Put aside the politics, the polemics and the president.
Michael Moore, nestled into a booth at a bar in the theater district, wants to talk about something else: his lifelong love affair with New York City and Broadway.
Flint, Michigan’s most famous son, now starring on Broadway in “The Terms of My Surrender,” started coming to town in the early ’60s to visit his aunt on Staten Island. She was married to a New York State assemblyman who was able to get tickets to the Broadway show that was the “Hamilton” of its day: “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“I’m in fifth grade, and I’d already been writing plays in school and getting my sisters to perform them in the neighborhood, and now I’m seeing Zero Mostel in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” Moore tells me. “I think I was already inclined to enjoy this sort of thing.”
‘I want to do theater for the last third of my life.’
Most summers, Moore left Michigan for New York, catching the ferry from Staten Island at 6:25 in the morning to explore Manhattan — and show business.
“We’d go to Rockefeller Center and stand in front of the ‘Today’ show window,” he says. “It’s not the same window, but it was a window. We’d stand for an hour and watch Hugh Downs. It was like being in Oz.”
Then he’d go over to the theater where Ed Sullivan was doing his show and stand outside the stage door to get autographs.
“I have Roy Rogers’ and Dale Evans,’” he says, proudly.
At night, there was always a Broadway show, but his parents, strict Catholics, put their foot down when it came to the two musicals he most wanted to see — “Hair” and “Oh! Calcutta!”
They sent him to “No, No, Nanette” instead — and he got mugged after the show.
“I’m 16 and a guy comes up to me from behind and sticks what feels like a knife in my back,” he says.
The mugger demanded money. Moore had a wallet in one of his back pockets and a subway map in the other. He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a dime, a nickel and two pennies.
“This is all I’ve got,” he told the mugger.
“Yeah? Well, what’s in your back pocket then?”
The mugger pulled the subway map out of Moore’s pocket, looked at it, gave it back to him, kept the 17 cents and said, “Thanks, dude.”
“I told that story back home in Flint, but I had to lie about where it happened,” Moore says. “It’s a factory town. How can you tell people you got mugged outside of ‘No, No, Nanette’?”
Although he loved the theater, Moore was, at heart, a movie guy. Years after he was accosted in Times Square, he went on to make some of the most celebrated — and often controversial — movies of the past 30 years: “Roger & Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Sicko.”
But now, at 63, he says, “I want to do theater for the last third of my life.”
The play that he says he always thinks about — one that has influenced so much of what he’s done — is Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
“I read it in English class and I remember being devastated by it,” he says. “I think about it in my show, when I talk about how liberals who supported the war [in Iraq] deserted people like me when we were rightly against it. How they made me feel that I was a traitor and that I was against the troops. I felt like I was in ‘The Crucible.’”
Moore happened to be at JFK Airport in the late ’90s waiting to pick up his daughter from a class trip, when an elderly man came up to him.
“You know, I got my start in Flint, Michigan,” the man said. “I was the night editor at the Michigan Daily in 1936 and I heard about the sit-down strike in Flint” — the strike that led to the creation of the United Auto Workers union.
“I got my first byline there,” the man continued, “and everything I’ve written since has been because of Flint. I found my voice in Flint.”
Moore, by then famous from his movies, was used to people coming up to him and talking about politics and Flint. He never wanted to be rude to a fan.
And so he said, “Oh, really? How interesting.”
The old man smiled and extended his hand. “I’m Arthur Miller,” he said.
William Ivey Long, the six-time Tony-winning costume designer, sure can draw a crowd. Sardi’s was packed the other night with Broadway bigwigs celebrating the unveiling of his caricature. Long is only the third Broadway designer to be honored that way. His caricature joins those of the late Florence Klotz (costumes) and Jules Fisher (lighting). I was surprised to learn that set designers Boris Aronson and Tony Walton weren’t up there. It’s too late, in Aronson’s case — he died in 1980 — but surely Walton, who was at Long’s unveiling, deserves a nod.