BROADWAY BY THE YEAR Recent Years

STREET SCENE O.K., 2020 wasn’t Broadway’s best. But the audiences, the shows and the traffic are back in 2022, and the Broadway by the Year series continues.

SCOTT SIEGEL HAS BEEN doing his “Broadway by the Year” concerts for 20 years now. But I had never been to one. Why? Well, mostly I was busy seeing the Broadway shows themselves.

This is not so much a review of the show as it is a report on my first night at the theater in two years.

I was in the Belasco Theater seeing “Girl From the North Country” with my friend SMP — who had thoughtfully brought Purell — on Wednesday night, March 11, 2020. Broadway shut its doors the next day. And I spent the next 24 months watching a lot of original dramas and comedies on Zoom and a lot of fabulous works from the past, often with their original casts. (Joan Allen and her ex-husband together again in “The Heidi Chronicles”!).

But for Broadway by the Year, I was venturing out — to Town Hall, a physical bricks-and-mortar theater — for the first time. I heard people at the makeshift press desk call me by my first name. Validation! I do exist! I ran into an old friend in the lobby and said hello. I chatted with a nice lady seated nearby while my friend LG got us drinks at the bar.

Act I was a quiet joy. Siegel had a bunch of talented Broadway performers with outstanding voices on his stage. The numbers ranged from “The Circle of Life” (from “The Lion King”) to “You Will Be Found” (from “Dear Evan Hansen”).

I was most taken with Ben Jones’s “It All Falls Away” from “The Bridges of Madison County,” a 2014 show I had completely forgotten even existed — which is a very good reason this series exists. It is possible to write a brilliant song for a show that isn’t a hit.

One could nitpick about including some of these shows in a roundup of recent productions. I mean, “Lion King” opened in 1997. But there were numbers from “Hamilton,” and the evening ended with “Let It Go” from “Frozen” (possibly the only Broadway number that every 5-year-old child knows the words to), so I guess it all averages out to recent.

Can’t tell you about Act II. At intermission, to quote my spirit animal, Dorothy Parker, in a particularly unsettling book review, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” LG thought we should go home.

But I can tell you what Siegel has planned for the months ahead.

On May 23, the series pays tribute to the phenomenon known as jukebox musicals in “Ziegfeld to Moulin Rouge.” You did know that those great “Moulin Rouge” numbers like “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Single Ladies” weren’t written for the show? Yeah, you did.

On June 27, singers will honor the little shows that didn’t “transfer.” Off Broadway musicals that stayed off Broadway in “Almost on Broadway,.” I’m hoping to hear “Try to Remember” from “The Fantasticks.”

Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, thetownhall.org

Dream it

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Dream it 〰️