Leading the Smiths in the 1980s, and then in a solo career that has extended to 11 albums, Morrissey has targeted himself — his shortcomings, his rationalizations, his yearnings, his peevishness — just as often as he has savaged others. He can be pointedly sarcastic in one song, startlingly vulnerable in another. All of the mood swings are centered by his voice: a long-breathed croon that breaks, at precise moments, into a cascading melisma. That voice is committed, physical and inarguable, and far less ambiguous than the words it carries.
For a rock star like Morrissey, who is 59, coming to Broadway is a paradoxical milestone, a downshift: playing a theater that’s smaller than his usual venues — the Lunt-Fontanne seats 1,509 people — with the promise of making a more intimate statement. Morrissey acknowledged his setting with his a cappella first notes, singing the line “There is a light that never goes out” (from a Smiths song) and continuing, “on Broadway.”
But he didn’t offer a radically scaled-down, quasi-confessional performance like “Springsteen on Broadway” (even though, like Springsteen, he has written an autobiography, titled “Autobiography”). It was, instead, the kind of concert he has been playing on tour through the decades: loud, tuneful, impeccably sung and aimed toward the rafters. He brought his band (including his frequent songwriting collaborator, guitarist Boz Boorer), a video screen, strobe lights and smoke. He let the songs speak (and mope and sneer) for themselves — a relief, given his cranky, troll-like public pronouncements.
The Smiths were categorized as post-punk, but their music and Morrissey’s solo albums largely hark back to pre-punk: to full-bodied 1960s folk-rock and studio pop. The songs use pealing, Byrds-like guitars, gleaming keyboard chords and well-turned melody lines, a world away from the abrasiveness and austerity associated with post-punk. Morrissey’s innovation was to bring punk’s bluntness to his lyrics, to strip away pop reassurance and admit to emotions that could be bleak, abject, petty, angry, contentious or self-destructive. The happiest song in his set was “The Bullfighter Dies”; with the video screen showing bloody bullfight scenes, Morrissey, a longtime animal-rights advocate, sang, “Nobody cries/Because we all want the bull to survive.”
Before Morrissey stepped onstage, a half-hour of video clips were shown, a compendium of influences and kindred spirits, some obvious — David Bowie, Patti Smith, Edith Piaf, the Ramones — and some more obscure, including Love Affair, Giuda and Jobriath, a rock singer who was openly gay in the 1970s. During his set, Morrissey performed Jobriath’s “Morning Starship”; it will appear on “California Son,” an album of other people’s songs due May 24.
Morrissey worked the Broadway stage as he works larger ones. He concentrated on singing, strolling around and occasionally whipping his microphone cord — no wireless for Morrissey. Fans rushed the stage to bring him gifts, and in some songs he reached across the footlights to give handshakes while he sang about feeling lonely and alienated.
Yet throughout the show, Morrissey gauged his effects. Video images illustrated most songs. The title of “World Peace Is None of Your Business,” an ironic song about entrenched power, was shown on a sign held aloft at a mass protest. For “Jack the Ripper,” the theater filled with smoke and Morrissey performed in a cloud of blood-red light. And in “Seasick, Yet Still Docked,” which laments, “Wish I had the charm to attract the one I love,” simply hunching his jacket tightly around himself made Morrissey seem as frozen and friendless as the song’s narrator.
At typical rock concerts, an encore is a self-congratulatory send-off. Morrissey’s was the opposite: “Let Me Kiss You,” which presents the singer as “someone you physically despise.” He made an abrupt exit leaving, on the video screen, a gun-to-the-head suicide scene from Jean Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet.” On Broadway, Morrissey had been as intimate as his songs themselves, but he stayed true to his persona.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.