The Press Box - Listener Mail and Michael Riedel on Covering Broadway

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are answering your Listener Mail! They weigh in on the new Anthony Bourdain book (17:15), discuss the journalistic use of the word “slap” (23:00), and touch on the potential repackaging of retired or aging NFL quarterbacks on our televisions screens (25:58). Then longtime theater columnist Michael Riedel joins to discuss his new book, ‘Singular Sensation,’ as well as his thoughts on Broadway post-pandemic (32:15). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Michael Riedel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guest's guiltiest pleasures. Followed the Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, it's WrestleMania Week and World Wrestling Entertainment has hired sportscaster Adnan Verk to call the matches. What I want to know is what other media personalities could hold. their own next to the squared circle. I hate to say it, but give Tucker Carlson a tennis racket and let him manage some like sweaty barrel-chested dudes in Memphis in the 80s and that kid would have made millions of dollars.

Wait, is this the upside for Fox News personalities to recast them as just as like managers of wrestlers whose only job is to make the audience mad. Yes, well, that's what a heel manager is supposed to do. That's what a manager in general, for the most part, is supposed to do. Um, kind of a tangent here, but part of this, right, is the ability to announce a match is that you have to have the wrestlers fly through your table while you're announcing the match. Yeah, but like, yes, that's what, yeah, that's what Adnan will have to deal with, I think, a lot now. I mean, if you're at ringside, uh, on some of the shows, I think, you know, the, the table sort of recessed back by the entryway, But yeah, there is a lot of wrestlers going through tables at paper views and such.

So, yeah, there is, that is a real degree of difficulty situation. Who else would be really great? Man, I think an important skill here would be the ability to pretend to be shocked by what you're seeing. Yeah. Which is kind of, if you think about it, kind of a news anchor skill. maybe not they don't pretend as much but they have to have that kind of news anchor face we're like oh wow

we're just right yeah we've this is shocking developments on your screen right that's essentially what a wrestling announcer does yeah no I mean you're right it has to be someone with a little bit of that it's and it can't you can't be sort of like smug and even keeled right

I mean there's some people who'd be a little bit too just blasé about the whole thing you have to be performative you gotta be able to be like yeah like you said you got to like have be really excited and really you know feel betrayed for the audience you got to be a conduit for all the people uh who are watching it too so you know there's a lot of those primetime people who feel like there a lot of people watch rachel maddow or you know whoever and just think that like that's they're feeling these things for you um as far as just

someone who's like calling calling the action oh man there's a lot of people in sports who can do it really well. I would love to see, what were you going to say? Well, I'm just going to say, if feeling betrayed on behalf of the audience is our qualification, I would like to nominate everyone in cable news. I really don't think we need to choose. That is kind of part of hosting a show on cable news. Coming up on today's show, we answer your listener mail, including the question,

what are your memories of the Bernie Madoff era of media? plus longtime New York Post theater writer Michael Reedle on his new book about Broadway in the 90s and what the theater beat will look like after COVID. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, it's Thursday. Let's do a little listener mail. Let's begin with the Derek Chauvin trial.

The former Minneapolis police officer is being tried for the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin took the fifth today before we came on the air. Looks like the defense has rested the case. You've been tuning in to the trial. What are your impressions of watching this thing as it unfolds? I think I said it on the last episode.

I mean, it was a... It's sort of perplexing, maddening. Chauvin's defense attorney is a, I mean, just almost cartoonishly bad or, deliberately bad or just sort of implicitly dislikable. I mean, there's a lot of, obviously, there's a lot of other factors in play that would probably lead to me disliking the fellow.

I know it's his job, but I guess to me it was, well, I mean, I guess the verdict will be, you know, will obviously determine a lot about my feelings of even having watched it. The whole thing was, it was this weird tension of sort of being maddening and uplifting at the same time. Uplifting is the wrong word, but it did seem like there was, the prosecution was really coherent, it was really powerful, it was, it seemed by any gauge, by any measure, the, all the, you know, I mean, convincing in terms of assessing Chauvin's guilt. And but the sort of maddening part is just watching it knowing that like certainly many other compelling cases

have been brought before and it's just so hard to have this sort of charge brought against a police, a policeman, president or former. Now, it did seem like this was different than a lot of the ones that have come before in the sense that Chauvin was no longer a member of the force and that there were multiple members of Minneapolis police including the top cop who was who were testifying

against him. And that was, you know, obviously slightly novel in its way and an uplifting for that too. But I don't know. I just felt like the defense was so mealy-mouthed and weak and all over the place that, like I think I said in the last episode, it made me feel like he was sort of performing as an attorney, that if he asked the same follow-ups with the same glint in his eye over and over again, then maybe he would confuse a juror into thinking there was meaning there that there wasn't. And so that is just sort of even more, well, not just flummoxing, but it makes you mad, then there's sort of like a gimmick way through this, right? But yeah, I mean, it's a lot of, it's weird, you know, it's a lot of conflicting emotions just watching, you know, something that

in practice, you know, if you watch just the highlights or you read about it, there's obviously a lot of information there. A lot of things happen. But if you watch it live, it's like, you know, reading the phone book so much at the time, you know, and yet there are a lot of emotions just like welling up and coursing through you as that's happening.

And of course, just to, you know, sort of make matters more complicated, there was another shooting in Minneapolis. Kim Potter has now been charged with second degree manslaughter for shooting a black motorist named Dante Wright.

and Potter's defense is that she somehow mistook her gun for a taser. She was intending to use a taser. She actually wound up using a gun and shooting and killing Dante Wright. And that happens in the midst of this trial, which is just truly, it adds another, it is horrible on its own, and it also adds just another layer to what you're talking about. Another thing that has come up this week, David,

is the death of Bernie Mado. 82 years old he dies at a federal prison in Durham County, North Carolina. Will Wackland, listener wants us to revisit some of the media around that. I had two thoughts for you. One, and this will appeal to you as an art director, was the Adam Moss cover of New York Magazine. The Joker one? The Joker one. Yeah.

March 2nd, 2009. This was the year after the movie, The Dark Night. But where do you feel, where do you feel? where do you stand on that as a certainly in the Moss Pantheon along with the Elliott Spitzer cover? How do you feel about that one? It's actually design-wise

kind of subtle for as far as like a person painted imposed with Joker makeup goes. I mean it's just white. It's a very white cover. I'm looking at it right now. You know, it's just very sort of like subdued presumably to make the lips pop.

But even so, it's not because his hair isn't bright green or anything. It's, um, I think that the, the point must be to sort of make you do a double take, right? That's, oh, is that just a picture of a dude.

