Broadway Then and Now

Can I just start by saying, this brilliantly lighted street to the left here isn't the Broadway that I knew when I was young!

Oh, yeah, the Great White Way, as they used to call it, had plenty of lights. But they weren't nearly as bright as they are now. It's just amazing how brilliant and colorful it is. It's probably brighter at night than it is sometimes during the day.

This first shot here is the view looking down toward 42nd Street from around West 46th Street. These pictures were all taken at about 10:30PM. Not all of the shows were out by then. We'd had a little rain that evening, but it didn't chase away the tourists, my husband and I included.

I spent several years way back in my youth trying to break into Broadway as a dancer. "A Chorus Line" had just made it big and the chorus seemed the easiest way to get in. I became a serious groupie of the show. I saw it some 30 times in standing room. In those days, though, standing room only cost $5, which was about the price of a movie. And you could buy your ticket ahead of time at some theatres. It was a cheap way to see a show and I saw a lot of them in standing room back then. And for my birthday, my grandfather would take me to Sardi's, the ancient watering hole of theatricals.


That was before Disney moved in. Now... some folks don't like the "Disney-fication" of 42nd Street. But I reckon most of those folks weren't regularly taken for a prostitute in broad daylight while on their way to dance class. Or if they were, they obviously didn't mind.

The regular Broadway con artists, mind you, knew you by your dance bag and generally ignored you. You were just part of the general scene.

My main dance studio was (as the song in "A Chorus Line" says) up a steep and narrow stairway... right over a taxi-dance joint. Which wasn't (ahem) a "real" taxi-dance joint, if you get my drift. One of the dance teachers used to tell us to stamp on the floor to wake up the girls downstairs. I knew I had become a "real" Broadway Baby on the day I came down from a dance class in the middle of the day and executed a perfect leap over a drunk who had passed out on the bottom step. Ah, the good old days. LOL


That's all changed now, though. Now they've closed down a couple of blocks to traffic on half of Broadway and they've got outside sitting areas like the one to the left. There are cute little evergreen potted plants as accents for a red and white bistro set-up.

So tourists can sit down and relax for a bit and watch the passersby pass by. This shot is taken just a few steps away from where I was first asked "How much?" as a young innocent. Times have definitely changed.

Dance has changed too. In my day we were expected to learn tap, jazz, and ballet. Hip hop came in basically after I went out. LOL Acrobatics was considered a specialty that you generally didn't need. No one was ever expected to do the difficult stuff those kids do on "So You Think You Can Dance." And I would never even have considered trying to be a dancer if they had.

I bonded with a small group of other dancers at the dance studio. And on Saturday nights after a late afternoon class we would go to the Tkts Booth on West 47th Street and get half priced tickets for a show. Of course it was usually a musical. We never went dancing for some reason. I guess because we'd already done plenty of that. It was more fun to go to some cheap place to eat and then see a show.


The Tkts Booth is still on West 47th Street. That's something that hasn't changed. But they've given it a new home. The picture to the left is of the red step roof over the Tkts Booth. It's a cool place to stop at night and take pictures.

How did they ever come up with the idea of making the roof into lit stairs??? I know stairs have a long history on Broadway, starting with Ziegfeld perhaps. But stairs as a roof??? LOL Anyway, it works. And it's very striking.

The picture below is of those same red stairs from the side. The actual place where you buy your tickets is under the highest part of the stairs on the outside. My husband and I haven't bought tickets there in a long time as we've gotten older and our schedules have gotten tighter. We generally don't have time to stand on a long line the same day and see what's available. But we're hoping to go there in the next week or so on a gift certificate a couple of friends gave us for Tkts. It's been a long time. But I like the new look an awful lot!

As for me, I never made it on Broadway. Not only was I not a good enough dancer, I wasn't a good type either... which is actually worse. Looking back on it, I think the best way for me to go would have been the nightclub route, where you could invent your own act. But I've always loved stories, so cabaret is kind of boring to me.

Broadway's changed in other ways as well. It likes to do a lot of revivals now, because it costs so much to put on a show. Producers want a sure thing and a lot of theatre goers are family oriented out-of-towners looking for a major event that they've already heard of. Disney often has several shows running on Broadway based on their films. And dance has returned to Broadway, though as I said in a more demanding form.

Generally speaking Broadway is not held in as high a regard as it once was. I've heard fans of American Idol diss a contestant by saying they'd only be good enough for Broadway. But... it still gives me a buzz.

Are there any other Broadway Babies out there???