Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway
by Michael Riedel
Avid Reader Press, 2020

In 1938, the crackerjack playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (You Can’t Take It With You, The Man Who Came to Dinner) wrote and produced The Fabulous Invalid, a sentimental and fanciful paean to the theater at a time when many were doubting the power of the art form to survive as anything more than entertaining fluff. “More a pageant than a play. . .a valentine dipped in treacle”—as reported by Hart’s biographer, Steven Bach—Invalid placed a fictional New York theater at its center, from heyday to near-decrepitude, but planting real-life personages (imitated by other actors)—the Barrymores, Orson Welles, Fred and Adele Astaire—in scenes from some 26 plays, works by Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward, Maxwell Anderson. And songs—lots and lots of songs. “Laughable,” one major critic dubbed it, and not in the good way; it suffered the shortest run of any of the duo’s collaborations. What did survive was the title—one that became an enduring catchphrase that resurfaced periodically when a spate of inferior products prompted Gloomy Gusses to declare the theater irrelevant and running on fumes. (And let’s be clear, in those days “theater” meant Broadway; for the cognoscenti, great plays and musicals began and ended with an imprimatur from this patch of Midtown real estate.)

In 1953, another superlative team, Rodgers and Hammerstein, spoofed the gloomy sentiment in the their Me and Juliet, with a song, “Intermission Talk,” sung by disgruntled theatergoers waiting for Act Two:

They don’t write music any more like the old Vienna waltzes
The guy today who writes the score doesn’t know what schmaltz is.
The plays are all too serious, no longer sweet and gay.
The authors who think certainly stink
The theater is fading away.
The theater is dying! The theater is dying!
The theater is practically dead.
Someone every day writes
We have no more playwrights
The theater is sick in the head!

We wish it would lie down and die!
Why the hell won’t it lie down and die?

(If you’re wondering why you may never heard of this R&H title, well . . . place it in the “noble Homer nods” category: It’s their least successful show, a surprising mediocrity in a canon of superlative creations; this song is one clue as to why.)

And so it has persisted, a periodic taking of the patient’s temperature and declaring prognosis negative: The theater is on life support. And yet, stubbornly, it has always somehow flickered back to life.

One such period was chronicled by Michael Riedel in his 2016 book, Razzle Dazzle, an examination of Broadway in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, an era when Times Square was in failing health—corroded by greed, corruption, and vice—but revived by smart, ambitious producers and real estate developers who laid out a welcome mat for A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls, Cats, and Mamma Mia. (Needless to say, crap—examples 3 and 4—can be wildly successful.)

Riedel has been a keen observer of the Broadway scene for nearly 30 years, first as a reporter for the New York Daily News, then and more significantly as a columnist for the New York Post. He quickly became the Peck’s Bad Boy of the scene, mixing hard-nose reporting with a generous helping of snark, gossip, and condescension. He was likened to Addison DeWitt, the viperous critic of the classic film All About Eve, but seemed to fashion himself more akin to Walter Winchell, a much-feared, powerful, Fedora-sporting New York newspaper columnist and radio personality of mid-20th century whose targets ran the gamut from starlets to Charles Lindbergh. (If there’s a quota on old-timey allusions in a single paragraph, I may now have reached it.) Winchell could make or break careers, even for politicians, and Riedel’s sting was scarcely that powerful, but his twice-weekly pronouncements could set the theater boards a-twitter (ahem) with outrage and indignation, even inviting (probably baseless) rumors that his favoritism for a certain production or performer came with a hint of corruption; but the noise never rose beyond a whisper. Riedel’s popularity at The Post was undeniable; he was indeed that guy you loved to hate. There was even word of a tipsy dust-up between Reidel and a British director in a theater district bistro that in the overheated coverage by the Post (big surprise) suggested fisticuffs and injury. It was later revealed to have been an incident far less macho and far less physical, but it made for good copy and added fat to the fire of Reidel’s bad boy rep.

