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    Nicole Scherzinger to Star in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ on Broadway in the Fall

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    The revival, birthed in London, is a radically reimagined version of the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on a 1950 Billy Wilder film.Jamie Lloyd’s radically reimagined revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Nicole Scherzinger plays the faded film star Norma Desmond, will come to Broadway this fall after a rapturously received run in London.Earlier this month, the revival was nominated for 11 Olivier Awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Lloyd. The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 28 and then open on Oct. 20 at the St. James Theater.The musical, a dark thriller based on a 1950 film by Billy Wilder, features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; Glenn Close starred in both previous Broadway productions, in 1994 and 2017. (The stage role was originated by Patti LuPone in London; the film starred Gloria Swanson.)Lloyd, a British theatermaker, has carved out a distinctive niche by staging starkly spare productions of classics with a focus on psychological drama. The new production, which ended its London run in January, is stripped down in many ways — two songs have been cut, there is no grand staircase or turban and Scherzinger doesn’t even wear shoes.“It’s much more about the psychological and emotional journey as opposed to huge, elaborate sets,” Lloyd said in an interview. “It’s very much a kind of psychological chamber piece.”The show, set in midcentury Los Angeles, is about a forgotten star of the silent film era who latches onto an aspiring young screenwriter in the hopes of rebooting her career.Scherzinger, 45, has had a varied entertainment path — as a musician, an actress and a television talent show judge. The critic Matt Wolf, reviewing the London production for The New York Times, called this “a career-defining performance” for Scherzinger; the New York production will be her Broadway debut.“I guess I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Scherzinger, who studied theater in high school and college, said in an interview. “I can’t believe that it’s finally about to happen.”Scherzinger, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Kentucky, said she was eager to have another go at the role in the United States. She said she will set aside the script for a few months — she just spent three weeks visiting with her grandparents in Hawaii — before reimmersing herself in the character.“I’ll be back in America, my home, and I’m going to want to try and up my game even more,” she said. “There’s certain places I can make stronger choices, and I’m excited to play around with that to see where it can go — it’s great to be able to explore even more and go deeper.”Scherzinger, who said she has committed to nine months in the role, will be joined on Broadway by her three Olivier-nominated co-stars, Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett-Young and David Thaxton. More

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      ‘Illinoise,’ a Sufjan Stevens Dance Musical, Is Moving to Broadway

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      The production will make its transfer unusually fast, with an opening set for April 24, just 29 days after it wraps up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory.“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview. More

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      ‘New York, New York,’ a Film-Inspired Homage, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The new musical, based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film, features songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and is directed by Susan Stroman.“New York, New York,” a new musical inspired by the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, will open on Broadway next spring.The musical, set in the years just after World War II, is nominally about the lives of a diverse array of New Yorkers, including a musician who falls in love with a singer, as in the film. But, also like the movie, it is a tribute to New York City as a city of seekers and strivers.The musical will feature songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, a songwriting pair best known for “Chicago” and “Cabaret.” The two wrote songs for the film, which was also a musical, including, most famously, the title song, which enjoyed renewed popularity in the city at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.The stage adaptation will include nine existing songs and 13 new ones. Ebb died in 2004; Kander, who is 95, has been actively working on the show, and the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) co-wrote two songs with him and will be credited for contributing additional lyrics to the show.“The hero or heroine of the piece is New York City itself,” Kander said in an interview. “In the years of 1946 and 1947, the city was flooded with new young people, many of whom had been in the Service — I was one of them — looking to have a life you couldn’t have where you came from.”Kander said the show will track five story lines, but also will feature “a kaleidoscopic set of interludes where we see other characters.”The show features a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, and will be directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The cast has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances on March 24 and to open on April 26 at the St. James Theater. The lead producers are Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy; the show will be capitalized for $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show will be large — Stroman said she expects an onstage cast of 27 and an orchestra of 19. Stroman and Kander began talking about the show before the pandemic, but now see it a tribute to the city’s resilience. “We knew the city would at some point come back, and that fueled us to write about it even more,” Stroman said. More

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      Julia Lester on Her ‘More Knowing’ Little Red Riding Hood

