Move over Hamilton. There’s a new impossible ticket on Broadway.
According to Rolling Stone, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiographical Springsteen on Broadway is nothing short of a triumph. As Andy Greene writes, “It’s clear from the beginning that this is nothing like a typical latter-day Springsteen concert, where set lists can vary wildly from night to night and Bruce often has little to say between songs.”
The show is more a live rendering of Springsteen’s recent autobiography, Born to Run, with some new or “heavily altered” stories performed for the audience via spoken-word vignettes. As Greene notes, Springsteen has been heavy on the stage banter for giant swaths of his career, so he’s had a lot of practice.
Of course, it’s not at all off-the-cuff; Springsteen actually reads most of his lines off a large teleprompter that’s suspended over the audience. But that doesn’t hold over when he actually plays his songs—which include hits like “Thunder Road.” He even pulls out a “mournful” version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” which was written not as a symbol of national pride, but one of “protest,” as he tells the audience.
Although Springsteen may have told Variety recently that he wasn’t interested in writing anti-Trump songs, he does get political in the show, saying the following: “Today we’re dealing with young men in torch-light parades calling on the ugliest ghosts of our past. And suddenly your neighbors and countrymen look like complete strangers to you. Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I think that’s true. I believe that it is true. I believe that what we’re seeing now is just a bad chapter in the ongoing battle for the soul of the nation.”
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