Oh, no, that is a dude as the Joker. But, um, but yeah, so what are we, why are we revisiting it? Whatever is,

is Will Wackland wants us to, oh, you see, the idea is just to revisit the entire, the entire, uh, historical episode. No,

I think just media. I just wanted to think of a few media moments from, from, from the whole major. Saga. And my mind naturally went to this cover. The headline is

Bernie Madoff Monster. It is amazing that neither of the New York tabloids came up with that idea or did that idea before New York Magazine could do it.

That was kind of surprising to me. You're right. It's not like, it is not just off the charts in terms of invention, but it was one of those

really supremely effective covers. And as soon as it came out, everybody's just kind of, there's like this just collective anger at Bernie. Madoff, which was surfing off collective anger from the whole financial crisis that engulfed us in 2008.

Bernie Madoff becoming this like celebrity kind of face of it, face literally in this case. And then that cover came out and I remember everybody just being like, oh, wow, that's it. That's what we wanted. Bernie Madoff as the Joker, who has become this kind of financial super villain of 2008. by the way, if you ever want to feel old, look at the secondary headlines of famous magazine covers. Can I give you

former Senator Bob Kerry, Jane Fonda on Broadway, and Oliver Platt? Oh my God. That was 2009 magazineing. My second memory of burning Madoff media

was I was working at the Daily Beast and this was the night, I think the night he was arrested in December 2008. I just remember. Tina Brown walking quickly into the newsroom. And in my memory, this may be made up, but she had a printout of the Wall Street Journal's story about Bernie Madoff's arrest. That checks out, yeah.

Checks out. And she is waving again in my memory of this story and just saying, guys, this is going to be absolutely huge. And I'm sitting there at my desk thinking, we've just had like 900 financial villains in American life. and here's this guy, what is it, you know, New Yorkers, rich New Yorkers, what? You know, okay, we'll get on it. But a great moment in Tina's editorial sense, like, she knew that was going to be bit. Whether she knew from her friends, I don't know how she knew, but she knew that was going to be big. I will always remember that moment.

Listener, Mike Someta points out that the Huffpo obit called Bernie Madoff, the disgraced Wall Street financier. Is this a case where We always have disgraced at the bottom of the pile Is this a case where disgraced is actually too nice To Bernie Madoff? Yeah, I think so I mean, I don't think that word does enough I don't know if it's too nice

But that word does not really do anything To describe what's happening We talk about journalistic euphemisms all the time Like Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty To a number of crimes And was serving a 150 year prison sentence When he died So I think you're on solid ground

to just go, you don't need disgraced, you don't need embattled, you know, Ponzi schemer and financial criminal Bernie Madoff, I think it's just fine. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can be really specific there. It is interesting, maybe especially in the world of the sort of financial calamity that's come since he went down, that the Joker cover is interesting. I mean, Tina's reaction to it was spot on. Obviously, this is going to be a huge story. It was a huge story. Partly it was a huge story because it affected people who were very wealthy and very powerful, right? And famous. Famous people, you know, everybody from like, you know, sports team owners to famous actors, director is the whole thing. But I don't know that that would

have necessarily been covered the same. I mean, I guess anytime you can call something a Ponzi scheme, that's just gold, right? I mean, it's just, it's sort of magical. But, you know, one would think that disgraced or no, whatever you wanted to call them, that there's, that there's a little, I'm sure there's, today, it feels like there'd be a little bit of kind of laughing at some of the victims, you know, or just like, you have, you know, you lost one million of your $10 billion. Are you really that sad? You know, that's, I mean, it's, it's, I think it's just sort of a product of the times that the guy who lost money for billionaires was the joke, was like the super villain of the era, right?

unlike, you know, any of the other all the other billionaires out there who are losing money for all the rest of it. This is from listener Kevin Farreley. Do media companies have official podcast production standards? I couldn't get through a recent NFL podcast from a major non-ringer outlet because the hosts seem to be using dial-up modems

and sitting 10 feet away from their mics. Let me turn off my modem. Hold on. The, yeah, I'm sure that. there are best practices, but it is, I mean, you can answer this too. I think obviously staying on schedule is, you know, producing content is more important than meeting certain standards for the most part. Now, I'm not talking about kind of prestige podcasts or whatever, but like regular weekly or biweekly podcasts, you know, if you, if one of us called, called into one of the people who

run the podcast department, we were just like, hey, bad news, my microphone fell in the toilet. would you like me to record on my phone or just wait till next week they would say record on your phone right i mean it would be uh i don't think they'd be interested spotify might even send us a new mic i just want to break i think they would i'm saying if we didn't have enough time spotify can even send us all the microphone fell in the toilet in that unlikely circumstance well you know maybe that's some of the background noise you're hearing the uh but but i don't but but yeah there's but but it is still sort of a i mean the podcast world in general is still kind of young enough that there's not like the best practices standard across the board.

You know, I mean, we have, especially since COVID and so many more people are recording at home. I mean, their high quality equipment was shipped around to just about everybody that needs it and so on and so forth. So in that sense, then yes. But, you know, wouldn't be the first. I mean, I'm looking at my recorder right now. I am actually recording this, but there have been a couple of times where my recording

button, my record button hasn't been pushed properly. And so we're using the cell phone backup. up audio or whatever else. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why audio would be bad. But I do believe and strongly that sound quality makes a big difference in the way it's perceived. Your show's perceived. So yeah. To answer Kevin's question, we do have podcast production standards of the ringer. And ours, this is a good time to remind everybody, always sounds great because of Erica Servantes. And if there's ever a mistake that David, like David's talking about or, you know, people say, wow, Brian's audio sounds like shit. That's our fault. We drop the microphone

literally or metaphorically into the toilet. We did that. Our producers make us sound great. But you do hit on a good point, David, with other people, which is that there's a really interesting question of how much do listeners care about that kind of stuff in this kind of DIY journalism world

that we're all in now. Like they care for sure, but there is a bet people are making that they care only so much. I mean, I think of that whenever we talk about substack on here and I read a substack essay that is like 1,500 words too long. And I'm like, this essay should have been edited and it should have stopped. And somebody should have stepped in and said like, hey, this is great. Now, please end this essay because it's going on.

But the bet is that people just don't care that much, right? That they'll just, that they'll deal with a podcast. It doesn't sound great. They'll stop reading an endless substack essay when it's, when they're just tired of reading. And then they'll just go to the next one. because what they want more than polish is information or entertainment or content or whatever you want to call it. And I think that is a kind of, that is something that media is dealing with in a bigger way right now. I wanted to bring this to your attention, Mr. Bookperson.

