TV & Radio

Springsteen on Broadway: The idolatry is close to suffocating

Review: Some will find his rhapsodies to the power of rock’n’roll a little hard to swallow

Bruce Springsteen performs in ‘Springsteen on Broadway,’ his solo concert run at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. Photograph: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Peter Crawley's face
Peter Crawley
Thu Dec 20 2018 - 15:40

Bruce Springsteen’s autobiographical solo performance at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York begins with a series of disclaimers. “I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud,” he levels, picking between two chords on his guitar, weaving in and out from behind a microphone. “And so am I.”

It seems a necessary caveat for the audience at Springsteen on Broadway (Netflix, now streaming), whose idolatry would otherwise be suffocating. “I have never been inside a factory,” he continues, “but it’s all I wrote about.”

Just as pleasingly, he even distances himself from the role of showman. “I’ve never worked five days a week until now,” he says. “I don’t like it.”

If so, he suffered on like many of the characters of his songbook, bringing to a close a year-long residency at the theatre earlier this month. Even that lengthy stint could not satisfy demand, though, and so a recording arrives to Netflix to share the story of Springsteen’s self creation and the blue-collar bard’s take on America.

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Fans may hang on his every word, and, over two-and-a-half hours, there are an awful lot of them. The more Springsteen-agnostic, this writer included, will find his rhapsodies to the transformative power of rock’n’roll a little hard to swallow: “The world had f*cking changed in an instant in a sweating wet orgasm of fun,” he recalls of the music.

Later he provides an extemporary description of that boardwalk town of Freehold as a place where people “had their hearts broke, and made love, and had kids, and died, and drank themselves drunk on spring nights, and where they did their very best, the best they could, to hold off the demons, outside and inside, that sought to destroy them.”

Is there a touch of fraud to this as well, the seemingly authentic, seemingly automatic voice of the man who may be the American oracle? Perhaps.

But though it ends with a shiver of mortality, beating out a heartbeat on his guitar as the spotlight gradually fades, if this performance proves anything it's that Bruce Springsteen, like his show, must go on.

Bruce Springsteen