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      Her bold choices for “Into the Woods” have garnered the 22-year-old actress critical acclaim and a Broadway debut.Conventional wisdom has it that actors should not audition in costume. But Julia Lester did so anyway — fashioning a red cape out of a circle skirt — when she videotaped her audition for the part of Little Red Riding Hood in the Encores! production of “Into the Woods” this spring. Two weeks later — without even a callback — she heard from her agent: “Stephen Sondheim wants you to play Little Red.”Indeed, it was her many bold acting (as well as sartorial) choices for the fabled girl bound for grandmother’s house — her raised eyebrow, brassy willfulness and wry sophistication — that captured the attention of critics in May and catapulted Lester to a Broadway debut at just 22 years old after the show transferred there this summer. (The Broadway run has just been extended through Oct. 16.)“In Lester, we witness a major new comedic talent emerge,” said Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post. “All her well-known jokes feel fresh, and she is unbelievably funny. My face was a lot red from laughing so hard.”The New York Times called her “pert and twinkling”; The Washington Post, “uber-confident, rough-and-ready”; The Wall Street Journal, “deliciously impish and knowing.”It was her aura of worldliness and tenacity that made the show’s director, Lear deBessonet, so certain in casting Lester. “I knew she was right 10 seconds into her audition video,” deBessonet said. “Having seen a number of Little Reds over the years, any sort of cutesy, girlie, victim thing was totally not of interest to me. As a woman, there are certain things I don’t ever want to see onstage again.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” Lester said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important.”Raphael Gaultier for The New York Times“For me, the defining quality of the character is hunger, this delicious power lust which is so refreshing and unexpected,” deBessonet continued. “It was immediate upon seeing Julia. I was like, ‘Yup, well: There she is.’”Sipping water in a theater district hotel before a recent performance, in a braid and Doc Marten lace-up boots, Lester did come across as preternaturally comfortable in her own — admittedly callow — skin.Despite her cherubic face and wide-eyed words about getting to share the stage with so many veterans (including Sara Bareilles, Gavin Creel and Phillipa Soo), Lester talked about how she has grown increasingly self-assured over the last few years.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” she said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important for me.“Our whole career is based on what other people think about us,” Lester continued. “It’s quite a struggle to know that other people are silently or non-silently judging you on a daily basis.”If onstage she seems experienced beyond her years, that’s because she is, having performed professionally since she was 5 and just completed her third season as Ashlyn Caswell in the Disney+ series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” the musical drama about high school theater students. (The fourth season starts shooting in Salt Lake City in September.)Lester, at the piano, with Olivia Rodrigo in the TV series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.”Fred Hayes/Disney +Show business also runs in Lester’s blood. Her great-grandfather and his siblings were part of a Yiddish opera company in Poland at the turn of the century. Her maternal grandparents, Helen and Peter Mark Richman, met doing summer stock theater. Her mother, Kelly, and father, Loren, continue to perform, as do her two older sisters, Jenny and Lily.“We’re a big performing family,” Lester said. “I can’t stress enough how supportive we all are of each other.”Her version of Take Your Daughter to Work Day was going to the Universal Studios lot and hanging out with her dad on commercial shoots. “I always knew from the second I was born that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Lester said. “So being able to be surrounded by it on a daily basis, and really learn from my family, is such a blessing.”Born on Jan. 28, 2000, in Los Angeles, Lester had been in productions of “Into the Woods” twice before: first as the cow Milky White in a community theater production when she was in elementary school (her sisters played other parts) and the next time at age 18 as Little Red in a 99-seat theater in Los Angeles.While many actors dread having to try out for parts — given their nerves and the statistical likelihood of rejection — Lester said she loves auditioning.