#New York won’t really live again until Broadway is back

Not even a year ago, impregnable crowds and stained-costumed Elmos and wannabe John Mulaneys with their three-by-five-laminated-card invitations to comedy-club open-mic nights had made Times Square one of the most irritating, nerve-wracking places in the Western world.

What I wouldn’t give for my nerves to be a little more wracked now that the legendary bow-tie where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet is deserted, barren, haunted.

Times Square was the epicenter of the New York tourism boom over the past 25 years. Its reclamation, refurbishment and reconstruction over the course of the Giuliani years was the key to Gotham’s renaissance.

And the key to Times Square’s distinctive allure is the Broadway theater. Remarkably, either by coincidence or by some kind of suggestive magic, Broadway itself had a creative and financial explosion just as the city staged its own dramatic comeback in the mid-1990s.

This is the story that WOR Radio’s Michael Riedel, a longtime theater ­reporter for this paper, tells in his absolutely wonderful new book, “Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway.”

Once a glamorous business on the perpetual edge of bankruptcy and flameout, the Broadway theater not only became a centerpiece of the civic revival of the Giuliani years and beyond, but a cash cow whose profits were generated by a series of fresh and pathbreaking shows that brought a new dazzle and gleam to the Great White Way.

The creation of these shows forms the narrative spine of “Singular Sensation” — and they represented a second American revolution against the British. Throughout the 1980s, Broadway was dominated by Euro-spectacle musicals, especially those by Andrew Lloyd Webber. But when an eye-popping revival of “Guys and Dolls” opened in 1992, it ­reminded people of how much sassy fun our own theater could be at its best.

Then Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” came into town in 1994, after years of creative tumult, and it seemed like an exhausted relic. Meanwhile, an East Village tyro named Jonathan Larson was busy writing a rock-opera-musical-something-or-other titled “Rent” that opened in 1996 off-Broadway only days after its creator died tragically and dramatically at the age of 35. And when it hit Broadway and went off like a rocket, “Rent” killed off the British invasion of Broadway for good.

In the same year, a modestly conceived revival of a mostly forgotten show from the 1970s, “Chicago,” wedded the darkness of “Rent” with the pizzazz of “Guys and Dolls.” The two shows made Broadway hip in a way it hadn’t been in decades. They followed the culturally significant “Angels in America” — a two-part work I revile but whose attention-grabbing qualities helped make Broadway a home for provocative non-musical plays again.

In 1997, the astonishingly ­inventive stage version of “The Lion King” opened and made Broadway safe for families. It went on to become the most successful single presentation in show business history, grossing more than $8 billion over the course of 23 years. And over the following decade, “The Producers,” “Hairspray, ” “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” all restored the “comedy” to the “musical comedy” form.

Riedel says he was intending to end his book with “Hamilton,” which is really the capstone of the “triumph of Broadway” his subtitle describes — but realized it would have to await another volume. This one is a sequel to “Razzle Dazzle,” from 2015, which tells the equally wonderful story of Broadway’s escape from the pit into which New York had fallen by the mid-1970s.

Think of this. The year 1980 was considered a boom time for Broadway with about 6 million attendees and not quite $500 million in sales. In 2018, Broadway theater earned about $1.8 billion, with 15 million in attendance. And its positive effect on the city’s coffers was even more dramatic. According to the Broadway League, “the Broadway industry contributed $14.7 billion to the economy of New York City and supported 96,900 jobs” that year.

Riedel is convinced Broadway will rise again. After all, Elizabethan theaters opened and closed constantly due to threats of plague in London. Alas, I’m not so sure. A decisive break in a cultural habit can have lasting consequences — and the way it’s going, Broadway will end up having been shuttered for at least a year, if not longer. Will it return in force, or will it return in a zombie state, only to rise again to a weakened condition?

One thing is for sure: Until Times Square is irritating and claustrophobic once again, New York will continue to be a shadow of its former self.

[email protected]