But there was often the sense—especially watching the Reidel on display in his long-running PBS interview show, Theater Talk (shown in New York at a time convenient only to insomniacs and long haul truckers)—that his acid opinions masked intelligence and sensitivity. Not too surprising for a history grad from Columbia, but still . . .   The likes of Elaine Stritch and Nathan Lane could share the line-up with Edward Albee and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, suggesting that Riedel’s fedora was a bit ill-fitting.

Nonetheless, there was every expectation that he would trade on the waspish persona of his public reputation and let gossip drive the narrative, but many were surprised to find in Razzle Dazzle a well-written, well-researched, clear-eyed history. And entertaining: Broadway has always been a treasure trove of creative geniuses, monstrous egos, scalawags, heroes, and villains, all engaged in acts of triumph and treachery, sin and sensationalism. So much low-hanging fruit for a driven and thorough reporter—and Reidel clearly loved his subject.

He mines the same sources for Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, this time taking us through the ‘90’s, where a Broadway, once again suffering the malady of poor product and audience indifference, was resuscitated by booster shots of creativity (and luck). This was the decade of Angels in America, Rent, The Lion King, The Producers—landmark productions all—and the less impactful but nonetheless fascinating Sunset Boulevard, Ragtime, Titanic, and the Chicago revival.  Plays other than Angels are given somewhat short shrift, although he does an brisk, incisive take on Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, with Albee front and center as a most beguilingly eccentric and thorny soul. So it’s the musicals that are the mother lode of narrative interest here: the divas, the feuds, the enormous casts, the clashes of competitive artistic sensibilities, the colored lights, the backbiting. And the budgets! Millions to be made, millions more likely to be lost.

His coverage of the two-part, 6-hour Angels in America through its metamorphosis from a 1988 commission by a small San Francisco theater to its spectacular Broadway debut five years later (Part Two arrived in 1994) is concise but compelling. (A full-length account of the play’s complicated, absorbing journey can be found in an excellent oral history, The World Only Spins Forward.) For me, Angels is the only work covered in Singular Sensation that will survive long-term beyond its initial appearance. Like the great plays of the last century—Our Town, Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a handful of others—it will continue to challenge, entertain, and move audiences head and shoulders above its peers. (But in what form? The known obsessive Tony Kushner is probably tinkering with it as I write.)

Riedel is skillful at weaving artful narratives behind the shows’ successes: The bitter battle, Patti LuPone v. Andrew Lloyd Weber, over who would play Sunset’s Norma Desmond on Broadway. (LuPone, who had created the role in London, lost; Glenn Close won, if you weren’t paying attention at the time, largely because powerhouse critic Frank Rich flew to London to pronounce LuPone inadequate in the role.)  The bumpy voyage of Titanic—one of the most audacious ideas for a musical in recent memory—from risible skepticism to Tony-winning triumph. At an early preview when technical troubles kept the tragedy from going as smoothly as planned, comic Bruce Vilanch cracked wise to Riedel: “A show about the Titanic and the ship doesn’t sink? Well, that’s novel.”

Then there’s The Producers, catching lightning in a bottle by drawing together exactly the right ingredients—writers, performers, choreographer—for a smash that shattered records (especially for ticket costs) and filled the theater for as long as leads Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick checked in at the stage door. No subsequent team could match their magic, and at one point they had to return—a bit reluctantly—to boost sagging sales. Surprisingly, most of the original collaborators, including Lane and Broderick, teamed up for a near carbon-copy film version that flopped embarrassingly. Go know.

Riedel also artfully guides us through the saga of Rent, a messy off-Broadway hit penned by a promising phenom librettist-songwriter, Jonathan Larson, who was guiding his show to a Broadway debut when he unexpectedly died the morning before its first preview performance. That was front page news in New York and elsewhere, of course, and undoubtedly gave the show a leg up when it came time for awards. Rent was also aggressively marketed to young consumers, not typically drawn to the theater; Riedel tells us it was the first Broadway show to run ads on subway cars. It worked: “Rentheads” became the first collective set of groupies, who gathered outside the theater hoping to win one of the last-minute tickets sold by lottery, a gimmick exploited to even greater effect years later by Hamilton.

