The Capeman.

When the most expensive Broadway musical of all time receives ferociously negative reviews and shuts down prematurely, why should anyone not within commuting distance of Manhattan bother to mourn its passing?

The quick answer is this: Because of the way the U.S. culture industry is built, opinionmakers in Manhattan play a disturbingly large role in determining which art, music, and drama the rest of the country will be allowed to enjoy. In many ways, the New York culture corps operates like the Washington press corps: While both strike the pose of hardboiled interrogator of authority, they're careful to ensure that no feathers get ruffled in the nests of entrenched powers.

The New York showbiz press corps crushed The Capeman, Paul Simon's magnificent and groundbreaking musical about a Puerto Rican teenager's odyssey from troubled child to murderer to "rehumanized" adult. Before The Capeman started previews last December, Paul Simon had spent seven years researching Puerto Rican art, geography, religion, and history. He teamed up with Nobel-winning Caribbean playwright and poet Derek Walcott. They wanted Capeman to do what no other Broadway show had done before: consider the fears and terrors and raptures of New York's urban poor at a human scale--not some giant icon of the downtrodden in the manner of Les Miz, and not the outsized exotics of West Side Story. They insisted that their depiction of New York Puerto Rican life would be recognizable to people who actually inhabit New York Puerto Rican lives.

The Capeman tells the true story of Salvador Agron, born in Puerto Rico in 1943 and raised with his sister Aurea in a poorhouse where his mother, Esmeralda, worked as a cleaning woman. When Esmeralda married a Pentecostal preacher, the family moved from the island to the housing-project canyons of New York City at a time when the naked hostility greeting Puerto Rican arrivals made them feel they were entering a war zone. They were. In all the impoverished ethnic neighborhoods of the city, street gangs patrolled their designated turf. Illiterate and dislocated, Salvador joined the Vampires, a Latino gang. One night in a mindless act of violence, the sixteen-year-old Salvador, dressed in a black cape, stabbed to death two Irish boys his own age--passersby with no gang connections--and became the youngest person in the history of New York State to be sentenced to the electric chair. Governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted his sentence following the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt and others. After two decades of what the real-life Salvador described as "rehumanization"--including teaching himself to write, becoming a poet, and earning a college degree-he was paroled. He died of natural causes in 1986, at age forty-three.

Months before Capeman's previews, the press murmurs began: Simon was squandering money. A good piece of the show's $11 million price tag was an innovative extravagance. Early in their collaboration, Simon and Walcott agreed they would subordinate their lyrics to the storytelling power of the music itself. The musical cost a lot because Simon insisted that musicians be present, and therefore paid, every time the actors rehearsed--a practice unheard of on Broadway. He believed that, for the story of a culture to ring true, at every moment the storytelling would have to find its heartbeat in the music.

But the criticism went beyond murmurs about unorthodox rehearsal expenditures. Journalists stiffened at the prospect of reckoning with the difficult material of the story itself: the cause of violent crime among poor teenagers, the relationship between criminals and their victims' survivors, the practice of putting adolescents on death row, the now-forgotten goals of rehabilitation at a time when politicians label such people "superpredators." Tension heightened when several victims'-rights groups declared their opposition to a show they had not seen because they presumed that Capeman would glorify crime. In fact, the show deals in graphic terms with-the rage and pain experienced by the mothers of the dead boys--as well as the mother of the murderer.

Worse, the show didn't offer any monumental characters--no operatically strutting and anguishing Evita Peron, no stock Carmen Miranda spitfires like West Side Story's Anita. The scale of characters in The Capeman remained resolutely lifesize, providing a sense of the precariousness of each character's toehold, as they are assaulted by the countless perils to health, home, and reasonable expectations of predictability that the poor must grapple with every day. "Afraid to leave the project/To cross into another neighborhood," one character sings plaintively.

"There's a job as operator/I wouldn't have to wait for/If I could speak the language easily," goes another ballad.

The language of racial epithets is not a matter of daredevil poetry, as in rap music, to amuse or outrage. Here, the words sting. They are intended to make an audience wince.

Capeman is not a cruise through the make-believe barrio. It is a work of art that offers no opportunities for catharsis, but plenty of difficult questions.

I saw The Capeman twice, and both times I kept swiveling my head in search of what journalists had reported: fidgeting, dissatisfied audience members sitting on their hands. But all I could see was people riveted or rocking, sometimes weeping, usually transfixed. At the curtain calls, people yelled and whooped and stomped out their pleasure as if they were cheering the victorious home team. And, in a way, they were: Capeman's extravagant display of Puerto Rico's vast musical wealth--bombas, plenas, aguinaldos, jazz, mambos, salsa--was lavished on an audience that contained more Latin faces than I've ever seen in any Broadway house. (On some nights during the fifty-eight-performance run, Latinos made up 90 percent of Capeman's audience.) Some of the lyrics sung from that stage related directly to the experience of audience members with roots in Ponce or Mayaguez or Humacao. "I was born in Puerto Rico. ... We came here wearing summer clothes in winter."

The forty-member, mostly Latino, cast was astonishing, almost liturgical in their style of speech and gesture, owing much of their choreography and attitude to religious pageants, traditional dance, and Caribbean narrative style. The remarkable Ruben Blades, playing the older Salvador, embodied the vigilance of someone who had spent many years in prison--someone constantly monitoring the movements of those around him, but also his own actions, thoughts, and impulses.

"Correctional facility," he sings, "they call this place/But look around and you will see/The politics of race."

Marc Anthony captured the emotional volatility of the young Sal, and the nimbleness to which Sal aspires as he walks the fraying tightrope of his neighborhood. And yet he claims guilt as well as victimhood: "The evil we do can't be blamed upon our destiny."

