Almost twenty-five years ago, on a hot June night in New York City, I went to see a Broadway show for the first time. I was seventeen years old and the show was Sweeny Todd with Dorothy Louden and George Hearn. I went alone and I had a fourth row orchestra seat, I think, and I ‘m pretty sure I paid only twenty five dollars for it. I wept throughout the opening number, overhwhelmed by the sheer power coming from the stage,and I wept as the show progressed and I wept at the end. After the show I walked out of the Gershwin Theater, onto 52nd Street, and went to the corner at 8th and phoned my mother in Pittsburgh to tell her what an experience it had been. As I spoke with her the big marquee from the Adonis movie theater across the street shone on my face and I found myself anxious to finish the call. I did, then crossed the street and entered the Adonis for the first time in my life.
I hadn’t gone to the theater alone again until Thursday night. Again it was Sondheim. This time a revival of Pacific Overtures, the Sondheim show that preceded Sweeny Todd in 1976. I paid 65 dollars for my Studio 54 mezzanine seat. Well, I was disappointed, though I did weep at the beginning, wept, as I often do, at the sheer exhilerating thrill of seeing live theater. But I bring such high expectations with me to Sondheim that I’m bound to be disappointed. And I wasn’t feeling too great. Sondheim’s music seemed stingy. The show’s polemical tilt seems to water down the power of the work, prohibiting the kind of high high moment that lifts shows like Company and Sunday in the Park with George and Passion into places so unexpectedly beautiful and rare that the music seems to work into your DNA and change you forever.
I didn’t go to the Adonis movie theater afterwards. It’s gone, razed nearly a decade ago now, I think, along with every other building on that block—the Chinese place on the corner, the Irish place where I met Kieren–to make way for a high rise apartment building with little pyramids of light on the corners that refer to the World Wide Plaza next door—and a mere two retail tenants, Duane Reade and Blockbuster, on the street level, two big chains that face the bustling, historical 8th Avenue, in all their uniformity and bright flourescence, with the callowness of a nineteen year old midwesterner freshly arrived from mallworld. This sad little block, on 8th Avenue between 51st and 52nd Street, is without a doubt one of the best examples of the stultifying effects of gentrification. You start with a half dozen buildings in a half dozen styles with a half dozen businesses----a lavish gay porno theater, world-famous, once a legitimitate theater, now crumbling towards the exquisitely baroque beauty that can only be found in the neglect of greatness, those smoke-stained nymphs dancing still up on the ceiling----a real New York Irish pub right next door-- with steam tables and all--- where all the bartenders are direct from Ireland, with a family of regulars, and a long, legitimate history of its own—and then four or five other independent businesses, a dry cleaner, I think, a newspaper/cigarette place, the Chinese place----and you replace all this vibrant diversity, all this legitimate New Yorkness----with one giant swath of uniformity, two-thirds for the drugstore, the final third for the Blockbuster—and suddenly, this block, once fascinating and full of life, filled with gay men fucking and Irish men drinking and Chinese people serving Chinese food and Pakistani men selling cigarettes—has been reduced to a particular amount of retail square footage in the large schemes of the Duane Reade people and the Blockbuster people, located who the hell knows where—and the block is no longer urban, really, the block ceases to be a city block, but has become, instead, just another piece in the ever-expanding pie of the big-chain-mall-world that is increasingly blotting out distinctions and differences all over the country and all over the world.
I walked up this block, after seeing Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, trying to imagine the Chinese place and trying to figure out the middle of the block, where I think the Adonis was, the bright white marquee shining so bright, and trying to imagine the Irish pub next door, the talk and smoke and music rushing out whenever someone would go in or out, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see anything at all. It was if they’d managed to eliminate even the ghosts of that time, all of it swallowed up whole by the clean, happy consumerism that has so greedily replaced it.