There is a new Anthony Bordan book out. It is called World Travel and Irreverent Guide. It is by Anthony Bourdain and Lori Williver. and I bring this up because Sebastian Modak had a very interesting piece in the Times about it. Modak notes that Bordan's name sits so boldly on the book's cover, despite the fact that he contributed not a single written word to its 469 pages. Now, Bordan, you'll remember, died in 2018. Before that, he had an idea for this book, but he was in such demand on TV that he turned to Lori

Williver, longtime assistant and collaborator, to work with him on the book. As Modak writes, the book, quote, mostly came out of one hour-long recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Mrs. Woolover, Ms. Willover, excuse me, and Mr. Bourdain held at Mr. Bordan's Manhattan High Rise apartment. And that quiet summer of 2018, Mr. Bordan was planning to go through the curated list of countries and cities and write new original essays about them. He died that summer. So Wolliver, his co-writer, turned to transcripts from his old shows. She got some guest essays. and now she has published this guide by Anthony Bourdain. What do you make of a posthumous book like this?

I, this, I mean, I'm kind of, I agree that like on its face, it has the sort of, you kind of react as if there's something sort of problematic here, but I'm having trouble putting my finger on anything that's actually, that I actually take exception to. I mean, there's lots of posthumous publishing, right? There's lots of, I mean, tons and tons of it. I mean, I feel like every author you've heard of that, I mean, that, you know, that multiple people are, I mean, every famous author that dies, they put out a collected works

or collected, you know, an uncollected, you know, works package or some sort of essay collection or, you know, they'll put something out right after somebody dies to, I mean, crassly to cash in, you know, and whether it's the estate. or whoever else that's doing it. And collecting quotes from TV, I mean, I guess the TV part probably strikes some, like, literary purists is a little bit crass,

but it's, that's nothing unusual at all. I think that, yeah, I mean, what, like, I'm a little bit flummox by it. I get the idea that, like, if his name was so much bigger than hers and this was a book that she wrote inspired, by him, that would be a problem. But from what I can tell, like, the whole book is Anthony Bourdain. It's just not like freshly typed into a typewriter by Anthony Bourdain, right? I mean, it's

Yeah, it was always, it was always designed to be a collaborative book. His estate, we should know, it's fully signed off on this. This is not like some rogue thing or whatever. This is completely done with the wishes of his, uh, of his airs and everything. So that is the, um, it's just an interesting product. And as you point out, there is a grand history of this in publishing. Yeah. Are we still getting Michael Crichton novels where we've been getting now for like about a decade since his death? Yeah, I mean, certainly in the thriller space, I don't even know, you know, nonfiction is a little bit different. But again, if you're just sort of like, I mean, go to the, go to like the literary theory or like literary biography section of your bookstore,

or like the most pristine, the holiest of holies of any sort of literary space, and you will see an endless stream of like the collected and annotated letters of like whatever Tennessee William, whatever great writer that you want to put up, hold up. I don't think anybody makes some like moral objection to a, you know, Harvard scholar contributing 25% of the words to a collection of a dead author and still putting that famous author's name giant on the front. Yeah, there is a, it does have a whiff of commercialism, but it's, I don't think there's any problem here at all.

It may not even be commercialism. I think everybody's ears perk up, and I bet Lori Willover would be the first person to acknowledge us. Because of a few things Modak gets at in the piece, is that first of all, Bordan's literary voice was so particular. So the idea of having something, that he himself did not write every word of is just different to people. It sort of catches them out in a way.

And then also that his, this is a guide that has like hotel picks and restaurant picks and things like that. And his taste is also very, very particular. Like that, that's how he became known as a TV star. Like, I'm going to tell you where to eat and I'm going to tell you about the places that suck that you should avoid at all costs. So just having those things sort of come out And again, largely guided as this piece makes clear by his taste.

It's just really, really interesting. And I think that's why people, we had somebody when I tweeted this out on our account and somebody wrote back and said all those things that the piece brings up, all those little, the kind of, you know, what makes this book different, those all occurred to me. And then I went and immediately ordered the book because I'm really excited to have another book by Anthony Bourdain coming out. which is, I think, what the publisher's counting on, and Barnes & Noble, which says in the piece,

we've ordered it for all 600 plus stores, and we are all very excited about it. Sam McBride, David, draws our attention to the journalistic use of the word slap. Sam, right, slap is something only used to describe a country slapping someone with sanctions. I think that is largely correct, though. I would also add the NFL can slap someone with a suspension or fine. are those the actual uses of the word the non-literal uses of the word slap it is interesting

that is about as like kind of colloquial or conversational as you could imagine a newspaper of record getting full stop right I mean I can't imagine I can't think of that many more instances where you just use that sort of slang as almost like the only way of saying something

right Yeah, it's kind of the mandatory verb for a suspension or a sanction. Yeah, slapping with a suspension, yeah, for sure. Yeah, we're going to have to keep an eye on that. Slapwash 2021. We're also talking about the phrase opens up the other day. Our pal Scott Tobias writes, what do we think of sound off relative to open up? I suppose those inclined to sound off need little prompting to do so.

Points out a headline that said, Spurs coach Greg Popovich sounds off on Dante Wright comma Texas governor which brings up an interesting question like if you are always sounding off as Greg Popovich's want to do are you really sounding off? I think sound off is a signal to the audience or to the potential audience of what the tone of what you were about to receive is

right? Yeah though it does feel like kind of an event if I'm sounding off about something. Yeah but it's also inherent negative, right? I mean, they're not negative, like, well, I guess not negative is either the subject matter in the, well, you're saying something a bit controversial, I think. You're saying something that's, that has some teeth to it. Yes, teeth, that's it. I mean, you have something, you have, you have something to say that might ruffle some feathers. It'd just be weird to say,

like, Charles Barkley sounds off about the state of basketball. Well, okay, that's like everything Charles Barkley says. Right. They would be like, Charles Barkley sounds off about, I don't know. short people in basketball or I don't know I mean just something that would be you know slightly something that might be offensive to some people

yeah yeah it just feels it feels very funny but you're right I think it's become like this Pavlovian thing where when you put that on Twitter somebody's gonna perk up

oh this is gonna tell me something I don't know it's a little bit like opens up and we had what was it Tofer Grace opening up about the birth of his child yeah you just you perk up go

Oh, opens up. Oh, wow. I'm going to have some kind of intimacy I don't understand. Sound off is the same way it triggers this. Okay, somebody's going to say something that's going to be interesting. I got to pay attention to that tweet. This is from Kyle Koster of the big lead. With Aaron Rogers on Jeopardy and Peyton Manning set to do a college bowl revival,

are we in a golden age of networks repackaging, aging, or recently retired quarterbacks onto our television screens? Is this a bubble or will the public's general taste always be so? milk toast. Well, you can say something about the stickiness of pro sports broadcasts, right? That, like, I mean, we talk often on the show about the amount of money the rights are going for about how football or whatever is one of the only things that people still watch live and en masse.