“You’re being given the opportunity to do what you were put on this earth to do,” she said, “which is to perform.”Lester is also personally drawn to the character of Little Red, who, after being rescued from the mouth of the wolf, goes on to carry a knife for protection, to look after Jack (of beanstalk fame) and to grow up before the audience’s eyes. “She is so feisty and so funny,” Lester said. “In a lot of the moments when it’s really high stakes and dark themes are happening, she is a beacon of comedy and light. That’s always really fun — to be able to bring down the house during a quiet, serious moment.”Lester as Little Red Riding Hood and Cole Thompson as Jack in the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith her performance in this Encores! revival, which originated at New York City Center before moving to the St. James Theater on Broadway, the actress said she “wanted to reinvent the way people see Little Red.”“When I was working on the script, I tried my very best to look at every line that she says, and really think about, ‘What’s the most unexpected way to portray what’s written?’” she said.James Lapine, who wrote the show with Sondheim (who died in November), said it was the first time that he had seen an adult play the part, which its usually played by actors under 18. “She’s bringing something a little punchier to it and more emotional shadings,” he said. “She’s a more knowing Little Red Riding Hood.”The show’s actors say they, too, have been struck by Lester’s sure hand in getting big laughs and by how she brings a modern sensibility to the role without bastardizing it. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” said Brian d’Arcy James, who plays the Baker, adding that Lester’s interpretation is “totally fresh but also honoring what’s preceded.”Bareilles, who plays the Baker’s Wife, said she had been pleasantly surprised by Lester’s “natural fire” as well as by her palpable respect for the opportunity she had been given, for her fellow performers and for live theater itself. “She feels like an old soul to me,” Bareilles said. “She doesn’t carry any neediness or urgency to get seen. There is a reverence in how she approaches the work.”From left: Sara Bareilles, Brian d’Arcy James, Phillipa Soo and Lester in the show. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” James said of Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs “a real die-hard theater kid,” Lester said, there is a pinch-yourself quality to what she’s living through, since she long admired from afar the very people she now finds herself performing next to onstage.“I never expected that I would be making my Broadway debut in a Sondheim show, let alone be surrounded by so many people that I’ve grown up loving and watching,” she said, adding, “Every single person has taken me under their wing.”While she is only committed to the show until Sept. 4, Lester said she would love to return to this Broadway production and to see it live on. “I’m sort of hoping for this show to be the new ‘Chicago’ and just be long-running forever and I can come back to it like home base whenever I am available,” she said. “This is definitely a show that I am not ready to say goodbye to anytime soon.”The personal response she has received from members of the audience has been particularly rewarding. Well aware that, as a full-figured young woman, she may not meet the traditional physical definition of an ingénue, Lester said she was gratified that other young women have looked to her as an affirming role model.“It’s taken a second to grow into myself and be comfortable with who I am, but it’s got to start somewhere,” she said. “If someone can say, ‘I see myself in you when you’re playing Little Red’ — when I’m standing on a Broadway stage — that’s exactly why I’m an actor and a performer.”“I’m really grateful to the people who have seen beyond what I look like,” she added, “and seen what I can offer to the world.” More