Ednita Nazario as Esmeralda, no one-dimensional martyr-mom, beautifully does the job that the poor must do to keep their sanity: name and articulate the conditions of their collective experience. In her letters to the imprisoned Sal, she weaves together the threads of the history they've lived, helping her son connect their footprints on the beach at El Malecon with the tenements "tall as our mountains," so he is able at last to sort out how "numb and battered" he'd been by the streets, and by his father and stepfather.

For weeks before The Capeman closed, I read the New York journalists' screeds disguised as reviews or analyses--almost all of them vindictive, ad hominem attacks on Paul Simon. But why?

The critics' saturation bombing after opening night had been preceded by months of sporadic bullet sprays. Showbiz and gossip columns dropped hints about a spendthrift, megalomaniac Simon micromanaging everything and firing people left and right. The words "arrogance" and "control freak" cropped up in article after article, along with frets about whether the subject matter was "appropriate" to a musical--a form that has accommodated stories ranging from the cannibalism of Sweeney Todd to the bloodletting dictatorship of Evita.

But Simon's capital crime was apostasy: fie hadn't bent his knee to the designated gods of musical theater. "In the beginning," Simon explained to The Telegraph of London, show business insiders said that when it comes to staging a Broadway musical, "there are five or six people in the world who can do this, and here are their names." Simon declined the list. His instincts were vindicated when he started looking at the audiences at Broadway musicals while considering spaces for The Capeman. He didn't want the usual audience. "At every show save for Rent, the faces were glum and dutiful and anesthetized," he said.

Even the New York Daily News's Fintan O'Toole, easily the most brilliant theater critic New York has seen in decades, wrote a preview implying that maybe it wasn't such a good idea for the first Puerto Rican musical on Broadway to have a protagonist who kills people. (Ironically, O'Toole has frequently and lavishly praised John Synge's Playboy of the Western World, the first major work about the lives of the rural Irish poor, in which an entire village warmly embraces the protagonist as a hero after he claims to have murdered his father. Written almost a century ago, The Playboy was also greeted with loud denunciations of its depiction of the Irish.)

By the time the reviews were in from the opening, it was clear that the whole Broadway press posse had been stashing ammo for months. The New York Times's Ben Brantley could barely contain his exterminator's delight: "The show registers as one solemn, helplessly confused drone. It's like watching a mortally wounded animal. You're only sorry that it has to suffer and that there's nothing you can do about it." Brantley and virtually every other reviewer who booed the play used an identical modifier--"inert." El Diario, New York's largest Spanish-language paper, quickly responded to this lockstep unanimity by declaring that the Anglo critics who hated the play "have no clue what it means to live as a Puerto Rican in this city."

Just beneath the loud upper registers of protest was a steady, murmured harmony line that kept repeating, "We know what we like." And along with their counterparts in the White House reporting pool, what they like is comfort food: Musicals are instant puddings they can suck down without chewing. What the Broadway chroniclers don't like is having The Capeman's gorgeous music delivering a platter of economic, racial, and political questions that are not so easy to digest.

There were two exceptions to this ambush: out-of-town newspaper people, and nonwhite New York journalists. The Washington Post's Paula Span provided the most comprehensive reporting of anyone, giving space to almost a dozen of The Capeman's collaborating artists to make a reflective accounting of themselves and the project. The Hartford Courant's Roger Catlin admired The Capeman's team for being equal to the task of telling a tale without "lay[ing] everything out easily with a tap dance and a smile." Likewise, The New York Times's sole African American op-ed columnist, Bob Herbert, paid tribute to the team's having taken "a more complex approach" to the fact of homicide than "a rope around the neck or a seat in the electric chair." And the Daily News's Juan Gonzalez told his readers that "instead of bashing Simon's pioneering effort," they should be buying tickets. In San Juan, the newspapers reported every detail of the development of the project and ran exultant stories the day after the premiere.

Once word got out that The Capeman would shut down, almost every crank who'd canned it gave it one more kick. Michael Riedel, the Daily News's Broadway gossip columnist, told CNN that Simon failed because he hadn't included "some of that old Andrew Lloyd Webber muscle" and castigated Walcott for being a "novice" in musical theater (item: Walcott, the foremost playwright in the Caribbean, produced his first musical in 1950). Plenty of others went hunting for quotes from the likes of the anonymous Broadway agent who dismissed Simon's work on the project because "he's not even Latino; he's Jewish," or impresario Rocco Landesman, who said of the closing, "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."

But then the New York showbiz journalists long ago gave up their most accurate measure of professional integrity--being loathed by the powerful--for a shot at getting On the "A" List. Either group could as easily adopt as their hero James Reston, the New York Times Washington correspondent who, three decades ago, abandoned his responsibility to hold politicians' feet to the fire in exchange for a ride in Henry Kissinger's limo. Spoiled journalists--whether covering the Oval Office or Cats--end up promulgating weasel-speak for whoever's pouring their cocktails.

While theater critics on the shill can't yet hope to snag the rewards of such D.C. insider-trading experts as Brit Hume (tennis partner of--and ABC on-air apologist for--then-President Bush) or Sid Blumenthal (formerly Clinton's in-house ventriloquist at the New Yorker, now official White House adviser), there may be plenty of opportunities ahead on Broadway. Now that Disney has begun turning Broadway into a family-values entertainment reservation, there'll be no room there for reckoning with the troubles or the imaginations of impoverished, socially risky brown-skinned teenagers, whether on the sidewalk or on the stage.

Before long, Times Square will be as clean as Jiminy Cricket's conscience: no lap dances, no homeless teenagers, no union scale, no plays with complex visions. This will happen with considerable help from the Broadway press crews, who are weary of problems that won't just solve themselves and go away in two acts and an intermission.