How BROADWAY BECAME BROADWAY

WHEN I STARTED AS A DRAMA CRITIC IN 1980, I LEARNED HOW LITTLE I KNEW ABOUT HOW THE THEATER BUSINESS ACTUALLY WORKS.

- By Frank Rich

A STAGESTRUCK ADOLESCENT growing up in Washington, D.C., I had the same romantic view of Broadway from afar that every kid like me did back then—and maybe still does. A fantasy patched together from books (in my case, Moss Hart's Act One), movies (All About Eve), and, with luck, family holiday trips to the big city to see a Big Broadway Smash. The Theater District I encountered when I moved to New York in the 1970s did not match that fairy tale. The neighborhood was blighted by prostitution, porn, and drugs; the city was facing bankruptcy; and suburbanites and tourists were shunning the sordid hellscape depicted in movies like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. Forty-second Street was now the Deuce. A Times Square marquee was more likely to herald Deep Throat than The Pajama Game.

In the 1960s, my parents thought nothing of letting me roam those same streets unaccompanied to take in the Camel billboard blowing smoke rings, the Automat, the extant movie palaces, and the pinball arcades. By the time I went to work at the New York Times as a drama critic in the early 1980s, the streets were so treacherous that the paper briefly hired a shuttle bus to pick up its commuting employees nightly from its old headquarters on 43rd Street to spare them the sleaze of the adjacent Hotel Carter, a hotbed of vice. The bus would then dump its passengers at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where a fresh scrum of Eighth Avenue muggers and drug addicts was lying in wait.