And I think that leads to a kind of higher general curating or public awareness of some athletes, but really, I'd say blame, like, the State Farm commercials. Like, blame, like, the prevalent, like, the never-ending prevalence of, like, insurance commercials that put certain people in front of us. And that, I don't even know if it has so much to do with, with aging football players or athletes or quarterbacks or whatever else. I mean, I think that, you know, anyone that is on TV that much, I mean, like, it, like the Geico Gecko could probably host Jeopardy and it'd be as much of a success as Aaron Rogers. You know, I mean, there's very few people in our public sphere that have that sort of

name recognition, but as sad as it is, insurance commercials are like one of the most widespread forms of communication in modern culture. I have wasted so much of my life watching unfunny insurance commercials. Oh, God. It used to be unfunny beer commercials and at some point it changed. Yeah. Where like hours and hours of my time watching insurance commercials that don't have a pun at the end, don't even have like a bad pun at the end. By the way, you could probably throw in credit card commercials.

Speaking to Charles Barkley, like unfunny credit card commercials, but yes, insurance commercials. And I think you hit on a point, which is that as soon as celebrities started agreeing to be in just any ad, it became a pretty small jump for celebrity will then just do anything on television. Because there was a time when we were growing, you would not, you would not see even really. B-list celebrities just in regular old commercials. That was considered a little bit gauche. I think athletes probably less so, but celebrities definitely. And then all of a sudden they started appearing. And now it's like, oh, why don't you just also host Jeopardy?

That would be, you know, oh, sure, okay. You know, I'm already in 100 ads. That doesn't seem like such a big deal. I don't know. I thought he did a good job. I don't know. I mean, well, that's part of the fascination, too, is that Aaron Rogers can do this. which is you could not say about every NFL quarterback.

Yeah, for sure. Although if it were just a rotating cast of NFL quarterbacks, I'd probably watched it a lot more. If it was every NFL quarterback had to do a week of Jeopardy? Yeah. So like we get all 32 starting quarterbacks and then Dr. Oz does week 33. That's how you're planning the next season of Jeopardy. Wouldn't that be great if on first take it when it was like,

it was like the, you know, the workout, pre-draft workouts and then the draft and then training camp, but then they have to spend some like period of time between the draft and the training camp. They're like, you know, this is Joe Burroughs first run on Jeopardy. How do we think he's going to perform? Could he possibly live up to the hype? That'd be incredible. Claire McNair is rooting for that outcome. I'll tell you that right now. Finally, kind of a callout piece of listener mail from Gabe Classen. You too often claim that David is the son of a preacher. But every time a Bible reference comes up on the show, David can be heard panic sweating. My question is, David to recite any Bible verse.

That's his question or that's your question? No, that's his question. Oh my gosh. I'm a believer. First of all, recite any Bible verses, I mean, I could recite, you know, when I was a kid, it was always Jesus wept was the joke answer or whatever. You could go, you know, for God to love the world and all that stuff. Obviously, I'm a big fan of Austin 316. But yeah, recite any Bible verses just.

Which Bible is that? Austin 316 But yeah I don't have the Bible Memorize I used to know I used to have a lot more memorized But I've never been a big

Memorization guy anyway So there we go So this guy calling you out And you're going with Jesus wept Is this it? I'm going to say recite any Bible verse I couldn't recite any of the lines From any of the novels that I like

All right I consider the matter of call I would never had any doubt This is Gabe Klessin We're dealing with right now All right time for the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious

and all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to At the Press Box Pod where they are always gratefully received. David, some horrible news for L.A. moviegoers. The wonderful arc light Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard is closing. Oh, man.

My favorite place after a hard day at the ringer to go wait out the L.A. traffic was watching like a 5.30 show of something I kind of wanted to see, but was much better than waiting in traffic. So then I would see it And go have that good popcorn at the

Centorama dome There was some pleas for director Christopher Nolan who was often spotted there to save it And if that happens, it was a preemptive Overwork Twitter joke to write The Arklight Rises The Arklight rises Thanks to Tim Moran

And finally, as we mentioned Bernie Madoff is dead at age 82 It was an overwork Twitter joke to write Mourners at Madoff's funeral Are encouraged to bring along two friends Because he did that Hansi scheme. Thanks to Scott Tobias.

And as we laugh uncomfortably, we did get a note from Chicken Finger Taco, one of our valued listeners, noting that Madoff was one of the few people who, when he died, Twitter felt no collective guilt about just making jokes. You know how now, you know, we'd on Twitter and there's often like,

okay, what is something you would say here? What is something you wouldn't say? Apparently people felt no compunction about Bernie Madoff. Like Bernie Madoff had entered that zone, where there seemingly was no restrictions about what you could say on Twitter in that moment.

Anyway, if you had no second thoughts, congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Time for the notebook dump, David. And what comes to mind when I give you the following prompt? Broadway in the 90s. The 90s? That's post-cats. It's post-lame.

lay mis that whole thing post phantom yeah well phantom is where i was going to go the 90s it's pre pre like avenue q and all that's is it like rent is that where i'm supposed to be going there you go uh lion king lion king was after the 90s right no that was 90s um uh yeah what else where are we going with this how about rosy o'donnell making broadway kind of her thing on her talk show? Very 90s phenomenon.

Michael Reedle, longtime New York Post theater columnist during our New York period, I loved reading that guy in the New York Post because he was always writing something interesting. He has a new book called Singular Sensation, The Triumph of Broadway, which revisits the backstories of all these 90s musicals.

You might call it the restageables, if you're, for lack of a better term. We got into those shows and his particular approach to covering the theater. Here's Michael, read all right michael you started writing a theater column for the daily news back in 1993 is theater the beach you always wanted or did you just wind up there uh i know i really really wound up

up there i didn't uh i had no no plans to go into the theater all i had no plans to go into journalism to be honest with you and i was a history major uh in college and uh i was going to go to law school that was the big plan but i wound up um getting on a summer job with the broadway producer Elizabeth McCann. I really didn't know what a producer did at that point, but she was doing this play from England. And I remember my very first day on the job, she said this actor in the play,

his air conditioning unit was broken in the cheap apartment she put him in. So my job was to go fix the air conditioning unit. I mean, you know, what is a history major from Columbia? I know about an air conditioning unit. But I got a screwdriver, and I walked over in this very elongated man

to open the door and he said, oh, it's beastly hot in here, beastly, beastly hot. and he was kind of wiping the sleep out of his eyes. And I walked into the bedroom to fix the air conditioning. I noticed this attractive young lady's calf sticking out from under the covers of the bed. And she kind of raised her head up. And she said, it was so hot in here.

It's so hot in here. And I, like, stuck the screwdriver into the air conditioning unit, jiggled it around. And it came on, thank God. And I laughed. I said, thank you. It was beastly hot. And that elongated man was one Alan Rickman, making his debut in Maliazum Dangeros. And the girl in his bed was the young, the anjudo and the play with whom he was having an affair.

