One of the pleasures of Bruce Springsteen’s latest phase, as a one-man Broadway solo act, is his self-deprecation, the sheepish allowance that he is, for all his sincerity, at least partly a performance—a projection of the people he loved and knew growing up. He tells their story even while rock stardom and a taste for “the pink Cadillac” have led him to an entirely different material life. Cribbing from his memoir, “Born to Run,” he admits that he has written in the voice of a Jersey working man, yet he’s never really held a job. He sang lonely epics about the Turnpike and the Parkway before he ever bothered to get a driver’s license. The working man’s clothes that he wears onstage are his father’s. His gig on Broadway, he says, is the first real “job” he’s ever had. It’s half joke, half honest admission.
More coverage of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy from The New Yorker.
Springsteen has done his Broadway show, a tightly scripted narrative in words and song, a hundred and forty-six times, but, on Tuesday night, shaken by the scenes and sounds and images coming from the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, he briefly abandoned his script. He spoke in the voice of an American outraged, disgusted, bewildered by what is happening in his own country. Standing on a bare stage and under a simple spotlight, he said,
And, with that, Springsteen sang “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Here he is performing it at home: