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By Root 558 0

which was showing at the Ford Center—on 42nd Street. It was a Saturday night, and the balcony was full of loud, happy out-of-towners. To our right, four girls chattered away in Chinese. The row in front of us was full of sailors—a nostalgia trip all by itself, for sailors and soldiers have been coming to Times Square for a night of fun for a good three-quarters of a century. These boys, the drill team from the Groton sub base in Connecticut, were polite, talkative, and positively button-eyed with excitement; a few of them had never been in New York before. And on their one night out in New York, the submariners had decided to take in not a strip show but a Broadway musical—and what a musical it was! The curtain rose, and then stopped, about eighteen inches up. All we could see were disembodied shoes, in crazy shades of yellow and green and orange and blue, moving at a blur; and the theater echoed with the obbligato of rapid-fire tap dancing. No music; just rhythm. It was a moment of pure Broadway virtuosity. The first time I had gone to the show, a few months earlier, an old gent with a cane sitting down the row from me had loosed a spontaneous shout when the feet came out. Now the boys from Groton, and the Chinese girls, and Alex and I, were all cheering with delight. I was also furtively dabbing at my eyes.

That’s Broadway for you—bright lights and gaudy colors, energy and talent, the old-fashioned chorus line and the old-fashioned emotions. 42nd Street punches the same buttons they’ve been punching in Times Square for a hundred years. But 42nd Street is also about those buttons, and about that old Times Square. The play is a musical about the making of a musical, Pretty Lady, in the worst years of the Depression. To say that 42nd Street is about the Depression would make the play into a far more weight-bearing instrument than it aspires to be; insofar as it is about anything, it is about the “kids” of the chorus who are the true citizens of Broadway, who under all the wisecracking and makeup believe ardently in the dreams in which shows like Pretty Lady traffic. The Depression exists not as a social phenomenon to be examined, but as a giant piece of rotten luck, which makes us root for the show, and admire the kids, all the more. When Pretty Lady is threatened with sudden collapse, the kids wonder where their next meal is going to come from; but we know that the indomitable Broadway spirit will rise above misfortune.

The musical 42nd Street began its life as a 1933 Busby Berkeley movie— actually, it began its life as a novel, now long forgotten, by one Bradford Ropes—so, for the first audience the setting was contemporary, and the show’s yearning and escapism reflected the audience’s own deepest wish. Now, of course, that’s no longer true. The appeal of 42nd Street is overtly nostalgic. The air of desperation and fear that must have seemed terribly familiar in 1933 gives the play its authenticity today; here is the mythical Times Square of the thirties, the “Runyonesque” Times Square, right up to Nick Murphy’s hoods, who threaten to break a leg or two (but don’t). Who doesn’t know the song: “Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty . . . 42nd Street!” We don’t pity the kids; we envy them, for the sheer vitality, the electricity, of their world. When we watch 42nd Street we look not only backward but outward—to the street of the play, which of course is also the street of the theater, the street right outside the door. We compare their 42nd Street with ours.

Our 42nd Street was a consciously, sometimes even lovingly, reengineered urban space. For, by the 1960s and 1970s, the naughty and bawdy had descended into the squalid and pathological; and in the ensuing decades New York City and State had undertaken a massive project of urban re-creation. And it had worked. The very fact that we were watching a musical on 42nd Street was proof, for the theater we were sitting in had been showing pornographic movies twenty years earlier. The Ford Center had been built from the wreckage of two splendid old theaters, the Apollo and the Lyric,