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By Root 685 0

later they’re whisked away and the cast emerges in the gold spangles of the children’s fantasy. Julian Marsh, the madly driven director, is here a lonely but lovable curmudgeon. Nick Murphy’s gangsters may be naughty and gaudy, but they’re hardly dangerous. And Peggy Sawyer tramples no toes on her way to the top. The show is about pluck—Peggy’s, Julian’s, the chorus’s. And when, after two and a half hours of frantic hoofing, the cast capers its way madly, brilliantly, through a reprise, you think, “These kids are having the time of their life!” The life of a chorus girl was famously transitory and cruel; in the years before the First World War, George Bronson-Howard created an entire literature out of these beautiful, brittle, predatory creatures. But not here: the true subject of this 42nd Street is the sheer wonderfulness of the theatrical well that is life on Broadway.

It is, of course, ever thus. There has always been an O’Neill, a Williams, a Miller; and a Ziegfeld, a Cohan, and, for that matter, a Minsky. Theater is the one aspect of Times Square that is immemorial: a play today looks like a play seventy years ago, and it is presented in the same space. You still need actors, musicians, writers, makeup artists, and ticket-takers, and you need producers willing to take a plunge on a risky project. Theater has remained the same, while everything around it, the context that is Times Square, and thus the context in which we experience it, has changed drastically.

This balance between the difficult and the accessible, the disorienting and the familiar, is an ancient pattern on Broadway. And yet the global firms that have come to dominate rental, food, television, and the like have now gained a foothold in theater as well. Two such firms, Disney and Clear Channel Communications, now constitute the largest forces on Broadway, the one as a producer, the other principally as a backer and a distributor, and both as theater owners. Their arrival in Times Square has been treated with a great deal of trepidation, though also some wary hope. Do they come as imperialists, or as rich uncles? The fear, generally unspoken, is that their advent will hasten the eclipse of the little voices of disturbance—the counterrealities of Broadway—and amplify yet more, as if it were needed, the bombast of the middlebrow musical. And then the Broadway theater, as it has been known for the last century, will linger only as Times Square’s vestigial organ.

THOMAS SCHUMACHER, THE HEAD of what is known inside Disney as the Buena Vista Theatrical Group, does not produce an impression that corresponds in any way with that notorious term of abuse “Disneyfication.” Schumacher is a slight fellow, still almost puppyishly enthusiastic at forty-four, with thick, floppy hair parted down the middle and dark, squarish spectacles. He looks like a chic, media-savvy French intellectual. The medium, in this regard, is the message, for Schumacher is the living emblem of a very different kind of Disney. And he is at pains to distinguish his role on Broadway, and Disney’s, from the epithet people so lightly toss around. “It’s ironic,” he said, when we first met, “that we use the term ‘Disneyfication’ when in fact the purest saving of what is the halcyon days of Times Square, the classic center of it, was actually the restoration of this theater.” “This theater” is, of course, the New Amsterdam, on 42nd Street just west of Broadway. We were seated at a little table in an oval lounge ringed with murals depicting the history of New York City, from the first encounter with the Indians up through 1903, when the theater was built. The lounge had been submerged beneath a foot or so of water when Disney took title to the New Amsterdam in 1994; now, like the rest of the theater, it had been lovingly restored. “That’s all we did,” Schumacher went on, with a good deal of heat. “That’s all we did.”

“Disney” is, of course, a very sensitive subject for Disney. The word has become shorthand for the spurious and the engineered and the uniform-but-with-a-little-local-appliqué. “We