The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (29 page)

At the same time, B.S.’s brother Joe, along with a group of investors, built the International Casino on the northern corner of the old Olympia site. The International was the last word in refinement, luxe, and swank. Here is how a reporter described the opening, in September 1937: “Hollywood on Broadway—a glittering gallimaufry of chromium and glass, crystal fountains, sliding doors, revolving stages, staircases which descend from heaven (when they work), a stainless steel escalator and a three-story spiral bar, where you can drink your way up and fall your way down, or vice versa, as befits your mood.”
Life
magazine did one of its “
Life
Goes to a Party” series about the International soon after it opened, and the author noted, with what seems admirable candor for a family magazine, that “most people go to the International Casino to see a hundred-odd youngish girls in various states of undress.” The article’s opening photo spread shows a glistening chrome escalator with a tuxedoed headwaiter standing at the top, and then half a dozen beauties in two-piece bathing suits balancing spinning plates on long rods. Inside,
Life
offered pictures of bathing beauties descending from the ceiling in an elaborate trapezelike contraption and another riding bareback on a revolving stuffed horse.

And then, of course, this swanky, sexy, air-conditioned culture crumbled away just as surely as Hammerstein’s opulent Gilded Age culture had done before it. The Bond’s Clothing store booted out the nightclub in the forties, and in the sixties the New Criterion became just another movie theater (though it never stooped to porno). Times Square embarked on its long, slow slide into irrelevance and decay. B.S. and Joe Moss’s son sold the parcel in 1968, and then
his
son, Charles, bought it back ten years later. By that time, the block was a huddle of tacky variety stores. The parcel seemed about as valuable as it had when Oscar Hammerstein bought it in 1893. And then, suddenly, by the mid-eighties, with the building boom provoked by the new zoning laws, property along Broadway was worth a very great deal. Moss held out for a long time. He didn’t want another office building to go up where the New Criterion and the International Casino had stood—although it is also true that many of his proposed deals fell through. And when he finally agreed to lease the property to Toys “R” Us, he felt that he had found a tenant worthy of his family’s history.

Had he? Not exactly. All those other Times Squares, the Times Square of the Olympia and the New Criterion and the International, catered to a cosmopolitan taste, a taste for elegance and nocturnal drama, the drama of grand settings and fine clothing and unpredictable experience. They were for grown-ups seeking a grown-up fantasy. And it is that grown-up sense of fantasy, the fantasy of the spiral bar and the umpteen tiers of box seats rising into the upper air, that has vanished from the spanking-new Times Square. There is fantasy aplenty, at Madame Tussaud’s and the ESPN Zone and the Hershey’s candy store; but not for grown-ups. The drama of open-ended experience still lives on the streets; but indoors, fun has been ingeniously, minutely, engineered. Here is the difference between popular culture and mass culture. For a global entertainment firm like Toys “R” Us, Times Square is now a “site,” a branding opportunity, a marketing strategy. It has, amid these vast calculations, been reduced in size and stature. And its particularity has been diminished as well: Toys “R” Us’s very presence makes Times Square more like the other places where Toys “R” Us is present. The Ferris wheel is site-specific “appliqué,” to use Michael Sarkin’s language.

How can you not feel ambivalent about the Toys “R” Us flagship store? To repudiate it is to repudiate mass culture itself, with all its vitality and its electric fantasies and its relentless wish to entertain. To embrace it is to embrace mass culture, with its numbing sensationalism, its two-dimensionality, its gigantism. That Ferris wheel is probably the biggest, and cheapest, attraction in Times Square, but it’s also a reminder of a Ferris wheel that never got built—the one at the heart of the City at 42nd Street project, stillborn in 1980. This was the plan that Mayor Ed Koch dismissed by saying, “People do not come to midtown Manhattan to take a ride on some machine.” The Ferris wheel, to an echt New Yorker like Koch, was strictly Disneyland. And that ride, which bore so heavy a symbolic burden, was an educational device designed to evoke the verticality of the city, its infinitely stratified texture. This one is a marketing device intended to spread out a giant store’s wares from basement to ceiling.

You don’t have to be a dogmatic critic of corporate culture to find the Toys “R” Us store at least faintly sinister; you just have to feel the bombardment of the cheerful booming music and the video monitors and the elevators in the Barbie house and the giant, looming Monopoly board, all of it a minutely orchestrated simulation of the spontaneous life of the place whose brand identity it is so ingeniously exploiting. An adult of only moderately melodramatic sensibility might contemplate the store with the apocalyptic alarm that the new generation of urban critics brings to shopping malls and planned communities. On one particularly insanely crowded day, I saw a friend who had come to buy a Lego for his nephew; he clutched at me like a drowning man in the wild eddy of the crowd and shouted, “It’s hell!” before lurching onward to a cash register.