(One fine anecdote that Riedel doesn’t include: Rent’s chief rival for Tony Award glory was Victor/Victoria, a pallid tuning-up of the terrific Blake Edwards film, both starring Edwards’ wife, Julie Andrews.  Music by Henry Mancini, who passed away in 1994. The sentimental outpouring over Larson’s fate didn’t faze some of the V/V chorus, who donned T-shirts saying, “Our composer is dead too.”  Ouch.)

Rent took home a passel of awards, including the Pulitzer, despite its shortcomings. Whether it endures as a masterpiece, only time will tell. Like Hair, I’m guessing its fate is in periodic performances in concert, nostalgic forays that highlight the songs and give only passing glances to the words that surround them. (Although the Hair score is to Rent’s what the Messiah is to, well, Rent.)

Riedel nicely sketches a gallery of vivid characters, including producers Fran and Barry Weissler and their rise from obscurity to enormous wealth. He was a failed matador (!) and failed actor, she a middle-class housewife—but both had chutzpah to burn. Starting with a plan to produce plays in public schools in 1965, they spent the succeeding decades following their instincts and producing a string of productions with varying degrees of success. But their greatest risk was gambling on a revival of the 1985 modest hit, Chicago, resuscitated in 1996 as a stripped-down concert version at New York’s City Center—that most graybeards labelled a sure-fire loser. The Weisslers rolled the dice and reaped the rewards for (at least) 24 years.

Then there are the out-and-out crooks, such as Garth Drabinsky, a Canadian lawyer and Cineplex movie theater mogul, whose venal ambitions in the theater world landed him 5 years in the pokey for fraud and forgery. Therein lies a tale that Riedel sketches with a flair for dramatic suspense.

And let’s hear it for the stories of the unsung, like the London critic who was asked by his editor to add a few lines to his review of The Blue Room, a David Hare play marking the stage debut of Nicole Kidman. She agreed to appear briefly nude—so brief that a sneeze might have ruined your evening. Even a disrobed for the then Mrs. Tom Cruise didn’t guarantee a hit for its New York transfer, but the critic’s toss-off compliment, “pure theatrical Viagra,” branded it a must-see. As Riedel writes, “The phrase . . . ricocheted around the world, ending up in newspapers from New York to New Delhi, Berlin to Buenos Aires.”

The book ends with its saddest sentence. Cheerleading current and recent hits, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Book of Mormon, Wicked, and Jersey Boys, he writes, “Broadway is in the midst of its new Golden Age.”  But that was then. In mid-March, with little warning, the Fabulous Invalid lapsed into a Covid-19 coma. As with so many commercial enterprises, Broadway shut down altogether for an as yet undetermined period. (London theaters bravely announced a West End revival, only to rescind the decision shortly after.)

Luckily, timing allowed Riedel to include in his Foreward an acknowledgement of the COVID-19 pandemic and its crippling effect on Broadway’s future: “Broadway is a $2-billion-a-year business, and the losses will be staggering. Many shows will never reopen. The big titles—Wicked, The Book of Mormon, The Lion King, Hamilton—will, but without those $2- and $3-million-a-week grosses. When will the tourists, who make up nearly two-thirds of the Broadway audience, return to New York . . . ? No one has the answer.” Of course, mass vaccinations will eventually bring that answer into greater focus (Rumors suggest a Hamilton return in July, but even then will audiences—and cast members—commune with the kind of ease necessary to celebrate fully the art form meant to be a a communal experience?) Zoom productions have proven creative and popular, but don’t really satisfy the hunger for live performance and spectacle. And they certainly don’t fill the restaurants, bars, hotels, and airline seats, or supply paychecks for performers, technicians, designers, and the thousands of others dependent on the health of the art form to survive.

So what will happen when the Invalid finally awaken from its coma, struggles to breathe, learns to walk again after this, its most serious malady? For certain, here will be tears and conflict, and setbacks before the joy arrives. The struggle will make for a colorful, dramatic, painful, story—and certainly a grand one.

Over to you, Mr. Riedel. 

—Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.