River near West 13th Street.“It’s the exact right moment” for outdoor theater, Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island, said.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“We were rehearsing on the faith that we would be able to come together and do this concert,” he said. “It all depended on where the world would be at this time.”While Broadway itself still has a few months to go before it returns in full force, about 60 of the industry’s chorus members were able to get onstage to sing songs from some of the most popular musicals of all time, including “Wicked” and “West Side Story,” as well as some of the newer musicals that were shuttered by the pandemic, including “Hadestown” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Watching from the audience, David Plunkett, 52, started out with his mask hanging from his wrist, then alternated between waving it in the air like it was a handkerchief at a church service, and using it to dab at his teary eyes.“I knew I needed it,” he said, “but I didn’t know how much I needed it.” More

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      A Night at a Jazz Speakeasy

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      A Night at the Jazz SpeakeasySinna Nasseri📍Reporting from Midtown ManhattanLast Friday, I received a coveted invitation to the Daddy Rabbit, a clandestine pop-up jazz speakeasy that hops around locations in Manhattan.I watched as a handful of musicians gathered to play in a dark, unmarked room. Here’s what I saw, and heard → More

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      No Broadway Shows? No Problem. Walking Tours Fill a Void.

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      Tim Dolan of Broadway Up Close and his crew of tour guides are back on the sidewalks, catering to a growing number of visitors.On a recent weekday morning, a cluster of 10 masked out-of-towners found themselves in the garish maw of Times Square. Tim Dolan, their tour guide, held up an iPad showing a black-and-white photograph of the area in 1900, when it was filled with horse carriages rather than jumbo LED screens. In the photo, a man is shoveling a pile of manure. “The only thing that hasn’t changed is the smell,” Dolan said with affection.Dolan calls himself “probably the only New Yorker who would ever say they love Times Square.” It’s his neighborhood, he says, even though he lives in an apartment in Hamilton Heights with his French bulldog, Belasco, named after his favorite theater.Archival images of Times Square are incorporated into the tours.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesHe’s also probably one of the few people who can tell you the story of the actor who appeared in 9,382 performances of “The Phantom of the Opera,” or precisely why there were live lions onstage at the Broadhurst Theater for 14 nights in 1921.Dolan is the founder of Broadway Up Close, whose shamrock-green-shirted tour guides have, for 11 years, led one hour-and-45-minute tours of the area between 41st and 54th Streets, from Avenue of the Americas to Eighth Avenue. They talk about the buildings, the business and backstage gossip of the Theater District — including this newspaper, which gave Times Square its name — tracking its history from Oscar Hammerstein I to “Hamilton.” Dolan is also behind one of Times Square’s latter-day landmarks and photo ops, currently stashed away: a typographical jumble of the letters of “Broadway” near a pedestrian plaza, which looks good on Instagram.Last year, when the Great White Way went dark, Dolan’s tours stopped accordingly. (At the time, they were running 10 to 12 tours a week.) The exsanguine atmosphere of the place was especially heartbreaking for him. He missed his adopted community of performers, stage hands, TKTS staff members. “Even the Naked Cowboy,” he said. “I felt like I saw literal tumbleweeds roll down 44th Street.”A pre-pandemic poster for “Sing Street,” which was supposed to start previews at the Lyceum Theater in March 2020. Amy Lombard for The New York Times“Hamilton” will resume performances on Sept. 14 at the Richard Rodgers Theater on West 46th Street.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesA poster for “MJ the Musical,” scheduled to open this winter at the Neil Simon Theater on West 52nd Street.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesBut now, with coronavirus in retreat and reopening dates appearing on theater marquees, Dolan and his Broadway Up Close tour guides are back on the sidewalks nearly every day, catering to a slowly but surely growing number of visitors.It beats giving the tours virtually, though Dolan still conducts a couple of virtual tours a week. “So much of it is reading the audience, engaging with the audience, picking up on what they’re most interested in,” Dolan said. “It’s hard to do that in a webinar.”Visitors joined Dolan for a recent “Shubert Brothers and Beyond” tour.