But of course, the store wasn’t for him; it was for kids. Children are now in the picture in a way they were not before; the functional unit of popular entertainment is no longer “the grown-up,” but “the family.” Times Square, even more than Las Vegas, has surrendered to the hegemony of the family. I saw Toys “R” Us through Alex’s eyes. He and I generally treated it as an amusement park, though the experience sometimes included the purchase of a game for Alex’s GameCube system (which the supremely efficient Toys “R” Us had in stock at Christmastime when every other toy store was out). Once we made the mistake of coming on the Saturday afternoon before Easter, which a salesperson informed us was the second busiest day of the year. We wandered through the pulsing—but not shoving—crowd, pulled ever forward from one sales area to the next, little recking that the “racetrack format” was working its magic on us.

I noticed that about half the customers were black or Hispanic; this was, after all, an inexpensive store with free entertainment, and thus a fulfillment of those democratic traditions to which Bruce Ratner had raised a metaphorical glass. We came to a crowd gathered around a table; it was the display for Rumble Robots, little battery-operated fighting machines. Teams of green bots and red bots were squaring off against each other, with kids clutching controllers on either side. The bout was managed by two cool young guys in black hooded capes—the Rumble Masters. Alex would not leave. Finally he took over a controller for a green bot. And the Rumble Master shouted, “Three . . . two . . . one . . . Rummmble!” It was an eleven-year-old peak experience.

We came back again two weeks later—and the Rumble Robots were gone, as were all the permanent-looking fixtures in the department. Here was capitalism in the raw: all that is solid melts into air. Now an entirely new set of fixtures had been installed to display Sega electronic games. The sales assistant at the display was Deryck Clarke, a thirty-nine-year-old black hipster who plays the French horn in Broadway musicals. He wore a ribbon that said, “I speak German.” Clarke was a New Yorker, and he said, “When I was in school I used to come down here with my homies to play the arcades. I was the Donkey Kong wizard.” Now he had a five-year-old son. I asked him if he regretted the demise of the Times Square he knew as a teenager. “Not really,” he said. “It was sort of menacing. At this stage in my life, I want a place that I can take my family.”

17.

PLAYS “R” US

IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, I went with my wife and parents to see August Wilson’s play
King Hedley II,
at the Virginia Theatre on West 52nd Street. The play was set in 1985—Ronald Reagan’s America—and the action took place in the scraggly backyard of a street of row houses in a barely-getting-along urban neighborhood. A half-demolished brick wall at the back of the stage formed an enclosure separating the world of the characters, black people who were no longer young and no longer hopeful, from the prosperous, front-yard world familiar to the audience. No one was going anywhere; and the ironically named King Hedley and his neighbors delivered furious monologues about the cruelty of life in Reagan’s morning-in-America world, while also not failing to ensure their own inevitable failure, and even destruction. Wilson was also, of course, revealing to his audience the backyard world of embitterment and selfimmolation from which they would normally be shielded. Wilson’s incantatory language apparently hit its mark: At the intermission, my father turned to me and said, “They all seem very angry.”

Aristotle hypothesized that the theater arts permit the viewer to experience the catharsis that comes of feeling powerful emotions not normally encountered in daily life. Aristotle was talking about terror and pity, and probably that serves perfectly well to encompass the world of a play like King Hedley II, or Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, or O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
or any number of the serious and unsettling plays, whether originals or revivals, that have been mounted on Broadway in recent years. These works of theater provide the moral and intellectual anchor of Times Square. The critics of the new Times Square complain that the “unsettling experiences”—experiences of the unpredictable, the incongruous, the unmannerly—central to urban life have been evacuated from this all-too-calculated global crossroads. They’re right; and yet those disturbing experiences are still available inside the world of the theater.
King Hedley II
may not have constituted a cathartic experience for my father, but at the very least, it provoked a moment of troubled recognition— “They all seem very angry.”

It is patent that theater doesn’t “matter” in American culture; it’s scarcely mattered in half a century. But it matters greatly in Times Square, and not only economically. The illusionistic worlds inside the theaters offer relief from, and an alternative to, the illusionistic world of Times Square itself. They are spaces carved out from Times Square’s increasingly totalized environment. Some of them offer themselves as contrasts to, or subversions of, that environment. (One of the two main characters of
Topdog/Underdog
makes a living, when all else fails, playing three-card monte, presumably not far from the theater.) To emerge from these plays is to carry with you a memory, or perhaps just an image, of something that will not be assimilated into the glossy world of Broadway, just as King Hedley and his friends cannot be assimilated into Ronald Reagan’s America.

