ABOUT THE SHOW

Writer and performer Noah Diamond made his New York debut on a double-decker tour bus. 400 Years in Manhattan is a multimedia stage show based on the New York City tour he conducted for seven years. The show, which Mr. Diamond describes as “a comedic journey through the city’s history,” enjoyed a successful workshop production in 2007 at HERE Arts Center.

For Diamond, being a New York City tour guide was the ideal day job while he struggled for a life in the  theatre. “A tour guide’s job is to write a solo show about a specific place, and then to perform it against  the ultimate backdrop,” he explains. “It was like being in a show that ran for seven years.”

Adapting his New York tour to the stage had long been on Diamond’s to-do list, but he could never compensate for the absence of the tour’s most important element – the city itself. Then, looking at images of Lower Manhattan for another project, he happened upon several pictures, drawn or photographed from the same angle over four centuries. “I put them into a slideshow,” he recalls, “and had them fade into one another, so I could watch the city develop over history.” The multimedia presentation, he realized, “could show you the one thing the tour never could: the city’s literal past.”

Diamond explains that 400 Years in Manhattan was written “from the perspective of a tour guide unconstrained by time or place. We can visit places in New York which no longer exist, and we can visit them in chronological order; we can compare the past and the present side by side. Most of the stories I tell in the show come directly from my tours, but the view is different. Instead of starting on Eighth Avenue, we start in 1609.”