Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, the Boardwalk Balladeer, the one-time New Dylan, Steinbeck in Leather, the leader of the E Street Band and the man whose lyrics have been misunderstood by Republican politicians for over 30 years now has another title: Broadway star.

Tuesday night’s performance of Springsteen on Broadway wasn’t officially opening night (that’s 12 October) but the reviews on the street from the first preview were unanimously positive. “It’s not a concert, it’s a show.” When one person said it, all the enthusiastic fans who’d just exited the Walter Kerr Theatre agreed. This wasn’t one of Springsteen’s fabled four-hour blowouts in a stadium, it was two hours in a Broadway house.

“It was fantastic, a great night. He told stories, he sang all the classics, it was unbelievable!” gushed a New Yorker by the name of Adrian who was in such a whirlwind she couldn’t pick a highlight, so settled on Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s signature song that closed out the evening.

Though Broadway is known for its razzle-dazzle, everything about this production is apparently stripped bare. This is not a jukebox musical like Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out. There are no dancers, skits or tableaux. There are no slides projected, no video installations, just a microphone stand waiting for a man and his guitar, a piano and some equipment cases stacked up against a brick wall.

“I’d read his book, a lot of the stories came from there,” said Mark Zuckerman, a Florida transplant to New York. Nearly each of the 15 songs were set up by an excerpt. While there was some off-the-cuff banter, like a dedication to Tom Petty at the start, “it felt like theater.” (“There had to be a teleprompter, but I couldn’t see it from my angle,” Jonathan Toth from Toronto suggested.) There was no encore, and only the final song, Born to Run, had audience members singing along. Springsteen’s wife, the longtime E Street Band backup singer (and singer-songwriter in her own right) Patti Scialfa, joined the stage mid-show to sing duet on Tougher Than The Rest and Brilliant Disguise.

Bruce Springsteen performs in Toronto on 30 September. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

The intimate setting of a Broadway house (975 seats at the Walter Kerr Theatre as opposed to 82,500 at nearby MetLife stadium, where Springsteen played three sold-out shows last summer) was the big selling point for many. “This is my 27th show, but the first time I heard him speak without any sort of amplification,” Mike Ryan of Manhattan’s Upper East Side said concerning the few moments when Springsteen didn’t speak into the microphone. “I’d say it was around 50-50 music and storytelling,” he continued, delighted that the singer had some good comic timing. “He talked about being Mr Born To Run, gotta get out, leave home. And now after he’s made his fortune he still lives 10 minutes from where he grew up.”

The tickets set him back $620 a pop, and while there did appear to be a look of shock and horror in his eyes as he recalled this, he was quick to add “this is a once in a lifetime.”

A few seats in the top rows are reserved for lucky lottery winners at a more reasonable $75 price point. “It looked good from up there,” said Jill, a German woman living in New York pleased she didn’t have to break the bank. “I was thinking during the show how Springsteen is the embodiment of America. Of a certain kind of America,” she added.

In a recent interview with Variety, Springsteen said you shouldn’t expect too many overtly political songs or statements from him: “I’ve done it when I felt it was really necessary and that maybe my two cents might make some small bit of difference. But the more you do it, your two cents becomes one cent and then no cents whatsoever, so I think your credibility and your impact lessens the more you do it.”

But before singing The Ghost of Tom Joad, he included a pro-immigration statement, saying something about how the new America will have darker skin, and won’t just be Irish and Italians, the heritage he and his wife share. More encouraging is how the predominantly white audience wealthy enough to throw down so much money on a ticket reportedly met the comment with such applause.