Bruce Springsteen takes on Broadway with personal gigs

Bruce Springsteen is swapping sweaty stadium shows for something completely different: a stint on Broadway, inspired by Barack Obama.

Bruce Springsteen is swapping staduim shows for Broadway.

He is the supreme being of the stadium concert who sweats out anthems about working-class New Jersey in marathon three or four-hour sets before tens of thousands of devoted followers.

Now Bruce Springsteen is about to do something completely different. He is going to be on Broadway.

“With one or two exceptions, the 960 seats of the Walter Kerr Theatre is probably the smallest venue I’ve played in the last 40 years,” he said, in a statement released by the Broadway company Jujamcyn that bagged “the Boss” for its venue.

They do not anticipate much trouble in filling the seats. It will take Springsteen at least a month to have played before as many fans as he would normally entertain in a single night. To cope with the expected rush, seats were offered through an online platform intended to discourage scalping - reselling tickets at inflated prices. Nevertheless, the entire run has sold out and tickets are already being resold on trading sites at about $US1,000 each.

The concerts will be based, loosely, on a performance that Springsteen, 68, gave in January for President Obama and his family as part of a farewell party for White House staff. He had just published an autobiography and the set list was mixed with life stories.

It set off a desire “to do some shows that were as personal and as intimate as possible,” he said. “I chose Broadway for this project because it has the beautiful old theatres which seemed like the right setting for what I have in mind.”

The show, which begins on Tuesday and runs until February, is also intended as a return, of sorts, to the performances he gave at the beginning of his career in Greenwich Village.

Springsteen had arrived on the bus from New Jersey in 1972, a borrowed guitar slung over his shoulder, to play before John Hammond, the Columbia record producer who discovered Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. “At that moment, John Hammond, one of the greatest ‘A and R’ producers of our time, was seeing idiots off the street,” he said in a recent interview on National Public Radio.

Springsteen, despite suffering “one of the biggest weenie shrinkers of all time”, managed to keep his composure and sang It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City, which persuaded Hammond.

Nearly half a century later, Springsteen has said his Broadway debut will be “the closest thing to what I would have done . . . in 1973”. He told The New York Times: “Really, John Hammond would love this show.”

He said that Sting, a friend, had written a traditional Broadway musical, “but it’s not something I could do”.

The show would provide the most regular employment of his career, he added, working five days a week.

“This is my first real job,” he said.

- The Times