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesGiven that the tours attract musical lovers and theater die-hards, they are also currently serving as a substitute for actual Broadway. “We would definitely be seeing a show a night,” said Carrie Mershon, a visitor from Kansas who was taking the tour. She had booked the family’s New York trip months ago, in the hopes that Broadway productions would be up and running by now. No such luck; their show tickets had been refunded. “This fills the void a little bit.”At least Dolan can be relied upon to put on a show. Befitting the location, the more over-the-top the story, the better: Know the one about a “Follies” girl who found herself riding a runaway ostrich? How about the music director who dove into a watery orchestra pit after a flash flood at “Evita”? Or the theatergoer who fell out of the window onto the marquee of the Lyceum Theater?Dolan delivers colorful anecdotes and his fact-filled soliloquies with the polished enthusiasm of a jobbing actor. He was last onstage three years ago, in a regional production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and said he had booked a show in Michigan before the pandemic struck.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesHe has an actor’s knack for the emotional overshare too, pointing out his ex-girlfriend in a photo of the original “Hamilton” cast. “She’s with Daveed Diggs now,” one of the younger members of the tour group said, matter-of-factly.“I am aware!” Dolan replied.He moved to the city in 2003 to train at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. After graduation, he performed in “Altar Boyz” for two years, and then felt the pressure to get what many in the profession call a “survival job.” He’s still not a fan of the term. “I didn’t want to just get by. I wanted another job that was just as fulfilling as when I’m onstage or in an audition room.”Realizing there was a lack of good Broadway-centric walking tours, he picked up his New York City tour guide license and set out to tell strangers lesser-known stories about his favorite place in the world. He read scores of books and scoured the photo archives of the Museum of the City of New York and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Most enjoyable, he relentlessly picked the brains of other industry professionals.The Broadway Up Close kiosk in Times Square.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesIf anything, he had to rein in his passions: The original version of the tour covered all 40 Broadway theaters open at the time, and was seven-and-a-half hours long. Eventually, Dolan divided it into three separate tours, later adding a historical Alexander Hamilton tour and one on Broadway ghost stories, plus an interior tour of the Hudson Theater that’s currently on pause.Dolan’s eyes light up when describing the very earliest days of Times Square, a time when, for example, you might visit a recreation of a Dutch farm, replete with sheep and windmill, on a 42nd Street rooftop. Perhaps more surprisingly, Dolan is a defender of the 21st-century incarnation of the place. “We lament the loss of the old, while loving the new,” he told the group while his “Shubert Brothers and Beyond” tour stopped in the spot where a beautiful French Renaissance-style theatrical complex called the Olympia used to be. (An Old Navy store is there now.)Amy Lombard for The New York Times“You can have commerce, and art, and a safe neighborhood all at the same time,” Dolan told me. “If you’re looking for the nostalgia amid the ‘Disneyification,’ you just have to know where to look. Wanting to find the old among the new is part of why I started this.”Dolan expects Broadway Up Close to be back to prepandemic levels of business later in the year. By then, he hopes, the area will start to feel like its old self again. “I don’t think it’s in September, when we just have a couple of shows open. I think it’s once we hit maybe December, and there’s a handful of shows, and there’s the yellow Playbills in a sea of people in Times Square. Maybe less masks too. I don’t think New York City will fully be reopened until that moment happens.”Tim Dolan calls himself “probably the only New Yorker who would ever say they love Times Square.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesBefore that, Dolan has a date, on Sept. 14, with the Gershwin Theater — where “Sweeney Todd” had its premiere in 1979 and “Starlight Express” opened in 1987 — for the return of the musical “Wicked.”“I’ll be the grown man in the last row, crying.” More

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      In the ’80s, Post-Punk Filled New York Clubs. Their Videos Captured It.

