Confirming weeks of rumors, Bruce Springsteen has officially locked in the details of a Broadway run this fall, setting an eight-week engagement for an intimate concert at the Walter Kerr Theater beginning in October.
With his massive fanbase, Springsteen stands poised to make his show, "Springsteen on Broadway," a juggernaut at the Broadway box office. At less than 1,000 seats, the Walter Kerr is a fraction of the size of the venues Springsteen usually plays — setting the stage for sky-high demand to drive ticket prices into the stratosphere.
To battle scalpers, the show will make use of Ticketmaster's new Verified Fan tech, which is the same service that "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" will use in the spring. The concept behind Verified Fan, which was introduced early this year, is fairly simple — fans register to buy tickets in advance (typically 48 hours before an on-sale), allowing Ticketmaster time to evaluate requests and eliminate ones believed to be connected to scalpers via proprietary technology. The service then sends out unique codes to individual fans that enable them to purchase tickets during a general on-sale.
In "Springsteen on Broadway," Springsteen's first run of solo dates since 2005's "Devils & Dust" tour, the singer is expected to perform songs drawn from all eras of his career, interspersed with readings of his best-selling memoir "Born to Run."
"I wanted to do some shows that were as personal and as intimate as possible," Springsteen said in a statement. "I chose Broadway for this project because it has the beautiful old theaters which seemed like the right setting for what I have in mind. In fact, with one or two exceptions, the 960 seats of the Walter Kerr Theatre is probably the smallest venue I've played in the last 40 years. My show is just me, the guitar, the piano and the words and music. Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work. All of it together is in pursuit of my constant goal to provide an entertaining evening and to communicate something of value."
It also seems likely he will perform songs from an untitled, long-gestating solo album, which he discussed before his 2016-17 tour with the E Street Band around the 35th anniversary of his 1980 album "The River." The 89-date, 13-month-long tour grossed $306.5 million globally, according to Pollstar.
He previously told Rolling Stone, "The record I was working on [before 'The River' tour] was a solo record. I was probably gonna go out and perform it on my own. ... It was the record I started before [2012's] Wrecking Ball. I've been making it for a long time. I went back to it after [2014's] High Hopes. I finished it at the beginning of the summer [2015]."
"When I say solo record, I'm not talking about an acoustic record," he expanded to Billboard last July. "It is, in fact, a very expansive record, a very rich record."
"Springsteen on Broadway" begins previews Oct. 3 ahead of an Oct. 12 opening at the Kerr, where the show runs through Nov. 26. Registration for tickets, to be priced from $75 to $850, begins today and ends Aug. 27, with sales starting to verified fans on Aug. 30.