In Defense of Delight: Broadway's New York, New York
Last night, I saw a final performance of New York, New York. It is one of four expensive Broadway endeavors to announce premature closing dates in recent weeks, wrapping after just 33 previews and 110 regular performances.
I was reluctant to go — as are you, most likely. You’ve read the reviews. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Vincentelli labeled it “sprawling, unwieldy,” and “surprisingly dull.” Deadline’s Greg Evans was slightly more optimistic, calling it “overstuffed with good intentions.” Broadway News’s Brittani Samuel calls it “a run-of-the-mill big Broadway extravaganza that knows where, but not when, it is.”
A particularly brutal Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post described the feeling of the musical as “akin to being stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia…nothing happens for hours on end, as you’re silently trapped there in your uncomfortable and expensive seat.”
With that, New York, New York’s fate was sealed. It’s unsurprising — the Scorsese film it’s loosely based on was a flop, too. Not even a roughly $20 million budget or stellar creative team packed with heavy-hitters like Susan Stroman or Kander and Ebb could save it from itself. The show will limp along like a zombie for just under a week more, between the living and the dead, before it stumbles into a musical theater graveyard of shows which have met a similar fate.
The aforementioned reviewers are objectively right. I can say nothing that hasn’t been said, except this: New York, New York was not good. But it was delightful.
The show is set in 1946 when the fog of World War II is beginning to clear and the city is rebuilding. The time reflects our own in many poignant ways. Madame Veltri, a landlord played by veteran Emily Skinner, writes an optimistic letter to her son in Act I. “It’s better than before,” she sings. “I thought some places that we love had been lost, but then here they are, back again.”
Isn’t that our city? The COVID dread has largely lifted. Shops that were shuttered on my Upper West Side street are coming back to life. We’re happy to see the people we’d once “cross the street to avoid.” In New York, people can again be plucked out of obscurity. Lives can change in an instant. A janitor one day can find herself onstage at the Metropolitan Opera the next.
Even Stroman’s clichéd montage of Central Park in the snow hit home, reminding me of returning to New York after five months of seclusion— walking through the ramble, looking up to the San Remo standing faithful watch over Bow Bridge. The gentlemen’s tap number on high-wire scaffolding elicited squeals and cheers from audience members, myself included. Colton Ryan took theatrical risks as the bombastic Jimmy Doyle that, in a way, restored my love for the art form.
It’s a shame that reviews so often determine a show’s success or failure, especially when we critics are too high on hot-takes to see that this is a show so many may need. When did we become arbiters? When did our stultified sensibilities override the importance of joy? A musical, after all, is only as good as the mark it leaves on its audience.
New York, New York embodies the hope for our home — that things will be better than before. Different, and better. Even with its flaws, I wouldn’t bet against it.
As I walked home from the St. James that night, I was buoyed by a little bubble in my heart — the feeling of delight. Rare, precious, personal. A quiet thing.
GRACE BYDALEK is a writer, performer, and administrator based on the Upper West Side. She is a theater critic for the New York Sun and the director of the Dissident Project. @grace_daley
Image: Paul Kolnik