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      An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York documents a brief moment when rogue videographers shot an influential sliver of the music scene.In the summer of 1975, Pat Ivers filmed a legendary festival of unsigned rock bands at CBGB, which included Talking Heads, Blondie and Ramones. Ivers had unauthorized but easy access to equipment, thanks to her day job in the Public Access Department at Manhattan Cable TV, and other members of her video collective, Metropolis Video, helped out.“I was the only girl,” Ivers said in a recent interview. “And all the guys said, ‘You’re crazy. We’re not making money at this.’ They wouldn’t do it anymore, so for about a year, I sulked at the end of the bar at CBGB. Then I met Emily.”Emily Armstrong was a sociology major at the City University of New York who’d also taken a job in Public Access at Manhattan Cable, and shared with Ivers determination and a love of punk rock. The pair shot dozens of concerts, and hosted a weekly cable show, “Nightclubbing,” that showed their videos. The hulking Ikegami camera they used was “like a Buick on my shoulder,” Ivers said. They’d shoot bands until nearly sunrise, hurry back to Manhattan Cable’s offices and return the equipment before anyone noticed it was gone.Pat Ivers, left, and Emily Armstrong teamed up to shoot shows throughout the city using borrowed equipment from their day jobs at Manhattan Cable TV.Sean Corcoran, a curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, graduated from college in 1996 and was in kindergarten when Ivers and Armstrong were amassing their archive. But he’s fascinated with the flowering of new music that took place in New York starting in the late ’70s. When a colleague proposed an exhibition timed to the 40th anniversary of MTV’s August 1, 1981 arrival, Corcoran pounced on the opportunity to build a showcase for the music that emerged in the wake of New York City’s 1975 near-bankruptcy, subsequent economic distress and AIDS and crack epidemics.When Corcoran began curating “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” which opens Friday, he knew most of the photographers who’d documented the era, including Janette Beckman, Laura Levine and Blondie’s zealous guitarist, Chris Stein. While searching the copious Downtown Collection of NYU’s Fales Library, he saw a listing of Ivers and Armstrong’s archive, which the library acquired in 2010, and was thrilled. Material from that duo, plus footage from Merrill Aldighieri, and the team of Charles Libin and Paul Cameron, provided Corcoran with a vast but rarely seen video catalog.“New York, New Music” chronicles a variety of genres, including rap, jazz, salsa and dance music, but the videos in the exhibition emphasize post-punk, the gnarled, joyously uncommercial cousin of new wave that happens to be having a moment. (An inescapable Apple ad campaign uses the Delta 5’s spiky 1979 song “Mind Your Own Business,” which was considered so uncommercial it wasn’t even released as a single in the United States.) The sound of this era, Corcoran said, “never gets the attention that disco and punk get.”“New York, New Music: 1980-1986” opens at the Museum of the City of New York on Friday.Museum of the City of New YorkThanks to the advent of portable (if Buick-size) video cameras, these five dogged videographers documented this fertile music, which was politically progressive and inclusive of races and genders. All were DIY self-starters, flush with moxie, who made the best of borrowed equipment and Gothic lighting. Aldighieri even shot with videotapes she’d scavenged from dumpsters outside the Time & Life Building. This grimy, seat-of-their-pants aesthetic was the dominant language of music video until MTV spread throughout the country and turned videos into gleaming advertisements for stardom.Like Ivers and Armstrong, Libin and Cameron plunged themselves into the scene. The pair met as SUNY Purchase film students who bonded over their love of Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese. In 1979, they drove down to the 62nd Street nightclub Hurrah in Manhattan, and shot a 16 mm film of a colorful new band from Georgia, the B-52’s, playing a jittery surf-rock song called “Rock Lobster.” They edited it using university equipment, then showed it at Hurrah by projecting it onto a white bedsheet. Music videos were still a novel idea, and “people went ballistic,” Cameron said.The head of their film department went ballistic for different reasons, and expelled the duo for using equipment without permission. Free of academic distractions, they moved to New York, bartended at Hurrah and shot dozens of the era’s best bands; they contributed videos of the jagged funk bands Defunkt and James White and the Blacks to the museum show. After a few years, their video work led to flourishing careers as cinematographers, leaving no more time for late nights in the clubs.James White in 1980 at Hurrah.Charles Libin and Paul CameronDefunkt at Hurrah in 1980.Charles Libin and Paul CameronFilming this scene was stressful and sometimes risky. While working at Danceteria, an unlicensed club near Penn Station, Ivers and Armstrong were arrested along with other employees; they also had a significant portion of their archive stolen. “It made us bitter,” Ivers said. In April 1980, after shooting Public Image Ltd., they ended “Nightclubbing.”