Oh, my goodness. That was my crash course into the theater. But I had a good time that summer working for Liz McCann. And I got to know a bit about how Broadway functioned and people like the Schubert's and the Niederlanders, which kind of planted the seed in my head, I guess years later for my first book, Razzle-Dazzle. And then out of college, I just happened to know someone at school who was taking a job editing a theater magazine. And he said, do you want to be the managing editor? And I'd never written anything but a history paper.

But again, yeah, it was interesting. The first two days on the job, I think, I had the pleasure of hanging out and interviewing Julie Stein, the great Broadway composer. And then I got to meet people like Stephen Sondheim and John Candor and Fred Ebb. And it seemed a sort of a fun world to be in. And I never got to law school. How'd you want to cover the beat differently than it had been covered before? I think it was because since I wasn't a huge theater fan,

I, in the beginning, got interested in the business of it. And I got to know the Schubert's. I got to know the Niederlanders. I got to know the producers. And I learned the economics of Broadway. And I was always kind of interested in where the real power was in the theater. And I realized early on that, you know, you can have the best play in the world. But if you don't have a place to put it, no one's going to see it.

So the people who control the business are the people who control the theaters and the real estate. And that was the Schubert's mainly and the Niederlanders. And over time, I just got close to Jerry Schoenfeld, who was chairman of the Schuberts and Jimmy Niederlander who created that empire. And they were old guys, and they loved telling me great old stories about the business and the struggles that they had. And so I really learned, I really learned all about the business from those guys and some other producers. Sadly, all these people are now dead. But I was fortunate that I was the repository of their vast knowledge of the theater. As I was getting to know them, I really never had any plans to write books either.

but I realized when Jerry died in 2008 or so, I thought, you know, I'm pretty much the only reporter around who knows all the stuff that these guys told me. Because they didn't talk to reporters. They were pretty private. They were in the background, usually. But for some reason, they like me. So that's sort of how the ideas for the books came about. And you were going to write when you were doing as a column, you were going to be interested in not just theater is art, which critics are interested in, but theater is business. theater is power struggle between artist and business, that whole 360 view? Yeah, that was far more interesting to me than just being a critic and going to the theater and writing a little book report. I mean, the job of a critic I find kind of bleak, actually, night after night, sitting in the dark watching other people do things that you can't do and then sort of writing your little

term paper about it. Too boring. I had much more fun getting to know the theater people, having my own particular feuds with them as I did over the years. when I wrote things they didn't like. But just covering the, you know, to me, the fun of the theater was the personalities. You have these gigantic egos. You have enormous financial stakes.

People put everything they have into shows, and the whole thing can go belly up in one night if the critics don't like it. So it just creates an atmosphere of big, big egos in collision and very eccentric people. So I never, never ran out of material. And to me, that was far more interesting than just sitting through some, you know, mediocre play and saying on the one hand on the other hand. If there's a mean review or a column that they don't like, there's a much more immediate visceral reaction than if you'd been a movie writer writing about a movie in production that is that is sort of remote. The theater, I feel the theater is just much more immediate in

that. I think it was Scott Rudin, now kind of in the news. Yeah. His issues right now. But Scott was quoted saying about my column. This is many years ago now. He said, he said, you know, in the movie business, the studios are so powerful, the audience is so enormous that really what the press says is immaterial, you know, you release a big franchise movie. Yeah, maybe someone reported some tension on the set, but most people are going to see the movie. There are millions of people who go see those movies. They've never heard of it. But Broadway is a small world. So when I would write something

kind of spicy or racy about problems behind the scenes at a show, it was amplified by the fact that you know, there were only, what, 50 people working around Broadway. And if you were following theater back in the day when I was, you know, really at the height of my column writing, people read the column and that's why people would get upset at me because I could plant the seeds of a kind of field of negativity for a show. And I was never one to only take one swipe at something. I mean, I would go back and again and I'd take the steamroller. I'd go over the first time, then I'd back up and go over to the second time, then maybe

go over to third time, just for kids. You said the flops have been very good to me once. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, they're the ones, you know, the more, actually, the tougher my columns were the more money they paid me. I figured that out early on. Oh, that's interesting. And I really made my name covering things like Rosie O'Donnell's show, taboo. It was a big one for me.

Well, the biggest one of all time, of course, was Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark. And I knew then that I probably should begin to think about, trying something else in my life because I thought I'm never going to have a show like Spider-Man. I mean, I must have written 20 columns and that a thing. And Spider-Man really got me into my radio career because Don Imus was reading my columns. And he invited me on the show to talk about them. And we became kind of friendly. And he made me a regular on a show talking about entertainment once a week.

And from there, I wound up getting my own show in New York. So I owe Spider-Man a lot, frankly. I remember when Tabu came out, I was living in New York. And a friend of mine said, we've got to go see this. It's so bad, you're never going to forgive yourself if you didn't go see it. I said, really? Do I want to sit through two, you know, insufferable hours? And we sat in the balcony, and I have, and every time I see my friend, we always quote

the show to each other. I'm so glad. I didn't completely miss it. In retrospect, it wasn't as bad as I probably made it out to be. I've actually listened to Boy George's score, and it has some good things in it. It was not a successful show. But again, to me, it wasn't the quality of the show. It was the tension among the creators.

Now, when you had Rosie O'Donnell and Boy George, you knew that collision was going to be something to behold. And of course, you know, Rosie was being sued by a magazine company at the time. She was under tremendous stress. Boy, George was bonkers. Raoulos Barza was running screaming out of a theater. And I had a lot of good sources on the show. So I can't reveal what the sources were.

But the creators of that show made a mistake that they went to a. certain restaurant and they sat around the table discussing all of their problems. And they did not know that my source was at the table almost every night next to them. He would just tell me. He was like my transcriber of their meetings. And how did he know? We said that. How could nobody was there? We were quiet. And they had no clue. Absolutely no clue. That's amazing. They never figured it out. They never figured it out. No. Wow. I mean, you would never have noticed the guy. He was very just a mild mannered guy just sitting there, you know, ain't no attention. So you mentioned Rosie, she comes up a couple of times in singular sensation because she becomes this force on Broadway in the 90s.

First is kind of a cheerleader champion of. How do we describe what she did for Broadway during this period? Well, I liken her in the book to what Ed Sullivan did for Broadway in the 50s and the 60s when he had his hugely popular variety show. And he always had numbers from Broadway shows on and he interviewed all the Broadway creators and stars. And Rosie became the Ed Sullivan to Broadway in the 1990s with her very, very popular talk show. She loved Broadway. She grew up in New York going to Broadway shows. She wanted to be a Broadway actress before she became a comedian.

