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PHOTOS: 'Springsteen on Broadway'
 
By Chris Jones Chicago Tribune
*Spoiler Alert, If you want to be surprised... Stop reading here!*
 

Some baby boomer men manage to stand tall and lean, rock solid with sensual certitude in their seventh or eighth decade — their masculinity reconstructed with new sensitivities but in no way undermined. And yet some find themselves soft and squishy, flailing around in some bathrobe or the metaphoric equivalent thereof, unadapted, retrograde, pathetic of word and deed and thus dangerous or irrelevant to the present.

It is a measure of the seriousness of the Broadway endeavor of one Bruce Springsteen — who, the evidence of two taut hours of stage traffic reveals, is the epitome of the former category — that the starkness of the contrast blows through your head like the wind off the Jersey shore. Is it environment? Psychology? Parenting? It sure can’t be fame or financial success. That cuts both ways but has left no visible mark on the poetic moral authority of the pile-driving Springsteen, redux.

So what do we really have here?

“Springsteen on Broadway” is a very serious attempt at self-definition as written and self-directed by one of America’s most intense and driven performers, a man who cannot act as one other than himself, and does not care to try, but who sure can make his own past live in the present moment. He can take you there for he takes himself there, and lives there again.

That’s the personal stuff. Conscious intent or not, the show is remarkable for its embrace of its subject as emblematic of an entire generation of working-class American men from boring towns: what moves them, motivates them, scares them, thrills them, what can result in their self-destruction as they try to react to yet another shift in the culture, the latest as they deal with the death of their parents and their own mortality. “I have always thought,” Springsteen says, “that I was a typical American.”

At a performance Tuesday night, Springsteen drove his own life-text on, music following prose, strings attached, prose following hard on music, the man only occasionally squinting at a large prompter screen hidden under the orchestra, filling every latent musical coda with words, squashing applause, only rarely acknowledging the audience. The lighting designer Natasha Katz, whose truly astonishing work is easily missed but crucial, plays her instruments on his craggy brow, letting him hide in shadows but always pulling him toward the light.

 

Springsteen brings out his wife, Patti Scialfa, to play and sing with him on “Tougher Than the Rest” and “Brilliant Disguise.” The pair say little to each other, but there is a sweet yet complicit tenderness to what they do; it’s a moment when you’re forced to think about what it is like to be with Springsteen, not merely to be him. As such, it is more than it seems.

Springsteen has always been savvy enough to embrace paradox in his music (“I hid in the mother breast of the crowd, but when they said, ‘Pull down,’ I pulled up”). He stipulates his own flimflammery early on — he who claims to be born to run actually lives now about 10 minutes from his hometown. He allows further that he who claims to be “Tougher Than the Rest” never has worked a “real job,” despite his decades of singing about blue-collar work and his hero status on the factory floor. “I have become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which I personally have had no practical experience,” he says. “I thank you.”

Such are the transformative possibilities of “power, pleasure and infinite dreams.”

Here is the moment that lingers the most. Here is what feels like the arc, or the uber-text of the show, whether Springsteen intended it that way or not. It is when he talks of going into the draft office and successfully doing all he could not to go to Vietnam, only to wonder forever about who went in his place.

He never quite comes out and says it directly but the implication is that his musical career has been a mission — an atonement, you might say — for never going in country.

“This has been my service,” he says, speaking of his musical life, which feels right. “Service” would be a dangerous word for most musicians. Not this one.

But service of what? At one point, Springsteen says (as he does in his book) that he doesn’t believe anyone ever came to one of his concerts to be “told anything,” but to be reminded of “who they were at their best.” He has understood this, of course, all these years: his music is an evocation of a moment, likely now absent, but certainly a time when the singer and his listener were stronger, younger and anything still might happen to them. His advice now is sage and calming: the current political trauma, he says, in one of the very few comments about today, is “just a bad chapter in the ongoing battle for the soul of a nation.”

