Since the turn of the century, Bruce Springsteen’s work has undergone a crucial shift away from the personal and toward the communal: embracing the bold, unifying power of We. After reassembling his trusted E Street Band at the end of the 1990s for a reunion tour, Springsteen, as the story goes, was called back to creative action in the wake of 9/11 upon hearing five simple words from a fan: “Bruce, we need you now.” In the ensuing years, he has more or less directly addressed that request, taking on the voice of the masses with a knowing and authoritative empathy. “We pray for your strength, Lord,” he sang on 2002’s The Rising; “we shall overcome,” he assured us later in the Bush years; “we are alive,” he insisted on 2012’s Wrecking Ball.

Of course, We have always been there in Bruce songs—it’s tramps like us, after all. Yet the devoted faithful, and their memories, now claim more space than ever within Springsteen’s universe, with the man himself honoring fans’ song requests at shows and putting together elaborate documentaries to celebrate his most well-loved albums. “It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness,” Springsteen said a few years ago, talking about his relationship with the community that’s formed around his work. “It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That’s what we do for one another.”

Springsteen on Broadway, a new one-man show at Manhattan’s Walter Kerr Theatre, is the latest evolution of that relationship. The setlist, which will basically remain static throughout the show’s sold-out, four-month run, includes most of his radio workhorses and enough rarities to perk up the ears of the lifers. And unlike his previous solo tours behind 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and 2005’s Devils & Dust, which were formed around new work that was intentionally dense, necessitating long, explanatory introductions for each song, Springsteen on Broadway is more intuitive and, as a whole, more comprehensive. If you’ve never seen Bruce live, this show illustrates his best sides as a performer: a helplessly charismatic showman; a competent multi-instrumentalist; and a writer with a body of work whose depth reveals itself patiently but forcefully when brought to life.

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The question lingers, though, of where his audience fits in. During a performance earlier this week, there is an occasionally awkward energy. When the crowd starts singing along to the first verse of “Dancing in the Dark,” Springsteen cuts them off. “I can take this one myself,” he says abruptly, eliciting a brief burst of applause and laughter before everyone abides and shuts up. But Springsteen fans have been trained to sing along and, more generally, to inhabit a type of collective abandon in the presence of their leader. So, despite being told upon entering that photography is strictly prohibited, many openly disavow the rule almost immediately. A woman to my right whispers to me, showing off her intimate lock screen portrait of Bruce’s ass, from a show in Connecticut: “Do you really think they’ll kick me out for taking just one picture?”

Springsteen on Broadway has a lonely, intense power that makes it unlike anything he’s put his name to. In design and structure, the show complements his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, and some passages, like the jokey “Rock ‘n’ Roll Survival Kit” from the foreword, are recited verbatim. But while the 500-page Born to Run seemed modeled after Springsteen’s epic live shows—jam-packed with tangents and asides, allusions and tributes—the two-hour Springsteen on Broadway is compact and precise. Every word spoken, every song performed, and every name summoned seems chosen with great purpose.

Well-worn stories, like those about his arduous recording sessions in the ’70s or the surprising dissolution of the E Street Band in the ’80s, are left out of the picture. Instead, there are descriptive portraits of his more ideological pillars: his parents, Adele and Douglas; his wife, Patti Scialfa (who joins him on stage to perform two songs from Tunnel of Love, the 1987 album about the dissolution of his first marriage); his Catholic faith; and his admirably unflinching views of America and the promise it still holds. The songs, played on a Yamaha grand piano and a dynamic array of acoustic guitars, wind through his monologues with a seamless, momentous flow. Many tracks appear in updated arrangements, so that even his greatest hits sound newly cutting. “This is a protest song,” he announces decisively before “Born in the U.S.A.” Then he recites the lyrics in one long, pissed-off breath, punctuated with droning slide guitar.

A key component of both Springsteen’s Broadway show and his memoir involves his self-proclaimed fraudulence, as he pokes holes in the image he’s established over the last four decades. He’s quick to make light of his fixation on the struggles of the working-class, despite the fact that he’s lived in extreme wealth for most of his adult life. (He recently referred to this Broadway stint as his “first real job.”)

But more than the everyman poetry of his lyrics or the first-hand experience he gleaned from his blue-collar father, Springsteen’s voice—which he describes in his book as a humble “journey-man’s instrument”—has always given him the most authority. Speaking or singing constantly through Springsteen on Broadway’s two-hour runtime, he unabashedly lets it fill the room. The 68-year-old’s singing voice has evolved in a curious way; while Leonard Cohen’s deepened and Bob Dylan’s dilapidated as they aged, Springsteen’s has settled into itself like a well-made piece of furniture. Meanwhile, his speaking voice now lands somewhere between Southern accent, Gold Rush Americana, and Rutgers professor—half-whispered, with a grandfatherly warmth.

During the show, he occasionally steps to the front of the stage, away from the microphone, to communicate more directly, making the 1,000-capacity theater feel like a small circle around him. Delivering the stalwart final verse of “The Promised Land,” his unamplified voice transforms its heartland gospel into something more fragile. Even if you’ve heard him sing it a million times, you still hang on to his words to find out where they lead, to be sure he makes it out all right.

There’s a subtle switch near the end of Springsteen on Broadway, when the man onstage turns away from the strictly autobiographical and toward a more symbolic analysis of his work and beliefs. The narrative loosens up, and Bruce follows suit, his songs flowing with a sense of cohesion that feels more emotional than chronological. At one point, he addresses the audience—not just those of us in plain sight, but everyone—and says he hopes he’s been good to us. He summarizes the span of his music, with a sense of finality, as being a “long and noisy prayer.” Then he recites an actual prayer and closes the set with a few songs that might as well be ones, including a rendition of “Born to Run” that maintains its driving force as it glides to its finale. When the lights comes on, the audience rises, howling and bellowing long after he’s left the stage. In that moment, it could be 1977 or 2017; we could be 80,000 people packed into a football stadium or 1,000 reclining in a small theater; at the end of a massive tour or the beginning of a Broadway residency. What’s important is, for now, we’re all alive and we’re all together.