And she reached 6.5 million people every morning, many of them women. And women, by far, are the ones who buy the most tickets to go to Broadway. You know, the wife is the one who tells the husband, we're going to go see this play. And husband's like, I'd rather be going to a basketball game, but okay, I'll go to play with the wife. And Rosie, those people loved her. They trusted her. She did not have the kind of snooty taste of a New York Times critic who might send a lot of people to a play that they would not find that engaging. And Rosie just embraced the theater, supported it, promoted it, and really was a very powerful force.

I mean, she could, a show like Titanic, very good show, which I cover in the book, did not get great reviews. And it was really about to go belly up. and Rosie saw it and loved it and brought the cast on. They sang the very stirring opening number. And, you know, that show had a two-year life largely because of Rosie's support of it. Yeah, I feel she really nationalized Broadway. You mentioned Ed Sullivan, but I was living in Texas at the time when her show started. I just remember thinking, oh, wait, it's a thing that you can get on an airplane to go see Broadway shows.

Yeah. It's almost like she made that more of a tangible idea to a lot of people who might not have thought that. And she also made, you know, the theater can be a little elitist. think. Certainly, God knows, with the prices that they were charging before the pandemic, it was becoming for the 1%. But Rosie made it fun. And she said, you know, the theater's not a snobby thing. Okay, you can go and you can see some great shows, some amazing performances, here's some great music. And so I really argue in the book, singular sensation, that she helped bring Broadway back into the mainstream of American popular and entertainment culture. I can tell, I mean,

she was so powerful that when Disney opened the Lion King, they had an iron-clad rule that they would not show you the opening number of the circle of life because they didn't want to give it away. They wanted to be such a surprise to people seeing it for the first time in the theater. So they would not allow any of it to be on national television. Nothing. There would be nothing in the circle of the life on national TV. And Rosie said, I want the cast to come on. I want them to sing the circle of life.

And Disney said, no, no, we don't do that. We don't show it away. People have to come to the theater to see it. She said, do you want my support or not? the very first time they performed the Circle of Life on national television was on the Rosie O'Donnell's show. That's great. That's great. You mentioned Lion King. In the 90s, the Disneyfication, quote-unquote, of Broadway was this big idea. Because Disney had taken over the new Amsterdam theater. You write. They'd done Beauty and the Beast. And then, of course, the Lion King. Where did you fall on the idea of Disneyfication? I was, I wasn't against it, but I wasn't for it. I mean, I, I, I wasn't against it because I recognized having lived in New York, you know, since 1985 and

seeing Times Square at its most squalid and having sort of, you know, gone through the crack epidemic, I was not opposed to Times Square being cleaned up. And I knew that Disney was going to be a big part of that. From an artistic point of view, I mean, Beauty and the Beast was, to me, was for kids. It really was a theme park show. I found it completely dull and uninteresting, not particularly inventive. So I thought about... Disney as, well, it's a necessary evil because we really need an anchor in Times Square to get Giuliani's plan underway to start cleaning it up. On the other hand, I don't want to sit through a bunch of theme park shows. So I really was ambivalent about it. Frankly, I didn't pay too much attention to it

because they just weren't doing anything that I thought would be that interesting. And then, lo and behold, Michael Eisner, who I think was a little, Michael told me for this book, He was very happy with the success of Beauty and the Beast. You know, they lost the Tony Award to a Stephen Sondheim show called Passion. But as Michael said, we won the Bank of America Award, so it was okay. But I think, you know, Michael sees himself as a creative CEO, as a creative producer. And he was a little put out that the Broadway community stuck its nose up at Disney. And he remembered, you know, Walt Disney hired people like Salvador Dali to do things in his movies.

You know, Disney was interested in real artists. So when Michael decided to the Lion King, he told the guys running this theater department, Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher, he said, we're doing the Lion King. He said, but let's do it in a different way from viewing the Beast. Let's try something else. And this was kind of key. Peter and Tom, they came from the nonprofit experimental theater world. So they knew the work of someone like Julie Tamer. And it was indeed Tom Schumacher's idea to bring in Julie Tamer. And it was a tremendous risk because nobody really knew what Julie was. was doing because she'd never worked in the commercial theater before. And I'd seen her stuff. I mean, you know, I saw her operas. They ran like seven hours. And they were, they were strange, but they were restingly beautiful. But I just couldn't put Julie Tamor and Disney together. It's just a combination that never made sense to me. And I went out to Minneapolis for an early preview of the Lion King. And I went sort of prepared to see a train wreck, because I knew Julie was demanding and high strong and very intense. And I thought this could be a real disaster for Disney and for

her. And I really went thinking, I'm going to kill this thing. And then, of course, I saw, you know, that opening number of circle of life. And I remember thinking, I don't have the vocabulary to describe what I've just seen. And I remember, I think I put this in the book, after the show was over, I never met Julie before or Peter and Tom from Disney. They were standing at the back of the theater because I had an appointment with them to interview them for the Daily News. And they were at the back of the theater. And they said to me, well, what did you think? I said, I think you got the biggest hit since the Phantom of the Opera.

And they were like, what? And I realized that, and I try to convey this in the book, people who work on these shows, they don't know what they have because you work so long and so intensely on something in a rehearsal room. You don't know if the jokes are still funny. You don't know if the music's going to land. You don't know how the audience is going to respond to these puppets they haven't seen before. So they did not know.

And, you know, that very first preview in Minneapolis, I think it was Tom Schumacher, who said to me, he said, look, we were terrified. We had no idea how it was going to play. They didn't even run the show from start to finish because of all the technical nightmares. And Tom said, he said, if I were an older man, I would have poop my pants when the lights went down. But it was the taking the chance on Julie Tamor that led to the Lion King, being the most successful entertainment title of all time. Before the pandemic, it was going to hit $9 billion in worldwide gross.

Amazing. Amazing. And as you say, it all makes sense afterwards. Yeah, but as you write in here, even while they're putting the Lion King together, a lot of people at Disney going,

what are we doing with the puppets? Michael almost pulled the plug on the show because he went, he didn't tell me this at the time, but I knew who he was talking of, so I'll say it now. Joe Roth was his second in command. And it was Joe Roth who was sitting with Michael at one of these workshops of Julie's puppetry. And Julie is explaining Banqu and Indonesian puppetry.

And Joe Roth is like, I have no clue what this woman is saying. And Joe Roth was sitting there saying, what's that thing on the head? Do I look at the thing on the head? Do I look at the actor's face? It's confusing. We don't know. But you couldn't tell because it was done up close in a rehearsal room. It wasn't lit properly.

The headdresses weren't painted yet. So it was confusing to everybody. And Julie got her work back in front of Michael in a theater, in a Broadway theater, properly lit, properly painted. And Michael said, okay, we're sticking with you because the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. And truer words were never spoken in the theater. You write in here that in the 90s Broadway is coming out of this intensely British period, largely the work of Andrew Lloyd Weber who'd done cats and Phantom of the Opera.

