Bruce on Broadway
Lately, I‘ve been reading online comments about the Netflix presentation of Springsteen on Broadway. Many are intelligent and well-conceived, but a significant minority are surprisingly negative or even mean-spirited. The worst suggest that Springsteen is a hypocrite who has no business writing about working people since he’s never held a day job, which is kind of like criticizing Einstein for discovering the Theory of Relativity when he had never traveled at the speed of light.
Even more disturbing were those who said the man who has staked a career on pointing out social injustice and lifting veterans and their affairs into the public consciousness is a phony because he vacationed with “that other phony, David Geffen,” on whose yacht the Springsteens were seen. Geffen’s my kind of phony since he’s given $150 million to the LA County Museum of Art and $200 million to fund the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Gynormous ego? Sure, but phony? Hardly. He puts his money where his mouth is.
Finally, a lot of the criticism of Springsteen on Broadway was that it was boring. I watched the show in three sittings. It’s deep, and there’s a lot to ponder. I didn’t want it to be a slog, so I had to take it in pieces. It is very still, and in our amped-up world, it is difficult to slow life to the pace of a one-man show and ignore the siren song of incoming texts and the thousand other daily distractions. For some, it’s just a guy reading a book into a camera for two and a half hours. But for me and many others, it’s can’t-look-away voyeurism. If you can manage to stay attentive, you’ll see him carefully dismantle his life as if it were a bomb. It is intricate and terribly intimate work, and you are left with the sense that he knew he was playing with emotional fire from the start, but his drive to know himself was inseparable from his need to be noticed—to be a star.
The show is his autobiographical book, “Born to Run,” and the book is his journey to escape the traumas of his childhood and to know himself fully. How many of us are compelled to run toward the fire? Most of us are running away. The rest of us are uninterested or afraid of what we’d find if we took a deep dive into our own psyches.
At his core, Springsteen is a keen observer of life and the human condition. He is part preacher, part carnival barker, and all storyteller. Sometimes the stories are about him, and sometimes they are others' stories. As music, they have a huge dynamic range, running from the solemn quiet of Nebraska to the bombast of Rosalita.
The music here is necessarily stripped down from the E Street Band experience. Instead of eight players, there is one, save on the two songs his wife, Patti Scialfa, sings impeccable harmonies. In fact, my only complaint is that he didn't give her a little more room, and let her sing solo. (There is a charming story in the book about how there were invited to a small and mysterious Hollywood party at which they were assured they'd be comfortable, but about which the invitation would say no more. Turned out it was hosted by, according to no less an authority than Jack Nicholson, the King of New Jersey, Frank Sinatra. Upon discovering how well she sang, the A-list crowd talked Patti into regaling them with some torch songs.) Regardless, these are his songs and hearing them performed acoustically renders them more personal and less tent-revival as they often come off with the full band.
Note that this is not some ad-libbed monologue. He took nine years to write the book, and as is the case with his songwriting, it is carefully worded, and for the Broadway stage, it is delivered with intention.
I’ve been a fan since forever. Never a super fan, but I respected his drive and his talent. Now I’m a bigger, more appreciative fan for having seen the Netflix show and having read the book, which--spoiler alert--it is not like any rock star book you’ve read. It is deeply personal prose, not the stuff of tabloids. And "Springsteen on Broadway" is not like any Broadway show you've seen.