Column: Michael Riedel's latest book 'Singular Sensation' is about Broadway in the '90s — the decade when the Great White Way took on a life of its own

In his revelatory first book about Broadway in the 1970s and ‘80s, “Razzle Dazzle,” the writer Michael Riedel made a typically immodest claim: Broadway saved New York City. And in Riedel’s sequel, “Singular Sensation,” Broadway gets to enjoy its just rewards. And, boy oh boy, does it have fun.

When Riedel, the longtime New York Post columnist, picks up the mantle in 1991, royalties from worldwide productions of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” are filling Andrew Lloyd Webber’s coffers with so much cash, he barely knows what to do with all that money. So why not take an intimate story about a faded movie star and her impecunious gigolo and turn it into a gilded mega-musical with a flying mansion and enough warring divas to fill any swimming pool on Sunset Boulevard?

Hey, why worry that none of that stuff was really needed in any palpable artistic sense? Did not “Miss Saigon” wow ‘em with a helicopter? Lloyd Webber had to compete with Cameron Mackintosh. In the 1990s, Broadway still was actual show-business and not a fight for moral righteousness.

But Lloyd Webber’s fin de si 1/4 u00e8cle indulgences signal an end in Riedel’s mind to the British dominance of the musical theater through such properties as “Cats,” “Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

Riedel’s new narrative, covering the era through Sept. 11, 2001, argues that the 1990s was the decade when American figures started to reclaim Broadway from all those whiskers, masks and barricades and that, in doing so, they announced themselves with substance and artistic invention.

A young man named Jonathan Larson sat in his East Village apartment and dreamed up “Rent.” Disney won the lottery by taking a risk on an avant-garde creative named Julie Taymor and handing her both Elton John and an assignment to take an animated cartoon called “The Lion King” and bring families back to Broadway. (She did, although it nearly went very wrong.) And a writer named Tony Kushner had a feverish dream about an angel, followed the death of a friend from AIDS.

Not only did Kushner write “Angels in America,” he actually got it to Broadway, buoyed by the kingmaking power of the New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, writing in a happier era for critics. You know, back when readers would still search hungrily for a lucid newsprint review and had neither Facebook walls nor identity politics as easy modes of counter-attack.

Of course, these American producers were benefitting from all the rehab done by the Brits on a hitherto-arcane industry that, by the 1990s, was generating levels of profit for its hits that eclipsed most Hollywood grosses. And I’d argue that the uber-narrative of Broadway in the 1990s was not so much a switch in power across the Atlantic, although that was true, but a realization that, in the theater, there was money in political substance, emotional heft and in paying attention to a new generation with a whole lot of disposable income but little taste for tired revivals starring Robert Goulet or Carol Channing.

By the 1990s, the island of Manhattan was being colonized by Starbucks, and Brooklyn was filling up with baristas and brand-name chefs. All those urban hipsters, terrified of losing the street cred they cultivated at the private universities that formed their ideas, needed shows that fulfilled their anti-suburban sense of selves. And many of them had the money to buy the tickets.

Now a talk-radio host on New York’s 710 WOR-AM, Riedel was always an anomaly among Broadway observers and that is now truer than ever.

For one thing, he has a sense of humor, a relief when the American theater is constantly self-flagellating or attacking its own or claiming to know far more than its audience. For another, he leans moderately to the right, whereas pretty much the entire theater industry either leans far to the irony-free left, or has pivoted there in public for its own self-preservation.

Plenty of the big-name creatives in his story rake in the royalties (or fight for their own pieces of the action) even as they affect disinterest in such tacky notions as branding or business. But Riedel sees through all that and pricks plenty of elite, puffed-up balloons. You don’t have to agree with him to enjoy the spectacle on the page.

Freed from the pressure of being a critic or reporter of record, Riedel was able to write a must-read Broadway column in the 1990s. It worked mostly because its creator had figured out that most actors had little to say and that show-publicists peddled cliched narratives merely designed to juice ticket sales. The publicists traded access to Broadway stars for friendly stories — it was ever thus in the entertainment business — and most star-struck journalists succumbed, if only out of terror of being scooped by the Times.

But Riedel had the sources, especially among the powerful theater owners and group bookers who tend to know everything, to do his own workarounds. Better yet, he realized that the producers were far more interesting subjects that the people whose work they produced. Well, with the exception of Mel Brooks and Edward Albee, the sweet-and-sour of the great Broadway take-out of the 1990s, and both wiser and funnier than most anyone.

Those producers were a chatty crew back then, invariably willing to sell a rival down the river by revealing just how few tickets they’d really sold in advance, as distinct from having reported as sold in Variety. Riedel loves producers (me too; they’re fun) and his book is filled with their antics, be that the chutzpah of a married couple from New Jersey named Fran and Barry Weissler, who made a billion-dollar killing with the low-cost “Chicago”; the rise of the savvy Thomas Schumacher, who made a fortune for the suits at Disney; or the machinations of a Canadian mogul named Garth Drabinsky, who kept one set of books for his investors and another to fret over when he couldn’t sleep. He went to jail, and I don’t mean as in the last-but-one scene of “The Producers.”

Of course, all of this Riedel juice now feels like nectar from a distant planet, as Riedel acknowledges in his post-pandemic introduction. Broadway is shuttered, the producers are nursing their losses in the Hamptons, the cool kids have all decamped for their parents’ old place Upstate and when Broadway comes back, it is not liked to do so with gilded mansions all around.

Nope. The word won’t be triumph but recovery. Riedel is reporting here on something that has gone for good. Or rather ill.

“Singular Sensation” ends with the bittersweet story of Sept. 11. Here was Broadway’s finest hour. Incredibly, the Great White Way was back in business by Sept. 13 at the behest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. You know, the old Giuliani, the one that commanded respect.

People needed to be close together and Broadway rose to the task. Now, with its ancient theaters and need for crowds, it finds itself a potential super-spreading event. No wonder the industry has decided to hibernate.

But it remains the talisman.

New York, and maybe even America, won’t feel normal again until Broadway shows return. That will be a night.

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“Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway” by Michael Riedel is published by Simon and Schuster; Nov. 2020, $28.

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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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