He does a musical of Sunset Boulevard, the old Billy Wilder movie. How does he wind up with two actors who are playing the movie? the lead role of Norma Desmond at the same time? Well, Andrew was, shall we say, mercurial back in those days. And because he had unlimited amounts of money, he could do whatever he wanted to do. So he had the idea of Sunset Boulevard and Paddy Lepone. And he was going to do what he always did with his shows, which was open it in London and then bring it to Broadway. And they signed a deal with Patty to open a show in London, and then she would open it on Broadway. it. But before the rehearsals began in London, before Patty even was on the plane to go to London,

Andrew had this idea, well, you know, it's Sunset Boulevard. It's arguably the great movie about Hollywood. And so he said, well, why don't I open it in L.A. first in America? I'll open in England, and then before New York, I'll open an L.A. production. And Christopher Hampton, who was writing the book to the musical, said, and we should hire my friend Glenn Close, because she was just in Les Lé Liaison Dangerous, the movie version of it. great idea, Andrew says. Well, now we have a little problem because Patty Lepone, who's a diva, someone's going to have to tell her, oh, by the way, Patty, you're opening in London, but before you come to Broadway, we're going to open

another production in L.A., and by the way, it's going to star a gigantic movie star named Glenn Close. Now, Andrew did not have the guts to tell Patty himself. So it fell to one of the guy who ran his company in America then, the nice guy named Edgar Dobie, whom I know. And I tracked down Edgar and I didn't interview with him. I said, all right, Edgar, I got to ask you something. What was Patty's reaction when you told her Glenn Close was going to play Norma Desmond in L.A. before she got to play it on Broadway. And there was a pause. And Edgar said, well, enough time has gone by. I think I can tell you. They said, I'll never forget what she said. So I called her up. She was at her house in Connecticut. The car was in the

driveway, waiting to take her to J.F.K. to fly her so she could fly to London to begin rehearsals. And I'd have your call her and said, Patty, you know, want you to know, we've got the deal for London and we can't wait for you to arrive here and start working on sunset. And we've got your deal in place for Broadway. But I want you to know, in between London and Broadway, we're going to open a production in L.A., and Glenn Close is going to play Norma Desmond. And there was silence on the other end of the line. And Patty said, Glenn Close. She brazed like a donkey. And her nickname is George Washington, because if you look at her in profile, her nose meets her chin. And Patty, and Patty told me this, she walked out of her house. She had her airline tickets. The driver in the limo was out there,

and she threw the tickets at him. She said, take these back to Andrew Lloyd Webber. And then ensued all these negotiations to get her back. But the atmosphere was poisoned. And it never recovered. And then, as we know, Patty got mixed reviews. in London. Glenn got rape reviews in L.A. and Andrew dumped Patty for Broadway and hired Glenn and Patty sued Glenn. I'm sorry, Patty sued Andrew. Got like $1.7 million,

I think. And she built a pool in Connecticut with the money, which she always called the Andrew Lloyd Weber Memorial Pool. See, I mean, I tell you, this stuff is better than any show you're going to see. It truly is. And then Andrew Lloyd Webber, you write this in the book, too, hires Faye Dunaway to do the L.A. version. So now

we got Glenn Close has moved to Broadway. Faye Dunaway is going to do L.A. they decide she can't sing well enough for their taste, and they pull the plug on the show, and you have her standing in her backyard in L.A. giving this very Norman-desmond-like press conference. Yes, absolutely. Demouncing Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Yeah, well, I mean, she did poor, poor Faye. I had heard, because I talked to a lot of people who worked on the show, they said, actually, she could act it well, but she never had the confidence in singing. So she would give a good scene, and then the song would come, and she'd get nervous, and the whole character would fall away. So Andrew just shut it down before it even opened. And Faye called Patty.

And so happened. A friend of mine was on a conference call with Faye and Patty. And he remembered what ensued. And Faye said, what should I do? And Patty said, do what I did. Sue the motherfucker. And Glenn did. So Andrew had to pay out a settlement to Faye Dunaway, too.

Absolutely. Incredible. So I began the book with Sunset Boulevard because it really was the last of those big British spectacles. And we didn't know it at the time, but it was the end of that era. And it was just interesting to me as I began to plot out this book, which is the 90s on Broadway, that one season you have Andrew Lloyd Weber at his height, most expensive musical of all time Sunset Boulevard. It wins all the Tony Awards because there wasn't that much competition that year.

The next year you have a show that none of us had ever heard of written by someone we didn't even know, a guy named Jonathan Larson, and the show is Rent, and it's American, and it's content. temporary, and it's about young people. It's set in New York City. It is everything that the Andrew Lloyd-Weber era wasn't. And that shifts and begins a whole new chapter in the history of Broadway, where the Americans really come back in power and the British exit. You initially thought Mel Brooks's musical version of the producers was going to be a flop. Yes, shows you what a judge I am of success on Broadway. Never, never listen to me about if something's going to win or lose. My thinking at the time was,

you know, Blake Edwards had come to Broadway with Victor Victoria, and that wasn't very good. And as much as I love Mel and his movies, Mel was not at the height of his powers in Hollywood anymore. You know, he hadn't had a real hit movie for a long, long time. I mean, you know, Robin Hood Men in Tights is not exactly plays and saddles. No offense to space balls, but. Yeah, right. So you just had the sense that, I mean, here's this old Hollywood guy, never really been around Broadway. It's going to be like Blake Edwards.

He's not really going to know what he's doing. And I was kind of thinking, I don't know, is that Mel Brooks humor? Is it kind of old-fashioned? You know, and people like Nathan Lane felt the same way, I interviewed Nathan for the book. And he said, you know, when I first got the script for the producers, as Nathan said to me, and I think I put the quote in the book, he said, you know, Mel's gay people are like extraterrestrials. So, you know, you just weren't quite sure if that old-fashioned kind of Melbrook's humor would land. And I really wasn't sure.

But, you know, again, I didn't realize the brilliance of Mike Ockrent, who was the first director of the show and his wife, the wonderful Susan Stroman. And Mike Ockrent, he and, he and Mel really laid down the blueprint for the musical version. And, you know, you can't just take the screenplay and put it on stage. It has to be reconceived as a musical theater entertainment. You know, the problem with Victor Victoria was it was basically the screenplay put on stage. but Mike Ockren, who directed me and my girl in Crazy for You, he knew the whole thing had to be rethought. And Mel trusted him.

And, you know, the tragedy of that story is, as they were getting ready to go into rehearsal, Mike Ockren got leukemia and he died. And Stroman, who was married to him, she was going to choreograph the show. She was completely devastated. And she couldn't, you know, get out of bed, let alone work. And so the producers was in this limbo land.