Of course, most of these illusionistic worlds aren’t meant to be disturbing in the least. They’re meant to be—even if in fact they’re often not—delightful, sentimental, splashy, and sparkling, just as they have always been on Broadway. Frothy escapism is the bread and butter of Broadway. Take a musical like
42nd Street,
for example. Just as the 1933 movie muted the bitter misanthropy of the 1932 novel, so the play—itself a revival of a David Merrick production from the sixties—gentles the Depression-era desperation of the movie. The kids who find a dime on the street and sing “We’re in the Money” are urchins; but a moment later they’re whisked away and the cast emerges in the gold spangles of the children’s fantasy. Julian Marsh, the madly driven director, is here a lonely but lovable curmudgeon. Nick Murphy’s gangsters may be naughty and gaudy, but they’re hardly dangerous. And Peggy Sawyer tramples no toes on her way to the top. The show is about pluck—Peggy’s, Julian’s, the chorus’s. And when, after two and a half hours of frantic hoofing, the cast capers its way madly, brilliantly, through a reprise, you think, “These kids are having the time of their life!” The life of a chorus girl was famously transitory and cruel; in the years before the First World War, George Bronson-Howard created an entire literature out of these beautiful, brittle, predatory creatures. But not here: the true subject of this
42nd Street
is the sheer wonderfulness of the theatrical well that is life on Broadway.

It is, of course, ever thus. There has always been an O’Neill, a Williams, a Miller; and a Ziegfeld, a Cohan, and, for that matter, a Minsky. Theater is the one aspect of Times Square that is immemorial: a play today looks like a play seventy years ago, and it is presented in the same space. You still need actors, musicians, writers, makeup artists, and ticket-takers, and you need producers willing to take a plunge on a risky project. Theater has remained the same, while everything around it, the context that is Times Square, and thus the context in which we experience it, has changed drastically.

This balance between the difficult and the accessible, the disorienting and the familiar, is an ancient pattern on Broadway. And yet the global firms that have come to dominate rental, food, television, and the like have now gained a foothold in theater as well. Two such firms, Disney and Clear Channel Communications, now constitute the largest forces on Broadway, the one as a producer, the other principally as a backer and a distributor, and both as theater owners. Their arrival in Times Square has been treated with a great deal of trepidation, though also some wary hope. Do they come as imperialists, or as rich uncles? The fear, generally unspoken, is that their advent will hasten the eclipse of the little voices of disturbance—the counterrealities of Broadway—and amplify yet more, as if it were needed, the bombast of the middlebrow musical. And then the Broadway theater, as it has been known for the last century, will linger only as Times Square’s vestigial organ.

THOMAS SCHUMACHER, THE HEAD of what is known inside Disney as the Buena Vista Theatrical Group, does not produce an impression that corresponds in any way with that notorious term of abuse “Disneyfication.” Schumacher is a slight fellow, still almost puppyishly enthusiastic at forty-four, with thick, floppy hair parted down the middle and dark, squarish spectacles. He looks like a chic, media-savvy French intellectual. The medium, in this regard, is the message, for Schumacher is the living emblem of a very different kind of Disney. And he is at pains to distinguish his role on Broadway, and Disney’s, from the epithet people so lightly toss around. “It’s ironic,” he said, when we first met, “that we use the term ‘Disneyfication’ when in fact the purest saving of what is the halcyon days of Times Square, the classic center of it, was actually the restoration of this theater.” “This theater” is, of course, the New Amsterdam, on 42nd Street just west of Broadway. We were seated at a little table in an oval lounge ringed with murals depicting the history of New York City, from the first encounter with the Indians up through 1903, when the theater was built. The lounge had been submerged beneath a foot or so of water when Disney took title to the New Amsterdam in 1994; now, like the rest of the theater, it had been lovingly restored. “That’s all we did,” Schumacher went on, with a good deal of heat. “That’s
all
we did.”

“Disney” is, of course, a very sensitive subject for Disney. The word has become shorthand for the spurious and the engineered and the uniform-but-with-a-little-local-appliqué. “We didn’t actually put up the McDonald’s next door,” Schumacher said, a bit wearily, “or the Chili’s down the street, or Madame Tussaud’s.” He evidently knew the critique by heart. When I mentioned that restoring the New Amsterdam was not quite all Disney did, since the company owns ABC and ESPN, both of which have an extremely gaudy presence on Broadway, Schumacher raised his eyebrows. That’s Disney-the-company; his Disney is the New Amsterdam Theatre and
The Lion King,
and
Beauty and the Beast,
and
Aida,
and the lineup of new shows he’s got in the works.