“The scene we loved was over. A new scene was coming. I didn’t like Duran Duran,” Armstrong added. More than a dozen of their videos, including footage of the punk bands the Dead Boys and the Cramps, and the louche, chaotic jazz-rock of the Lounge Lizards, are displayed at the Museum of the City of New York show.Aldighieri, an intrepid Massachusetts College of Art and Design grad who’d worked as a news camerawoman and an animator, was hired by Hurrah to play videos between sets, and used the house camera to shoot bands. She filmed more than 100 different bands there, some more than once: “I was there five to seven days a week,” she said. But in May 1981, Hurrah closed, and a subsequent late-night mugging scared her into nightclub retirement. Aldighieri created a short-lived series of VHS video compilations for Sony Home Video, worked in production and postproduction, then moved to France. From her archive, the curator Corcoran used four clips, including the jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra and the South Bronx sister group ESG, which played minimalist funk.The footage from the five filmmakers forms “the core of the video content” in “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” Corcoran said. It’s just a happy coincidence that the show is arriving at a time when post-punk music is finally in the limelight.Sun Ra onstage at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriSonny Sharrock of Material performing at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriThe acerbic British band Gang of Four released a boxed set in March; Beth B’s documentary of the No Wave warrior Lydia Lunch opens in New York this month; and Delta 5, heard constantly in that Apple commercial, has been cited as an influence by emerging groups from the United Kingdom (Shopping), Boston (Guerilla Toss) and Los Angeles (Automatic).“Always surprised that there’s still resonance after 40 years,” Ros Allen, who played bass in Delta 5 and is now an animator and senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland in England, said in an email. “‘Mind Your Own Business’ has got a catchy beat and bass lines and a cracking guitar break, and then there’s the ‘go [expletive] yourself’ lyrics.”The Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham, who is now an assistant professor of experiential learning at Endicott College in Massachusetts, said in an email, “There was so much interesting and lasting music made during that post-punk/pre-New Romantic time.” He added, “And maybe our own kids will be generous enough of spirit to click ‘like’ and allow us relevance, once again.”Bad Brains onstage at CBGB, as captured for “Nightclubbing.”via GoNightclubbingIn the course of the 1980s, Corcoran noted, New York changed from an unregulated city hospitable to artists to a tightly policed city hospitable to stockbrokers, which brought the era to a close. Much of the footage he chose has rarely been seen, and other important video documents of the era are frustratingly difficult or impossible to find.Chris Strouth, a composer and filmmaker, spent years searching for the videotapes of M-80, a groundbreaking 1979 two-day music marathon staged in Minneapolis. After he finally located it, he spent “four or five years,” he said, turning it into a feature length documentary. At the last minute, the singer of an obscure local band he declined to name pulled permission to use its footage, which Strouth described as “heartbreaking.”Some filmmakers didn’t get signed releases from the bands, which limits their commercial use. Some got releases that have gone missing or didn’t anticipate the rise of digital media. In lieu of a contract, videos can’t be licensed without facing a gantlet of opportunistic lawyers and moody band members. “It’s hell,” Strouth said with a bruised chuckle. “Music licensing is hell.”But it wasn’t always that way. Ivers was able to film nearly every act from the late ’70s, except Patti Smith and Television, who declined permission. Thanks to Ivers and others, an obscure era of music was thoroughly memorialized. “The shows we saw — my God,” she said. “It was lightning in a bottle. It was only going to happen once.” More

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      NYC Plans a Central Park Mega-Concert to Celebrate Reopening

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      The mayor’s office has asked the producer Clive Davis to sign up musical stars for an event on the Great Lawn in August.Brunch crowds are back. Rush-hour traffic is back. Tourists in horse-drawn carriages are back.But the best proof that New York City has returned to its full glory may be a mega-concert in the green expanse of Central Park.Seeking a grand symbol of New York’s revitalization after a brutal pandemic year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is planning a large-scale performance by multiple acts and has called on Clive Davis, the 89-year-old producer and music-industry eminence, to pull it together.The show, tentatively set for Aug. 21, is still coming together, with no artists confirmed, though Mr. Davis — whose five-decade career highlights have included working with Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and Whitney Houston — said he is aiming for eight “iconic” stars to perform a three-hour show for 60,000 attendees and a worldwide television audience.Mr. de Blasio said in an interview that the concert was part of a “Homecoming Week” to show that New York City is coming back from the pandemic — a celebration for residents and those in the region who might not have visited in a while.