I mean, they weren't. weren't sure what they were going to do with it. And, you know, finally Mel said, look, Susan, he loved working with Susan and Mike Ockrent. He trusted Susan. And he went to her apartment. And I think it's one of the more, you know, moving moments in the book. Susan told me, she said, look, I was so devastated. If you squeeze my skin, the grief would come out. And Mel, went to her and he said, look, I want you to direct the show. You understand it. You know what Mike and I were going for. I want you to direct it. And she said, I can't, Mel, I can't. I can't He said, listen to me, you're going to come to rehearsal and you're going to laugh and you're

going to have a great time. Then you're going to go home at night and you're going to cry your eyes out. But you're going to get up next morning and you're going to laugh and you have a great time. You will go home again and cry your eyes out. But I promise you this, whenever you're with me, you will laugh and have a great time. And true to his words, Susan said, you know, how could I say no to that? And she said, it was working with Mel that got me through the death of Mike Cochran. And Mel was absolutely, she said every moment with Mel was the most hilarious time I've ever had in my life. But she did go home and cry her eyes up. What's it been like for you to go a year and change without seeing a Broadway show? It's been, it's not been as tough for me as I thought

because having taken the radio job three years ago, you know, I have a radio show Monday through Friday, New York at 6 to 10 a.m. So it was difficult for me to go to the theater. at night, and I wasn't going to it as much with this new, new career that I have. I missed more than the shows. I actually missed my friends, really. I mean, I missed meeting somebody for a drink, catching up on the latest gossip, what's happening, what deals are being done. Because everybody's scattered, you know. I mean, the people with money on Broadway have country houses, so they all fled and disappeared. And while we still talk on the phone, I just, I really missed popping into Bar Centralia or Joe Allen, place like that.

and running into some actors, running into some musicians or stagehands or producers. And just there is a kind of a real neighborhood-like quality to Times Square if you're in the theater. Because we all know each other, and we've all been in the business a long, long time. And more poignant for me than not going to the theater was going Times Square on my bike in March, April, and into May, and seeing a place my neighborhood, you know, for the last 30 years of my life, completely. deserted, absolutely deserted. I remember my friend Imogen Lloyd Weber, Andrew's daughter, she lives in New York, and we would meet on Wednesdays in Schubert Alley for a little cocktail hour. And you got to remember everything was shut down. Okay, this is back in April and May. There was no

outdoor dining, let alone indoor dining. Everything was shut down. And Emigin would bring a thermos with some vodka and cranberry juice and I would pick up a bottle of rosé. And we would sit in Schubert Alley and we'd have a drink. And we were the only people in the theater district. The only person we ever saw was a guy changing the light bulb on the marquee of the phantom of the opera. Oh, wow. It was just the three of us on 44th Street. So that was very, very poignant. I'm pleased to say now that there is definitely life in New York City again.

Times Square is bustling, and the theaters are preparing for a reopening sometime in the fall or the late or the early winter. Yeah, I see we've had some scenes. of that. Nathan Lane and Savian Glover were doing this thing for 150 people wearing masks the other day at the St. James Theater. Mike Daisy is back for whatever that is worth. What do you think the theater beat looks like? Not just Broadway, but the actual theater journalism looks like when Broadway gets back on its feet. Well, you have certainly see how this recovery goes. You know, on my book, Singular Sensation ends with September 11th and Broadway's comeback after the attack on the World Trade Center. Which we have to say, again, it was a remarkable comeback, but that really was an existential crisis for Broadway. I remember that day talking to the Schubert's, and they said, Michael, we've been told that there are bombs planted at Times Square that could go off at any minute. They were afraid that terrorists would storm a theater and hold the audience members hostage. But, you know, within two days, Giuliani had Broadway up and running again. And within a year, Broadway had recovered.

It was doing very, very well. this is different. You know, you can't be shut down for over a year and just flip the lights on and expect everybody to come back. And I think there's going to be some real challenges here that I'm not so sure that my friends in the business are aware of that they have a belief that there's a pent-up desire of people to be together again and experience live theater. You know, you've got an older crowd on Broadway, the audience, and I think having gone through this, even vaccinated, people are going to be reluctant for a while to be sitting in an old theater with 1,500 other people. And the shows that are going to open first are the big name marquees like The Phantom and Wicked, Chicago, Lion King. But those shows have been running, in the case of Phantom, 34 years, their audience is entirely foreign tourists. And I don't know when foreign tourists are going to come back to New York City. And I'll tell you this, they can't come back with their obscene ticket prices. You can't say to people who've been out of work for a year and a half,

hey, we're back in business. Come pay $1,000 to see Hamilton. That's not going to happen. You've got entice people back with a reasonably priced ticket. And you have to entice New Yorkers back because they're the first people who are going to come back. And you can't get them back with stuff they've already seen. So if I were an enterprising producer, I would be trying to line up something fresh and new, a good new play.

But we'll see. And the other issue you have is you're going to have to deal with, of course, the push for more diversity in the theater. And the New York Times is certainly leading the charge on that. But again, I'm kind of with Jerry Zacks, who said recently the other day, they were saying, well, do you think, you know, should we have plays about the pandemic and plays about this, that, and the other thing? And Jerry said, can we have a few plays in musicals that just make us laugh and provide us for some entertainment? I mean, I, for one, do not want to sit through 10 plays about the pandemic, okay? I mean, I've lived through it. I don't need to spend my time in the theater being told that the pandemic was

terrible. You would deny us the Andrew Lloyd-Weber grand musical about the pandemic? Yes, no. COVID-19, all singing, all dancing, all sneezing. No, no, no. No, no, it's not for me. I'm looking forward to Hugh Jackman and the music man, frankly. Michael Riedel's book is Singular Sensation, The Triumph of Broadway. He could be heard on W.O.R. Every morning, 6 to 10 a.m. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the press box. Pleasure. Great fun talking to you. All right, so for David Chutemaker, guest is a strained pun headline.

Thursday's headline about an AI-generated Nirvana song was In Computero. I'm still laughing at that. Today's headline comes from K.M. McFarland is from the San Francisco Chronicle, hot off the presses, because last night, White Sox pitcher Carlos Rodon threw a no-hitter. Now, he came a couple of outs away from a perfect game, but it was a no-hitter. I want you to think about that surname, David, Rodon. especially how it might resemble the surname of a famous sculptor. Oh, see, I really thought we were going to go with Rodan, like the Godzilla monster here.

Okay. What was the San Francisco Chronicles, strained pun headline? Rodan's, it was the thinker, right? So is that we're doing? Like Rodon's sinker or Rodon's... Oh, that's good. Not sure how many sinkers he actually threw in that game, but that would have been really good. Rodon's

uh uh um think uh shh dang what about if we got

just went a little more general here he really had a great game it was his oh um uh blinker

kinker his his best game if he were a painter we'd call it his masterpiece Rodon sculpts a masterpiece. Oh, okay. There we go.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.