I finally got around to watching the Springsteen on Broadway show on Netflix over the weekend... and I'm still recovering.
I've seen The Boss play live a number of times, but it's always been with the E Street Band in a stadium, so I wasn't sure how an acoustic one man show on a huge Broadway stage would go down. Bruce is a natural performer though and an excellent writer, so the autobiographical monologues merged well with a carefully selected setlist of hits and surprises. It was very funny in places, particularly the running joke about what a fraud he is - a man who's made his fame writing about working class heroes who's never held a steady job in his life.
I wasn't prepared for how emotional it would be though. Regularly readers of this blog will know that I weep buckets at the drop of a hat these days (hence why I lost that job in the college graduations department), and Bruce has been my favourite performer since I was a teenager... but I'd read his autobiography and knew most of the stories. Surely I could keep my mascara dry?
However, when he talked about his childhood, when he talked about returning to his old home to find the tree outside his old house no longer there, when he talked about losing Clarence... I was in pieces. Even more so when he spoke about his relationship with his father, about their eventual reconciliation on the eve of Bruce himself becoming a father, and about how when he was younger he had not been able to properly understand his father's depression. A new box of tissues was required.
"We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way and some transcendence."
(In case anybody is wondering, The Hot 100 Countdown will return in a couple of weeks. I have a good reason.)
I've not seen the concert but got the cd a week or so before Christmas and when I played it I found that I had watery eyes and a lump in my throat during listening, must have been coming down with something. I loved it all of it apart from the version of Born In The USA which didn't do anything for me. I thought at the time, I'm glad I got this but it won't be something I will play that often, however I have listed to it quite a few times since.
ReplyDeleteThe story about the tree, man, that get's me every time!
I've never made it through a Springsteen gig without crying at least once. Like you, tears flow far more freely for me these days, so I fully expect to be in floods when I watch On Broadway.
ReplyDeleteJust as well you were watching it at home really, with access to plenty of tissues. Is it that we reach a pivot point when we perhaps recognise we are now in the second half of our lives and start to reflect a lot more rather than look forward. Been happening to me as well of late.
ReplyDeleteHaven't watched it yet on Netflix so will do so soon.
Bingo, Alyson. I cried at Mary Poppins Returns. Let me repeat that... Mary Poppins Returns. Disgusting.
ReplyDeleteI cried at Mary Poppins returns too, Brian. And I haven't even seen it.
DeleteI have just cried my eyes out at a couple of scenarios in tonight's episode of '24 Hours in A&E'. I am so glad I'm in such good company!
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