The Boss on Broadway: Springsteen readies for a marathon run
The superstar singer and storyteller is about to embark on a 79-show residency in New York – an intimate experience that will cost fans an outsize price
The old-time music hall stage set is in, the running order locked down, and the marquee sign above the Walter Kerr Theatre is flashing the forthcoming attraction: Springsteen on Broadway.
Sauntering down West 48th Street from rehearsals on Thursday night, New Jersey’s most famous storyteller and resident superstar looked as if he’d already conquered Broadway – and indeed the city itself.
Touring equipment cases were lined up outside the theater; a row of black SUVs awaited him and his entourage. The Boss, still elfin at 68 and shadowed by security muscle, stopped to chat with fans and have his picture taken before joining his wife, Patti Scialfa, family members and his manager, Jon Landau, at an Italian restaurant nearby.
Starting on Tuesday, Springsteen will perform a solo acoustic show of songs and stories five days a week at the theater that seats fewer than 1,000. The show was initially scheduled to run to 26 November, but has already been extended though 3 February, for a total of 79 performances.
To no great surprise, tickets for the initial run sold out within a day. Taking a lead from Hamilton, the musical that set a new standard for ticket prices, Springsteen tickets run from $75 to $850 for the best seats – if you can find one at face value. On the black market, or semi-official resale sites like Stubhub, tickets are going for as much as $12,000.
Last year, according to Billboard, the Boss had 2016’s second-highest-grossing tour, playing to some 2.4 million fans on a 76-date outing that grossed $268m. The singer raked in $40m for himself. He banked $1.4m in recording royalties, helped by sales of both his catalog and a late-2015 box set celebrating the 35th anniversary of The River. And there was his autobiography, the well-received Born To Run, with 501,000 copies sold.
So why is he doing the residency? Springsteen declined to comment, but he explained himself succinctly when he announced it in August.
“I wanted to do some shows that were as personal and as intimate as possible. I chose Broadway for this project because it has the beautiful old theaters which seemed like the right setting for what I have in mind. In fact, with one or two exceptions, the 960 seats of the Walter Kerr Theatre is probably the smallest venue I’ve played in the last 40 years.”
He continued: “My show is just me, the guitar, the piano and the words and music. Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work. All of it together is in pursuit of my constant goal to provide an entertaining evening and to communicate something of value.”
He expanded that rationale last week, telling the New York Times how he’d played an acoustic set for the Obamas and their staff at the White House in early January. “There was a lot of storytelling, which goes back to our early days at the Bottom Line [in New York], when you were in front of a couple of hundred people. It worked in a very, very intimate setting.”
The need to achieve connection has been cropping up frequently. Bob Dylan has been playing some smaller shows; Stevie Nicks’s recent solo tour was as much a friendly get-together as a rock show. Perhaps it was always thus, but the need for rare, personal connection may now be elevated by the press of time and circumstances.
“I think everybody’s looking for ways to keep their live shows fresh, and when the opportunity to do Broadway came up, Bruce saw a way to frame what he does in an invigorating way,” says the rock writer Anthony DeCurtis, who has interviewed the singer on numerous occasions.
“He’s done theater shows before, but the notion of doing a residency like this is new for him. It was pretty common in the 60s and early 70s, when Bruce was starting out, for artists to do week-long stints at clubs. This reminds me of that.”
“Bruce is doing it simply because he wants to,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the touring journal Pollstar. “Money is clearly not the motivation, which is not to say that he won’t make a ton of it anyway. It’s acoustic, the overhead is modest and you can’t deny the intimate audience connection.”
And there is always a story to tell. “I’ve always felt that if you’re fortunate enough to be up there onstage, it’s your responsibility to try and close the gap with the audience, to give them the sense that there are other possibilities than the ones they may be seeing,” Springsteen told Richard Williams in 1981.
Still, Springsteen on Broadway is generating controversy. The top price of $850 is some way above last year’s average for a Springsteen ticket, $111. While that could be considered the price of intimacy that a fan is unlikely to experience across the expanse of Wembley Stadium, Springsteen has notionally joined with Taylor Swift using Ticketmaster’s controversial Verified Fan system in an effort to curb the ticket resale market, reportedly worth $8bn in the US alone.
But in a post on Medium, a longtime fan, Steve Milton, dismissed rationalizations that Hamilton is more expensive, that the pricing is no more than the market will bear, or that it effectively shuts scalpers out.
“That may all be true, but there is simply no need for Springsteen to hustle for $850 tickets,” Milton wrote, adding that, in 35 years of following Bruce, he had “never seen so many fans prepare to desert the man they have looked to and admired”.
At the box office last week, the cashier said it was likely the theatre would release some tickets on the day and directed fans to a website – luckyseat.com – where some freebies will be distributed. Asked to comment about ticket prices, Springsteen’s manager courteously offered none.
One well-known New York ticket scalper said of Springsteen: “He hypes up his own bullshit and promotes his own hype and scalps his own tickets at ridiculous prices.”
But come Tuesday night when the house lights go down, none of this may matter. As Springsteen told the New York Times last week, he considers the run “a real job. This is my first real job, I think.”
Setlist
Springsteen played the following songs at a warm-up show in New Jersey last week
Growin’ Up
My Hometown
Born in the USA
Thunder Road
Brilliant Disguise
The Wish
My Father’s House
Born to Run
Land of Hope and Dreams
Tougher Than the Rest
The Promised Land