Whatever “Disney” is, Schumacher himself is plainly not an alien life form on Broadway. He
is
Broadway. When we had lunch one day at a popular theater spot on 44th Street, Margot Lion, the producer of the hit musical
Hairspray,
waylaid him to say how much she had missed him while he was out of town. The restaurant’s owner, another Broadway fixture, came by for a chat. Schumacher made a point of greeting a young woman at another table because she worked for him in some capacity, and he didn’t want her to be embarrassed lest he overhear an unguarded comment. (Disney is probably the largest employer on Broadway.) It was like dining with David Merrick, or David Belasco. And Schumacher has the bona fides. When he challenged me to think of a musical that wasn’t derived from an earlier work, I tried
Oklahoma!
“Completely adapted from
Green Grow the Lilacs,
” he fired back.
Hello, Dolly!
? “Based on both
The
Merchant of Yonkers
and
The Matchmaker.
” When I complimented him on his erudition, he grinned and said, “Yes, the term ‘show queen’ does come up.”

Schumacher is a San Franciscan who went to UCLA and then went into arts administration—first with a dance company, then with the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, then with the Mark Taper Forum. In 1987 he established the Los Angeles Festival of Arts, where he presented the English-language premiere of Peter Brook’s
Mahabharata,
a production to which he often proudly refers. He then went to work in Disney’s animation unit, which had just been revitalized by Michael Eisner. There he supervised the development and production of
Toy Story,
Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life,
and such more classically Disneyesque fare as
Tarzan
and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Schumacher is proud of his work, and at times he skirts self-parody as he provides a gloss on the Disney output worthy of a man who produced the
Mahabharata.
When I asked him why one Disney heroine, or leading man, is indistinguishable from another, he said, “It’s a retelling of the mono myth.” The mono myth? “Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose?” In other words, as Joseph Campbell would put it, the hero with a thousand faces. Schumacher is a Disney true believer; of course, you wouldn’t want to have a cynic turning out children’s movies.

After the movie of
Beauty and the Beast
was greeted, at least by some critics, as a better musical than anything then running on Broadway, Michael Eisner, himself a native New Yorker and something of a theater nut, decided to produce a theatrical version of the show as an experiment in a new medium for Disney’s animated characters. Disney executives came up with a noisy theme-park-style show that underwhelmed critics and delighted the plebes;
Beauty
has been running since 1994, making it, as of 2003, the seventh longest-running production in Broadway history. Schumacher makes a point of saying that he had nothing to do with the original production. I couldn’t actually bring myself to buy a ticket, but Alex, who was forced to go by virtue of a class trip, found it so profoundly beneath his twelve-year-old contempt that he could barely bring himself to describe it. “Stupid,” I think, was his chief impression.

Meanwhile, Disney was fixing up the New Amsterdam. Eisner now agreed to create a separate theatrical unit, and to run it he appointed Peter Schneider, the head of Disney Studios, and Schumacher.
The Lion
King
had been released just as the theatrical production of
Beauty and the
Beast
opened and was the logical choice for the next fable to grace the boards. There was no obvious reason why Disney wouldn’t produce another connect-the-dots show like
Beauty and the Beast.
But Disney wasn’t producing the new musical: Schneider and Schumacher were. And Schumacher, who was a man of taste but also a company man, found the place where personal taste and corporate strategy converged. He asked Julie Taymor, the sculptor and mask-maker—and then recent winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant—to direct the new play. Taymor was the least “corporate” of figures; she operated on the small, handmade scale of Very Off Broadway. And yet Schumacher recognized that her work, which revolved around myth and ritual, and nonverbal means of presentation—the whole Campbellian substratum—fit very well with the Disney oeuvre. He had, he says, tried to bring her play
Liberty’s Taken
to the Los Angeles Arts Festival, and followed her work thereafter. And so he asked; and Taymor agreed.

When I asked Schumacher about the choice of Taymor, he said, “There is this impression that it runs counter to what we do. People don’t realize that Salvador Dalí was in residence in the studio. People forget that Walt worked with Leopold Stokowski. People forget how arty
Fantasia
was. It has never seemed to me a choice outside of what we do as a company, but very much a choice outside of what people expected us to do.” Of course, people forget these things because they took place half a century ago. Among the current generation of Disney movies, some are ingenious and charming—though I wouldn’t have included
The Lion King
in that group—but most stay well within the Disney comfort zone, which often includes the downright cloying. (
Pocahontas,
anyone?)

There is, at any rate, no question that the choice of Taymor startled people who thought of Disney as the Standard Oil of children’s entertainment. The news coverage in the run-up to the show’s opening, in the fall of 1997, featured such arch conceits as Julie Taymor as Beauty, and Disney, “the many-tentacled house of mainstream,” as the Beast. Taymor conceded that many of her friends felt that she had, in fact, surrendered to the Beast. And of her new employer she said, “At first they worried that I was too far-out and I worried that they were Disney.” And yet, she found that whenever an aesthetic choice had to be made, the suits from Disney, including Eisner, pushed her to take the bolder and more experimental route. Schumacher says that Disney and Taymor signed a contract permitting either to walk away in case of artistic differences. And then, he says, “we never looked at the deal again.”