EPISODE 933: A HISTORY OF BROADWAY FLEAS
Also, unusual things to do with hot toddies, Neil Patrick Harris, and Baby Yoda.
One Saturday morning in 1987, and then again between the matinee and evening performances, the cast of A Chorus Line, which had recently hit 5000 performances, set up some tables outside the stage door of the Shubert Theatre in Shubert Alley. From those tables they sold to anyone passing by memorabilia from the show—old costumes and props, things that the cast had in their dressing rooms. They did it as a fundraiser to fight HIV/AIDS, which had decimated the Broadway community, including killing their director Michael Bennett that summer.
The cast raised $6000 that day. And as the story goes, they and their customers had such a good time, the next year other shows joined in, and donated the money to a new organization Broadway Cares, which had been organized by members of the Broadway community to raise money to be distributed to organizations all over the country. That year they raised $12000.
The Broadway Flea Market has existed ever since. Today they raise well over a million dollars each year at the event, which includes tables both from shows and another Broadway related organizations, as well as auctions and autograph lines.
I’ve been going to the flea market each year since I moved back to New York in 2021. Those first couple years I was all about getting cast recordings of all of the shows that I was hearing for the first time at the gay singalong piano bar Marie’s Crisis. But it also almost immediately became for me a place where the universe kind of gives me nudges, and I try to respond. My second flea market I stumbled onto a gorgeously-framed poster from the original production of La Cage aux Folles. For almost a year I had been telling myself I wanted to try and interview cast members from that show about their experiences. If A Chorus Line was the inspiration for the flea market, in many ways the cast of La Cage, which opened in 1983, was the inspiration for and leader in Broadway’s HIV/AIDS fund raising in its earliest days. Cast, crew, and creatives each created events that would become the cornerstones of Broadway’s response to AIDS.
The piece was a lot, but I grabbed it. It now hangs in my apartment. Its presence helped me to muster up the courage to try and interview some of the cast and crew of the show.
This year I found myself looking through old Playbills. I don’t tend to collect that kind of memorabilia—I don’t have the room!—but on a whim I went looking for a Playbill from the original production of La Cage. And I found not one, but two, from different periods in the show’s 5-year run. Then I stumbled onto a poster of Harvey Fierstein’s 2015 play Casa Valentina, as well as a Playbill of his Broadway debut, Torch Song Trilogy. Fierstein wrote the book for La Cage.
He was also one of the first gay actors to be publicly out. And just as La Cage did so much work to normalize the place of gay people and gay married people in modern society, Fierstein himself would go on national television show like The Tonight Show or 20/20 and allow straight people who had no idea where to even begin in talking about sexuality to ask him whatever they wanted. And he was incredibly gracious about it. Occasionally you’d see his eyes widen for a moment, as when Barbara Walters asks “What’s it like to be gay?” But he seemed to appreciate that they were doing the best they could. And his answers were characterized by their warmth, their generosity, and their playfulness.
Fierstein is such a contrast with the current-day ethos that it’s wrong for members of a privileged group—white people, straight people, cis-gender people, men—to ask those who do not belong to that group to educate them. Where “It’s not my job to teach you what you don’t know” is the contemporary refrain, Fierstein seemed to understand that shunning the ignorant is less effective in the big picture than being open to them. And you can see in the TV spots he did, his approach clearly had an impact. He helped people.
Playbills, CDs, posters, memorabilia—these are the kinds of things you’d probably expect at a theater flea market. But for $45 you can also pick up a copy of Hamptons Magazine, which has Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris shirtless on the cover, and which he has signed.
When I asked if I could take a picture of it, the two table folks looked at each other, then one said, repeatedly, Or you can buy it.
Or there’s this one-of-a-kind little tote.
Or this blanket.
Or this.
You’re not missing anything here. There is no Broadway-Baby Yoda connection (yet?). But it’s a flea market. Anything is fair game.
The flea market can be a bit of a horror show at times, too. At 10:30 the crowds were like a tidal wave. You couldn’t get close enough to the tables to even see what they were selling. And if you pushed your way in, you were either going to take some elbows, or give some. At one point I was looking at CDs and noticed a guy standing behind me. “Am I in your way?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “but I am trying to be polite.”
It’s hard to be polite for very long when you feel yourself literally drowning in people.
But if you can extricate yourself from the crowds, and from the constant pulsing FOMO in your brain, there are so many great moments, too. There’s the overheard snippets of conversation—“Would you like a cookie from closing night?”; “The hot toddy was thrown at me from someone in the dressing room!” The people you meet—the old vendor who commiserated with me about missing the chance to see the cast of The Last Ship reunite in November at 54 Below. “I keep telling myself they must have stand-by,” I told him. (Never mind that the wait lists for the 2 shows are actually full, too.) The young person who had just bought the “Please wear your mask” signs from the Wicked booth; they’d seen the show something like 40 times, all over the world.
For as crazy as it can be, underneath it all the Broadway Flea Market has a spirit similar to what you find at Disneyland or Comic-Con. You feel such joy all around you, it kind of lifts you up. The stuff you find, the money you spend, it all sort of pales before that sense of being a part of a community that is grounded in affection and gratitude for the theater.
After the flea market I attended a new Broadway revival of Our Town, which is currently in previews. One of the central ideas of that show is that while alive we don’t take the time to appreciate the beauty of everyone and everything around us. We’re so focused on ourselves, we don’t see anything for what it is.
In a way that’s been the lesson of the flea market, too, ever since 1987. Life goes by so fast, and with no justice to it at all. Better keep your eyes open while you can, because there’s beauty all around.
If you’re interested in learning more about the flea market, Playbill has a great retrospective of photos.
And if you’d like to donate to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, there’s lots of ways to contribute. They also have a great store.
Thanks as always for reading! I’ll see you later this week.
Thanks Jim for the feel good New York moment. Just returned from time in rural America, where everything that’s wrong with the world is because of big urban centers. It’s a full-time job defending Los Angeles… Let alone the hell scape of New York.