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      She’ll Have You at Moo: Milky White and the Power of Puppetry

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      Once upon a time on Broadway, back in 1987, the skinny old “cow as white as milk” in the new James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” was played by a prop as still as a statue. The cow, Milky White, has no lines, so it worked.Years went by, the fairy-tale mash-up musical returned to Broadway in 2002, and this time Milky White was played by an actor in a cow suit. Now she could dance, and that worked, too.Decades passed, and in the frenzied spring of 2022 came a hit Encores! revival so delicious that it transferred almost instantly from New York City Center to Broadway. Now in previews at the St. James Theater, where it opens on July 10, this “Into the Woods” presents Milky White as a puppet who breathes, coughs, moos and mourns — which works enchantingly.Or as an enchantment? It is a mysterious thing, the preternatural dynamic between a puppet onstage and the people in the seats, even the grown-up ones.”We’re best friends,” the actor Kennedy Kanagawa said of the cow puppet that he brings to life in “Into the Woods.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWe, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor — the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa — is operating her. But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.“There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’”In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack — the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame — for a pittance of five magic beans. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements.For her, high-tech means low emotion. Whereas with Milky White, deBessonet melted as soon as she saw her move — though that initial glimpse was digital, in a short video that Ortiz shot after he first built Milky White.Kanagawa, Milky White and Cole Thompson during a rehearsal of “Into the Woods” at New 42nd Studios.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. “He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”As high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands; the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre); and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see.“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”Early one evening in June, after the first rehearsal for the Broadway run, Ortiz and Kanagawa were sitting in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street, giving an interview for this article. A few feet away Milky White hung next to the birds on a metal rack, looking as lifeless as any puppet does without its puppeteer.Phillipa Soo, right, as Cinderella and Albert Guerzon, rehearsing a scene in which he operates a flock of birds, Cinderella’s loyal friends.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesKanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. Holding her by the handles, Kanagawa played with her spindly, splaying cardboard legs and recounted how he learned to shift her udder to one side when she needs to sit down. But he wasn’t puppeteering her just yet; she was still inanimate.Then he tilted her head ever so slightly, and instantly there she was: imbued with life and seemingly quizzical — even if her big, almost teary eyes are really just beveled foam coated with clear epoxy that catches the light.“Yeah, we’re best friends,” said Kanagawa, who was praised for his expert puppeteering in Alexis Soloski’s review of the Encores! production in The New York Times.It’s a recent skill for Kanagawa. Ortiz asked him to play Milky White because of his playfulness and imagination as an actor and his deep-rooted passion for the show. Then he taught him how to do it.This production has offered both of them the space to evolve the musical’s performance tradition, considering the sparsely written Milky White as a full character in puppet form.“We just kind of talk endlessly about cow logic,” Ortiz said.“Which honestly is kind of dog logic,” Kanagawa said. “Milky is a pet.”There’s the “right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning,” said Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOrtiz, 38, grew up in Dallas, and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the frolicsome mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, the season being what it was, filling in for three performances as that show’s head puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” with a statue-style cow.Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to the Washington, D.C., area when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the video recording of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow — then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it with watching it so many times.”More recently, in Rob Marshall’s 2014 movie version (with James Corden as the Baker, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the Witch), a genuine cow played the cow — not a casting decision likely to be emulated by many stage productions.Long before that, though, an idea percolated in Hollywood that might have permanently altered the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The Muppets creator Jim Henson was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a wonderful fellow.” But Henson died in 1990.Five years later, the idea moved forward anyway at Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the movie were to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a couple of readings with a couple of deliriously starry casts (one had Robin Williams as the Baker, Cher as the Witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters) before, Sondheim writes, the project was killed in a studio shake-up.It’s easy to envision a profusion of puppet Milky Whites, a whole generation’s worth, blossoming forth onstage if that film had happened. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for, and Ortiz designed, and Kanagawa operates, will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.Just lean in and look into her eyes. There’s no question at all: She’s real. More

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      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

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      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More

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      Bruce Springsteen Is Back on Broadway. The Workers Are Coming Back, Too.

