Michael Riedel has written a riveting history of the institution
Michael Riedel said it wasn’t a setup. But when I arrived at Sardi’s, Mr. Riedel, the theater columnist for the New York Post and the author of “Razzle Dazzle,” a riveting new history of Broadway, was sitting at the bar with Michael Coveney, a British theater critic.
They were discussing their craft and some of its best practitioners.
“Tynan was great,” Mr. Coveney said, referring to English theater critic Kenneth Tynan.
“He writes so eloquently about not being able to write,” Mr. Riedel agreed.
“Fifteen hundred words and it says everything,” Mr. Coveney said, sipping a martini.
After leaving the British writer at the bar, we made our way to Sardi’s dining room, famously populated with celebrity caricatures. Seated across the room having lunch (under his own caricature) was Robert Wankel, the president and co-CEO of the Shubert Organization, which “Razzle Dazzle” credits for making Broadway the economic engine it is today.
Mr. Wankel offered us a tour of the palatial apartment above Sardi’s where the dictatorial Jacob J. (J.J.) Shubert, one of three brothers from Syracuse, N.Y., ruled over Broadway. (His brother Lee lived in equally splendid circumstances directly across the street.)
Sardi’s itself serves almost as a character in the book, and these days as something of a metaphor for Broadway; the tables and booths as likely to be populated by tourists catching “The Lion King” on a holiday visit to the city as sophisticated theatergoing locals.
It also played a role in my education. My parents saw almost every show on Broadway during the ’50s and ’60s (my mother saved the Playbills to prove it), retreating to Sardi’s after each performance and taking me along on a few memorable occasions as a teenager.
Mr. Riedel, who grew up in upstate Geneseo, was smitten by Broadway from afar. What did it for him was that 1978 “I [heart] NY” TV marketing campaign.
“It changed the perception people had of New York,” from urban blight to the bright lights of Broadway; the city championed by the dancers from “A Chorus Line,” high-kicking to the strains of “I Love New York,” and Frank Langella, as Dracula, hissing, “Especially in the eeee-ven-ing.”
“One thing New York had that was still fun in the land of ‘Midnight Cowboy’ was Broadway,” Mr. Riedel remembered.
In “Razzle Dazzle,” he gives much of the credit for the revitalization of Times Square and beyond to Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld,two lawyers who ran the Shubert Organization starting in the early ’70s. They backed such hits as “A Chorus Line,” “Phantom of the Opera,” and “Dreamgirls.”
Critics have taken Mr. Riedel to task for his glorification of the attorneys. “I always thought Jerry was a little bitter at the end of his life,” Mr. Riedel said of Mr. Schoenfeld, whom he described as “a great friend and source.” “Giuliani and Disney got all the credit.”
Being the victim of criticism is a somewhat novel experience for the writer, since he’s usually the perpetrator, his columns known for their gleeful savagery.
He makes no apologies. “ Al Pacino not knowing his lines in a David Mamet play is a great thing to mine,” Mr. Riedel said. He was referring to a recent column where he pronounced the current production of “China Doll” starring Mr. Pacino “a f— disaster” and wrote that there were teleprompters embedded in the set.
“My favorite stories are the ones I can get at least three columns and a Sunday feature,” he joked.
We politely parted ways when it came to our opinions of the quality ofAndrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre, the composer and impresario an important character in “Razzle Dazzle.”
“ ‘Cats’ changed the whole business model,” Mr. Riedel claimed. “No show had ever made the kind of money that ‘Cats’ made. It’s because of Andrew and Cameron Mackintosh,” who produced the musical, “that Disney is here today.”
Whether that is a good thing, artistically if not economically, was left in the air as we paid our bill and Mr. Wankel guided us upstairs to J.J. Shubert’s stunning apartment.
“There are these crazy palaces above the theater that nobody knows about,” Mr. Riedel explained. “Being Jewish immigrants, they lived above the store.”
Write to Ralph Gardner Jr. at ralph.gardner@wsj.com