Looking back at grand ole days of Broadway with Tonys around the corner

In 1626 Peter Minuit, a Westphalian and this colony’s first governor, bought New York for 60 guilders.About $24.

Nearly what a B’way show’s intermission drink costs today.Canal Street was then a tangled mass.

Still now.New 1600 arrivals could not buy land.

They were tenants.Powerless.

Still now.All belonged to the haughty land-owning patroons.

New settlers argued with powerful Minuit who favored the patroons.Still now.

Think Albany, Washington.Think — or try to — of your landlord.So today — just a lousy few hundred years later — it’s Tony time.

And who really knows every nominee? Talented, able, but our massive public knows a Sarah Snook? Sadie Sink? James Monroe Iglehart? And why so expensive when these leads aren’t commanding A-Number-One movies? I mean, it’s not like film star salaries.Not like Jennifer Lawrence schlepping Stage Left in her underdrawers.Also, how newly wildly exciting are these “new” shows — “Gypsy,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Sunset Blvd.”? When they first opened the subway was a nickel.

Older folk don’t want to sit home and just watch cops and robbers on Netflix.Yeah, we got stars — Denzel, Gyllenhaal.They’re doing “Othello,” also happening is a riff on “Romeo and Juliet.” Nice.

Great.But new? I mean, please.

Shakespeare hasn’t written anything — not even a letter to his mother — in weeks.Audiences include the aging.Our citizenry now includes canes, wheelchairs, hearing aids.

Needed are longer intermissions.Ladies’ cans are always downstairs, which means lumbering through the crowd, limping downstairs, waiting for a free stall then schlepping back up.

We’re in that theater longer than the actors.Broadway is New York.Foreigners from faraway lands like Montana, Utah, schlep here to see Broadway.

Central Park they don’t need.They got cows pooping on their front lawn.It’s here everybody wants to be.

It’s New York.It’s “Give My Regards to Broadway....