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      Broadway took its first steps back with the return of Bruce Springsteen’s show, and no one is happier than Jim Barry, an usher at the St. James Theater for 20 years.Jim Barry, masked and ready, perched at the top of the theater stairs, cupping his hands around the outstretched smartphones so he could more easily make out the seat numbers.“How you doing? Nice jacket.”“Go this way — it’s an easier walk.”“Do you need help sir? The bathroom’s right there.”It was Saturday night at the St. James Theater.Bruce Springsteen was back on the stage.Fans were back in the seats.And, 15 months after the pandemic had shut down Broadway, Barry, who has worked as an usher at the St. James for 20 years, was back at work, doling out compliments and reassurance as he steered people toward the mezzanine, the restroom, the bar.“Springsteen on Broadway” is essentially a one-man show, but its return has already brought back work for about 75 people at the St. James — not only Barry, but also another 30 ushers and ticket-takers, as well as merch sellers, bar staff, porters, cleaners, stagehands, box office workers, a pair of managers and an engineer.The return of “Springsteen on Broadway” has already brought back work for about 75 people at the St. James Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore shows, and jobs, will return in August and September as Broadway’s 41 theaters slowly come back to life. Ultimately, a Broadway rebound promises to benefit not just theater workers but hotel clerks and bartenders and taxi drivers and workers in the many industries that rely on theater traffic, which can be considerable: in the last full season before the pandemic, 14.8 million people saw a Broadway show.Barry, a gregarious 65-year-old Staten Island grandfather, loves theater, for sure, but also depends on the job for income and basic health insurance.“This job is not for everybody, but I made it my own,” he said. Barry, a solidly built man with white hair who is often mistaken for a security officer, takes pride at being punctual, and jovial, and polite. “I can tell somebody tapping me on the back where the bathroom is, while telling somebody in front of me where their seats are, and also waving to somebody in the corner. It’s controlled insanity.”As he returned to work following the shutdown, there were a few changes to master. He had to wear a mask — they are required for employees, but not patrons — and struggled to feel comfortable making small talk through the fabric. And tickets were now all digital, which meant his signature move, which involved passing tickets behind his back as he accepted, scrutinized, and handed back the proffered stubs, was no longer useful; instead he needed to figure out how to quickly decipher all those different screen fonts.Still, he was thrilled to be back.“No matter what happens, nothing can make me feel bad, because I’m back at my house, and the Boss is at my house,” he said. “It’s where I want to be.”“No matter what happens, nothing can make me feel bad, because I’m back at my house, and the Boss is at my house,” Barry said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBarry, originally from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, took an unusual path to the theater industry. For 27 years, he had worked in banking, first as a teller, and then as a bank officer in Times Square.He saw theater, occasionally, and loved it. As a teenager he saw Danny Kaye in “Two by Two,” and later he saw “Jesus Christ Superstar.” (“I couldn’t believe it was so fantastic.”) But the production he most excitedly remembers seeing is “Grease,” at the Royale Theater; a friend got him access to walk onto the stage before the show. “It gave me the bug,” he said.So when he decided he needed to earn more money, and began looking for a second job, he reached out to one of his customers at the bank, a woman who worked in payroll at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway theaters, including the St. James. She asked if he’d be open to ushering.That was in 2001. The first shift he worked was at a dress rehearsal for “The Producers,” which was about to open. “You know you belong when your body just gets enveloped in euphoria,” he said.He was hooked. For years, he continued working full-time at the bank, while also working nights and weekends at the theater; in 2016 he left the bank for good, and now he works six days a week at the theater (the shifts are short — a full usher shift is 4.5 hours, but at each show half the staff gets to leave 30 minutes after curtain, which is two hours after their start time).It’s a union job, for which standard pay is $83.78 per show; Barry has the higher rank of director, so he makes about $710 a week, and supplements his income with Social Security and a small bank pension. He was kept afloat during the pandemic by unemployment; although he missed the theater, he also was glad to have more time to spend with his girlfriend.He has a bear of a commute — it can take up to two hours to get to work, depending on whether he drives or takes a bus, and how bad the traffic is. He arrives early, changes into his Jujamcyn uniform (black suit, black shirt, black tie, with a red J on the chest), and sits in a theater doorway on West 44th Street that he calls “my stoop,” enjoying coffee and a roll and greeting passers-by, sometimes posing for a picture with a passing actor.Barry has a long commute — it can take up to two hours to get to work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlthough he loves the theater, seeing shows other than the ones he’s working is hard — he’s generally on duty when other shows are running. But he usually gets to the big ones.At his own theater, he’s seen a mix of hits and flops. With the latter, he said, “you just feel bad for everybody.” And what if he doesn’t like a show he’s working? “We have the luxury of lobbies.”There are, of course, headaches to manage — intoxicated patrons, and insistent videographers — but he prides himself on doing so with civility. For the cellphone scofflaws, whose ranks have swelled since he began, he will sometimes simply hover, which usually shames people into compliance; other times he will use a flashlight or a headshake to get someone’s attention, and once in a while he’ll say something like, “Please don’t do that. If they see you, I’m going to get in trouble.” (At “Springsteen on Broadway,” no photos or videos are allowed until the bows.)How much does Barry love being part of the business? In March, sad not to be at work for his 20th anniversary at the theater, he and his girlfriend drove into Times Square, and he posed for a photograph in front of each of the 41 Broadway theaters.“There’s that old adage — when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life,” he said. “I am so lucky — I love to make people feel good about coming to our house.” More

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      On the Scene: ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ 🎸

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      On the Scene: ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ 🎸Michael PaulsonReporting on theater Even before entering the St. James Theater, the theater district was clearly more alive than it was a year ago, at the height of the pandemic. Times Square, even with all but one theater still closed, was mobbed. More

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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