Broadway in New York is awakening after the pandemic

Operations on New York’s Broadway are scheduled to resume at the end of September. The actor and dancer Preston Mui is one of thousands who hope their American fairy tale will finally continue.

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Preston Mui has to lose weight to fit back into his costumes. “I weigh every gram of food I eat,” he says, “it’s so tragic!” He laughs like every time he says something unpleasant. For example from the audition back then, with a freshly sprained ankle after a night flight. Clench your teeth, let nothing show, smile. “I didn’t want pity.” Mui got the role. His childhood dream of performing on Broadway finally came true – at the age of 37. That was in winter 2019.

Preston Mui is a dancer, but in recent months he has had more opportunities to exchange recipes with his mother than to practice new choreographies. For his profession, the lifestyle of a pandemic – sitting around on the sofa and baking banana bread – was particularly incompatible with the performance his body now has to perform on stage again.

Broadway in New York will officially reopen on September 14th after an 18-month hiatus. For the first time in its history, the world’s most famous theater district stood still for so long. Two world wars, two major economic crises and dozens of snowstorms almost, but never completely brought the theater to a standstill. Only twice did nothing work: in 2007 a strike by stage workers paralyzed Broadway for 19 days, and in 2012 a hurricane forced a two-day interruption. That was all – before the historic spring of 2020.

It is said that Broadway shines so brightly that you can see it from space. With the outbreak of the pandemic, the lights went out. 100,000 people lost their jobs: actresses, technicians, ticket sellers, cloakrooms, marketing people, restaurateurs, hoteliers and souvenir sellers.

Preston Muy wears a beige and white striped oversized jacket and a wide black culottes. The outfit should stand out a bit and hide the love handles a bit. He stands in front of the Richard Rogers Theater near Times Square and looks wistfully at the locked door. He performed here for the last time on the evening of March 11, 2020; it was his sixth week in the ensemble. “I had just started to feel safe, just started to enjoy the happiness of being there.”

One day later, the email came from his employer: Stay at home, the stage will remain closed for the time being. Preston Mui believed the interruption would only last a few days or weeks at the most. As is well known, the show has to go on and on.

But it turned out differently. Mui flew from the east to the west coast, to his parents in San Francisco. He was still optimistic. He had packed for two weeks without realizing that he would be staying for several months. Mui settled in with his parents on the couch in the living room. On the news, he saw the situation in New York keep getting worse. How thousands of people died. Mui worried about the others and had worries of his own.

The actor had to live on 100 francs of unemployment benefits a week, but at least he was able to keep his health insurance. His savings trickled into his vacant New York apartment; he hadn’t even set it up yet. Many of his colleagues from the theater could no longer afford the expensive rents. They had to give up their apartments, and some of them changed jobs right away. Others gave online classes in acting, dancing, singing. Mui also choreographed two pieces about Zoom in Zoom aesthetics – each of the cast members trapped in their little square.

Nothing symbolized the doom and gloom during the pandemic more impressively than the emptiness on Broadway. No New Yorker could have imagined this picture. “I was walking through Times Square today, and there were two other people,” friends texted each other. Local tourists now populate Times Square on nice days. It’s a bright place, long adopted by brands like McDonalds, Starbucks, Walt Disney and M & Ms. Even monks force themselves here as traders, handing you a symbol of peace that looks like a coin. All New Yorkers say they hate Times Square. It is the only place in town that the locals willingly leave to tourists.

Broadway was a billion dollar business before the pandemic. In the 2018/19 season, 15 million people attended a show. The cheapest ticket for “Hamilton” was $ 200, the most expensive several thousand. The rules according to which the game is played here are very simple: Either a show meets the taste of the masses – or it goes under. “The Phantom of the Opera” has been running here since 1988. What works is preserved.

There is actually no subsidized theater in the USA. But with the pandemic, Broadway homes are receiving money from the state for the first time in history. 44 task forces are busy getting the spectacle up and running again. The actors have meanwhile started rehearsing. Preston is now sitting at a plastic table and is hungry. You could buy gummy sandwiches in the little shop. But Mui only orders a bottle of mineral water.

His first memory of Broadway: As he approaches the theater entrance in a queue under the many lightbulbs on a canopy, ticket in hand. That was 1992 and he was ten years old. His mother had booked the flight from San Francisco to New York, and they saw “Les Misérables” and “Guys and Dolls” together. Mui says: “I was blown away” – it blew him away. That American enthusiasm resonates in his voice. “That pretty much sealed the deal” – that made the matter clear. He was young enough to be deeply moved by the play and old enough to know: “I want to perform on Broadway.”

Mui had danced and sung before visiting New York. But now it was no longer a hobby, but the beginning of a career. “The experience drove me forward.” He got a place at a renowned art school and specialized in dance. Jobs as a background dancer for film, television and concerts followed. “I danced behind the stars.” Soon he was choreographing himself. However, he moved to Los Angeles, in the direction of Hollywood instead of Broadway.

Mui had repeatedly auditioned for musical roles, ten times for the blockbuster “Wicked” alone. But he only got rejections. He suspects that this had something to do with his appearance: His parents are originally from China, so he is «Asian-American». Nobody in Wicked or Chicago or the Book of Mormon looked like him.

Broadway is also called “The Great White Way” because it was one of the first streets in the USA to have electric light in the 1890s. Today the term sarcastic is used to mean that white men are in power here. While there may be more and more Afro-Americans on stage, white people still control the business: as producers, investors, managers.

“Hamilton,” written by a Puerto Rican secondo, is an exception. Preston Mui saw the musical a few years ago in Los Angeles, performed by a local company. He was fascinated. Not just because he liked the production. «Here, a lot of visibly Asian-American people played roles that are not Asian-American. And I was like: what? ” So it worked after all.

He shifted his work from film and television to the stage. He trained his dance body and choreographed theater shows. He looked at as many pieces as he could, “to get inspiration again, to remind myself of what I had missed”. In a film you move from one “cut” to the next. Only in the theater do you go on “a completely emotional journey” with the audience.

And Mui did it: he danced for “Hamilton” with a sprained ankle and was cast anyway. “The tallest pedestal in Times Square,” he says. “Hamilton” has cleared the most important prizes, the tickets have been sold out for months since the premiere in 2015.

However, the rehearsals were tough in that pre-Covid winter 2020. Mui rehearsed the three-hour show in a short time, at least 30 dance and music numbers. It was only enough for a single rehearsal with the whole crew. Not only did he have to dance, but also know which costume to wear in which scene, when the right moment was to eat, drink or go to the toilet. “I also often stumbled over props.” That’s why the forced Covid break actually had something good for a new Broadway actor like him: the unique opportunity to practice with the ensemble for a whole month.

Now that Broadway is making its comeback, Preston Mui is making another attempt. It should be a marathon: with eight performances a week and just two vacation weeks a year. At some point he would like to fill a bigger role. But he would even rather create his own show. Something about the Asian American experience. “Or a story that is so universal that people of all skin colors can play on it.” This is Preston Mui’s American dream.

This article comes from the NZZ folio on the subject of “Brave New World” (published on September 6, 2021). You can order this issue individually or subscribe to the NZZ Folio.

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