“This concert is going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s going to be an amazing lineup. The whole week is going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before in New York City.”The show would be the latest in a storied tradition of Central Park super-productions that tend to attract worldwide coverage and to paint New York as a peaceful, cosmopolitan haven for the arts. Many New Yorkers, especially the mayor, may welcome that view after the prevalence of pandemic-era images like a deserted Times Square and boarded-up storefronts amid last summer’s protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.Clive Davis, the producer, said he is aiming to recruit eight major stars to share the billing for the concert, set for Aug. 21.Bryan Derballa for The New York Times“I can’t think of a better place than the Great Lawn of Central Park to be the place where you say that New York is reopening,” Mr. Davis said in an interview.Mr. Davis said that Mr. de Blasio called him three weeks ago, around the time of Mr. Davis’s latest Grammy gala, which he has been hosting annually since 1976, and was divided into two parts this year. As Mr. Davis recalled, the mayor asked him to present a show in partnership with the city that would celebrate New York’s reopening and emphasize the need to vaccinate more young people. The event’s working title gives a sense of its intended gravity: “The Official NYC Homecoming Concert in Central Park.”“I was greatly honored,” said Mr. Davis, who grew up in Brooklyn.Mr. Davis said that he and his team, which includes his son Doug, a music industry lawyer, are still at work booking artists, and he declined to offer any names of those he has in mind. Sponsorship deals are also in the works, he said. The mayor’s office said it would announce a broadcast partner soon.But a number of details for the event have already been set. Live Nation, the global concert giant, is involved with the production, and the majority of tickets will be free, although there will be some V.I.P. seating, Mr. Davis said.The Great Lawn — a 13-acre oval in the center of the park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Delacorte Theater and the reservoir — has long been the city’s most prestigious setting for outdoor concerts, telegraphing a sense of the very heart of New York.The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, has a reputation for being strict and judicious in doling out licenses for major performances there. The group’s website barely mentions concerts, noting that a renovation in 1997 “restored the lawn to balance both active sports use and quiet relaxation.” But the mayor’s office said the conservancy supports the idea.The Great Lawn has been the site of concerts and other major public events since the 1970s. Carole King serenaded 70,000 people there in 1973. Elton John played in 1980 — in a duck suit, among other outfits —  and the following year Simon & Garfunkel reunited for an estimated 400,000 people. Diana Ross performed in 1983, Luciano Pavarotti in 1993 and the Dave Matthews Band in 2003.The New York Philharmonic plays the Great Lawn as part of its tour of city parks each summer, and since 2012 the Global Citizen Festival has held regular events there with star-studded lineups including Beyoncé, Metallica, Neil Young and Coldplay. (Garth Brooks drew hundreds of thousands to the North Meadow, above 97th Street, in 1997.)But even as New York, dormant for a year, now races toward a reopening for entertainment venues — at a recent news conference with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, James L. Dolan, the chief executive of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, promised a “blockbuster summer” — the prospect of a large-scale public event may still pose complications for health and crowd control.While the state has promoted its vaccine passport Excelsior Pass as a way for restaurants, theater operators and others to confirm patrons’ vaccination status, the system is still new and has not been very widely adopted by either the public or many businesses. According to the state, about 1.1 million passes had been downloaded as of last week, representing only a fraction of the 9.1 million New Yorkers who have been vaccinated.The mayor’s office said there would be vaccinated and unvaccinated sections at the concert, and that about 70 percent of tickets would go to people who are vaccinated. The city has been working hard to vaccinate residents who are reluctant to get the shot.A successful event could be a political triumph for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his last year in office who has repeatedly clashed with Mr. Cuomo. Mr. de Blasio’s popularity sank after his failed presidential run in 2019, and many parents were frustrated over the chaotic reopening of schools during the pandemic.But Mr. de Blasio has recently embraced his role as New York City’s cheerleader as millions of people have been vaccinated and the city has started to reopen. Several of the candidates who are running to succeed him as mayor say they want to hold a major celebration, including Andrew Yang who proposed a five-borough party hosted by his friend Dave Chappelle, the comedian.Mr. de Blasio said he was excited to have Mr. Davis on board and compared the event to a homecoming at a college, where alumni gather to reconnect. He said he wants to show that the city is ready for September, when many more workers are expected to return to offices in Manhattan.Mr. de Blasio said he had been to concerts on the Great Lawn, including seeing Stevie Wonder at the Global Citizen Festival several years ago.“It’s an absolutely stunning place for the concert,” he said. “It makes you feel a deep connection to New York City.”It could also be a late-career feather in the cap of Mr. Davis, who has spent more than 50 years as one of the reigning dons of the music industry.Mr. Davis said he viewed the central message of the event as a simple and optimistic one.“There’s a mental attitude that I think we are all looking forward to,” he said. “That the future is bright and healthy for this country, for the world and for New York City.” More