You can do your bit for New York — and the nation — just by going out to see a show.
I think a great place to start would be Monday at New York’s Village Theater at 158 Bleecker Street, where beginning at 8 p.m., the pretty voices of stage stars Laura Benanti, Chicago’s Cathy Richardson, Brooke Shields and Alice Ripley, as well as the more manly ones of Adam Pascal, Duncan Sheik, Billy Porter and Michael McElroy, will be performing in a benefit to raise money for New York City relief efforts in the wake of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
As New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, currently the nation’s most popular politician, put it last week: “I encourage people from all over the country who want to help. I have a great way of helping. Come here and spend money. Go to a restaurant, a play. You might actually have a better chance of getting tickets to `The Producers’ now, if you want to come here and see it. The life of the city goes on.”
And so it does, in New York, and here in Washington, where the city is still recovering from the trauma of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
Keeping the faith
Many Americans have responded nobly and boldly — volunteering for recovery and relief efforts, enlisting in the military, giving generously to aid drives, calming fears, working to prevent hysterical ethnic-based reprisals and — I think most important — making a strong, defiant point of continuing to live life as we always have in this nation.
But there are also Americans who, though they might manage to stick an American flag in the window, have scurried into the basement or wherever to lie low.
The paranoia has been obvious in that part of our culture we call showbiz, in particular, the stages where generations of the likes of Benanti and Richardson have been making life merrier and happier and more meaningful since the first theater opened in Williamsburg, Va., in the 17th Century.
As critic Richard Christiansen has noted in these pages, Broadway has been reeling ever since the World Trade Center attack, suffering box-office losses as much as 80 percent. Four shows announced immediate cancellations and a slew of others indicated they might follow suit, including “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.” Advance ticket sales came to a halt.
Richardson’s hugely popular “Love, Janis” has taken a big hit, said publicist Gary Springer, in large part because the theater is in Greenwich Village, which apparently some tourists think is too close to the financial district terrorism attack site.
Washington’s Kennedy Center, just upriver from the stricken Pentagon, hasn’t suffered as badly, but it’s been hurt.
“We’re lucky because of our subscription ticket holders,” said Kennedy Center spokeswoman Tiki Davies. “They’re still coming to see shows. It’s the tourists that are the problem. New Yorkers are still turning out for new shows and off-Broadway, but the tourists are staying home, and that’s what’s hurting the older, big shows.”
The troupers are doing their bit. The show does go on.
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The day after the attacks, the Kennedy Center staged an inspirational concert by the National Symphony Orchestra, even though the arts complex is an official national monument and an obvious target for symbolic assaults. It then scheduled an even bigger one for last Monday, bringing in Frederica von Stade, Sir James Galway, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Simone Alberghini and the Billy Taylor Trio.
Standing tall
Broadway has been singing and dancing and acting its heart out. “Aida” went on, with cast members collecting money for the Red Cross. “Proof” delayed performances for two days, then reopened with a thank-you to the audience by playwright David Auburn. “The Music Man’s” cast and audience sang “God Bless America” and gave free tickets for the show to three neighborhood fire department stations. “Kiss Me, Kate’s” Burke Moses cheered up the audiences with inspirational speeches. When World War II broke out in September 1939, the British government immediately closed all the nation’s stage and movie theaters, asserting they were not “deemed essential to national life” — a decision George Bernard Shaw derided as “a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity.”
Though a few stayed shuttered until the following January, most reopened soon after and stayed open through years of German bombing.
I am going to make a special point of attending the theater next week: taking in Shel Silverstein’s one-act plays and a work by Eugene Ionesco perhaps appropriately titled, “A Hell of a Mess.”
The terrorists’ most damaging weapon is not box-cutter knives or bombs, but fear — or as an earlier president once put it, fear itself.