Springsteen: Behind the Mask
Something about the title Springsteen on Broadway doesn’t feel quite right.
It’s like Pavarotti headlining a five-year-old’s birthday party, or Van Gogh moonlighting as a condo decorator. I’m sure Muhammad Ali would have been a great club bouncer, but I think we can all agree he made a better world champion. When someone mentions Broadway, you think Cats or Les Misérables — exciting, yes, but in a champagne at the interval kind of way, not the heart-stopping, pants dropping, body rocking, booty shaking, earth quaking, history-making kind of exciting that Springsteen, and his E Street Band, have built their musical reputations on.
Of course, Springsteen didn’t bring his band on stage with him at any of the 236 performances, including this one filmed for Netflix. But, it will never not feel wrong to see the Boss finish a two-and-a-half-hour set (short by his regular standards) without even breaking a sweat — if his shirt’s not sticking to his chest by the time he’s done, then something’s not right.
The bare-faced brick, and vacant stage behind Springsteen’s increasingly wrinkled figure doesn’t scream Rock and Roll; it doesn’t even whisper it. Maybe it’s not fair to demand that a man who is now nearly 70-years-old, perform with the same electricity as his 25-year-old self. But it’s hard to ignore the wiry grey hairs that now line Springsteen’s cheeks. His voice, that blue-collar anger at the heart of his mythic sound, is necessarily lessened when he stands alone on stage. “Born in the USA” was never a solo cry, it was the chest thumping anguish of a disaffected people — the millions let down by a nation that promised so much and delivered so little. You can’t channel that kind of anger through a room of respectfully silent theatre goers — you need an electric guitar (a saxophone wouldn’t hurt, either), and a stadium of screaming Rock and Roll fans.
This was not the powerhouse exhibition we have come to love and expect from Springsteen, but something much more emotionally delicate, yet engaging nonetheless — and there was no denim in sight. This was never an attempt to capture the energy of his stadium tours, but a chance to expose the “magic trick” that made them possible. With a physical audience of less than a thousand people, Springsteen is able to engage with his own mythology in a way that his normal stage does not allow. “I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud,” Springsteen explains, “and so am I.” Had he begun his show in any other way, it would be easy to write it off like most celebrity memoirs as an interesting, yet essentially shallow, ego trip. But Springsteen appears wholly uninterested in preserving his all-American image. “Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had … absolutely no personal experience,” Springsteen reveals. In appropriately self-deprecating style, Springsteen allows us a look behind the curtain of his career.
And then he takes us meandering through his own history; from God fearing eight-year-old to Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. And for a brief moment, we get to feel like a part of it. Every relationship, every memory, every image, and every story colours the face we see in close-up on screen. It’s raw, and honest, and it’s all his — perhaps for the first time in his career. If you’ve read his 2016 autobiography, appropriately titled Born to Run, then you might have heard these stories before — but never like this. The show is populated by many of his most famous tracks, from “Thunder Road” to “Dancing in the Dark”, but Springsteen reaches deep into his musical catalogue for some of the most moving moments. The absent figure of his late father lingers over the performance, as it has seemingly lingered over his life. Springsteen narrates this alienation, and its eventual resolution, through tearful dialogue, but his aching rendition of “Long Time Coming” reveals more of his heart than these words ever could.
It may have cost them $20 million to get hold of, but Netflix really got it right with this one. Springsteen may no longer spit fire with the ferocity that he did 40 years ago, but over that time he has developed an introspective maturity that would rival Yoda. The Boss is still born to run, he’s just running a little slower these days.
