All Night All Day, or How I Debuted on Broadway

This weekend, a group of local theater artists created a 24-hour variety show on Broadway. By Broadway, I don’t mean in one of the big Broadway theaters. I mean on Broadway the street. Occupy Broadway, in solidarity with the NYC GA, opened the event on the red steps on Times Square, and then moved north to 50^th and Broadway – Paramount Plaza, a private-public park that they renamed “People’s Performance Plaza.” They describe themselves in their manifesto:

“We join in solidarity with fellow occupiers from Tahrir Square to Davis, California by challenging this restriction on access to the public commons [described earlier as private owners of public spaces reneging on their obligations to keep the spaces constantly open to public use] and by extension to democracy itself. Our creative resistance is using public space to create an exciting mix with public performances, art, and music in vacant, lifeless corporate, bonus plazas. Through such art, New York artists re-imagine their city as a work of art, rather than a shopping mall. With capitalism gone amuck, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are demonstrating another, more joyful way of living.”

And joyful it was. When I arrived, at around 1 in the afternoon, they were in kind of a lull, and the performance space was occupied by a discussion about the financial issues that have created the Movement.

But, the organizers found a way to pick back up the performative energy by bringing back “dramatic karaoke” from the wee hours of the morning (the event occurred from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday). Dramatic karaoke is when somebody recites, as if they were a dramatic monologue, song lyrics. I volunteered, and did the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” Unfortunately, I can only do one thing at a time, so I didn’t record my Broadway debut. But here’s OWS photographer Eric doing “Sympathy for the Devil”!

Dramatic karaoke was one of the staples of the event, as well as readings of the First Amendment every hour on the hour.

There was also real singing, monologues, storytelling, short scenes, and dance. It was a variety show of the first degree. But probably one of the most telling things I heard there was the story of Big Bank: The Musical. Not the story of what happens in the musical, although that’s certainly fun, but the story of how the musical came to be and where it’s at now, which is looking for funding. The problem with doing even a light-hearted musical about a Big Bad Bank that takes sick pleasure in foreclosing on people is that “producers like banks.” Later that evening I was speaking to a young man named Raymond who told me that he feels that we are taught a shallow, unfulfilling lifestyle by corporate America in which we value material things above human affection. If what Adam Rapp of Big Bank says about producers is correct, then the musicals and plays happening in doors on Broadway are a part of the problem that Raymond sees. The street performance of Occupy Broadway offers an interesting alternative to that: it’s Off-Off-Broadway on Broadway.