What’s striking, though, is that the idea of sleeping on the subway seemed then, as it did in Clark’s song, larksome and big-hearted-something that you chose to do. (Someone at Encores should revive the show for this New York moment.
PETULA CLARK DONT SLEEP IN THE SUBWAY PROFESSIONAL
The show got so-so notices, and then produced one of the most notorious stunts in theatre history, when the incorrigible producer David Merrick placed an ad with quotes from all the leading newspaper critics of the day-it was a day when there were many-praising the show only for the world to discover that these were not the actual critics but fellow-New Yorkers with the same names: a sort of straphangers’ revolt against the professional reviewers. (You can listen to the romantic song “ Ride Through The Night.”) The concept was that well-dressed homeless people, a self-chosen underground sect, secretly lived and loved on the subways. would call a “persistent trope.” A musical comedy called, simply “Subways Are for Sleeping”-one with impeccable pedigree, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Jule Styne, and starring Carol Lawrence-débuted on Broadway in 1961. Still, a little digging shows that the idea of sleeping on the subway was for a long time what a liberal-arts college T.A. People are falling asleep on the subway now, in part, because they are no longer afraid on the subway. It’s a magnificent system.)įor those of us who came of age in an earlier subway epoch, the ease is still shocking. (Those of us who make a fetish of finding a seat on the subway have had to evolve new schemes for doing it: mine involves moving radically to the left at every stop on the 6 line, except at Fifty-ninth and Fourteenth streets, when you should turn far to the right. Where it used to be impressive if a non-native New Yorker could work a transfer hookup involving much more than the Times Square shuttle, now newcomers talk easily of changing for the Q and hopping on the M and even of cruising out on the Z. Much of the growth from the previous year was concentrated, unsurprisingly, in the rapidly growing neighborhoods of Brooklyn-or, to put it in plain English, in the unending tsunami of hipsters travelling to and from what were once quaintly called the outer boroughs.
In 2014, around 1.75 billion-that’s right, billion-riders used the trains, the largest number since 1948. This is no illusion or impression, either. Saturdays and Sundays, where once one could always find a space on the sideways banquette of the E train, one finds it now as mobbed as at any weekday rush hour. Where once there were lonely cars at lonely times, now the subways seem as packed at four in the morning as at five in the afternoon. The background to this, as every New Yorker will recognize, is the revolution in subway ridership that has changed the trains in the past decade. “I know people have gotten out of work and are tired, but we are going to start waking people up.” Apparently, this step is essential because almost half the crime now reported on the subway “involves sleeping passengers”-presumably with criminals inflicting it on the slumbering, rather than, as in a twenties German expressionist film, the somnambulists striking others, unaware. “ Subways are not for sleeping,” he said at a news conference, and was seconded by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Now, apparently, in our own time, the sleeping-in-the-subways business has risen again-with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announcing last week that the transit police will start going car to car, waking the slumbering. (Clark’s hit, not entirely incidentally, was written by Tony Hatch, the British songwriter, and was one of several in that decade-“Downtown” was even more popular-in which Brits used a borrowed American vocabulary to describe a mostly mythical New York.) By the time Leifer was doing standup, in the eighties, the meaning had changed: only a fool would risk his health, or love life, by sleeping on the No. Oh, hey, don’t shave with a Ginsu knife.” Well, sleeping in the subway, in Petula’s time, was a sign of charming heedlessness, like walking barefoot in the park, the kind of thing eccentric and lovable characters might have done in a mid-sixties comedy.
“What kind of guys is she going out with that she’s gotta tell them these things? You know, ‘Don’t wash your face with Clorox. “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling,” Petula Clark crooned, back in the sixties, leading the wonderful standup comedian Carol Leifer to ask, a couple of decades later, just what kind of men Petula might be dating.
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