How does he really feel about serving what his people want? It’s familiar tension for any artist, even a massively successful rock star, and its infusion in this show is one of the most fascinating aspects of the piece. You feel him want to correct the record in places — such as when he insists that “Born in the U.S.A.” was and is a protest song, not a patriotic anthem ideal for appropriation at right-wing gatherings. But he is — or, at least, appears to be — a man without bitterness, rooted to New Jersey, happy never to have left his father’s house, thanks to his optimistic, loving mother and the comforting click of her high-heeled shoes. We’re all dancing in the dark, but he’s had a partner or two for life. They’ve helped him know himself. Lucky Bruce.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

So what do we really have here?

“Springsteen on Broadway” is a very serious attempt at self-definition as written and self-directed by one of America’s most intense and driven performers, a man who cannot act as one other than himself, and does not care to try, but who sure can make his own past live in the present moment. He can take you there for he takes himself there, and lives there again.

That’s the personal stuff. Conscious intent or not, the show is remarkable for its embrace of its subject as emblematic of an entire generation of working-class American men from boring towns: what moves them, motivates them, scares them, thrills them, what can result in their self-destruction as they try to react to yet another shift in the culture, the latest as they deal with the death of their parents and their own mortality. “I have always thought,” Springsteen says, “that I was a typical American.”

At a performance Tuesday night, Springsteen drove his own life-text on, music following prose, strings attached, prose following hard on music, the man only occasionally squinting at a large prompter screen hidden under the orchestra, filling every latent musical coda with words, squashing applause, only rarely acknowledging the audience. The lighting designer Natasha Katz, whose truly astonishing work is easily missed but crucial, plays her instruments on his craggy brow, letting him hide in shadows but always pulling him toward the light.

 

Springsteen brings out his wife, Patti Scialfa, to play and sing with him on “Tougher Than the Rest” and “Brilliant Disguise.” The pair say little to each other, but there is a sweet yet complicit tenderness to what they do; it’s a moment when you’re forced to think about what it is like to be with Springsteen, not merely to be him. As such, it is more than it seems.

Springsteen has always been savvy enough to embrace paradox in his music (“I hid in the mother breast of the crowd, but when they said, ‘Pull down,’ I pulled up”). He stipulates his own flimflammery early on — he who claims to be born to run actually lives now about 10 minutes from his hometown. He allows further that he who claims to be “Tougher Than the Rest” never has worked a “real job,” despite his decades of singing about blue-collar work and his hero status on the factory floor. “I have become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which I personally have had no practical experience,” he says. “I thank you.”

Such are the transformative possibilities of “power, pleasure and infinite dreams.”

Here is the moment that lingers the most. Here is what feels like the arc, or the uber-text of the show, whether Springsteen intended it that way or not. It is when he talks of going into the draft office and successfully doing all he could not to go to Vietnam, only to wonder forever about who went in his place.

He never quite comes out and says it directly but the implication is that his musical career has been a mission — an atonement, you might say — for never going in country.

“This has been my service,” he says, speaking of his musical life, which feels right. “Service” would be a dangerous word for most musicians. Not this one.

But service of what? At one point, Springsteen says (as he does in his book) that he doesn’t believe anyone ever came to one of his concerts to be “told anything,” but to be reminded of “who they were at their best.” He has understood this, of course, all these years: his music is an evocation of a moment, likely now absent, but certainly a time when the singer and his listener were stronger, younger and anything still might happen to them. His advice now is sage and calming: the current political trauma, he says, in one of the very few comments about today, is “just a bad chapter in the ongoing battle for the soul of a nation.”

How does he really feel about serving what his people want? It’s familiar tension for any artist, even a massively successful rock star, and its infusion in this show is one of the most fascinating aspects of the piece. You feel him want to correct the record in places — such as when he insists that “Born in the U.S.A.” was and is a protest song, not a patriotic anthem ideal for appropriation at right-wing gatherings. But he is — or, at least, appears to be — a man without bitterness, rooted to New Jersey, happy never to have left his father’s house, thanks to his optimistic, loving mother and the comforting click of her high-heeled shoes. We’re all dancing in the dark, but he’s had a partner or two for life. They’ve helped him know himself. Lucky Bruce.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...view-1013-story.html

____________________________________

The SPL Rocks!

Prego che tu stia danzando con San Pietro alle porte perlacee del cielo





Pulled up to my house today
Came and took my little girl away!
Giants Stadium 8/28/03



Oats

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