More Moore! Go Inside Opening Night of THE TERMS OF MY SURRENDER!

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World

Academy Award-winning filmmaker, best-selling author, and political icon. Michael Moore is making his Broadway debut with this new show

The Terms of My Surrender, directed by Michael Mayer. And I caught up with both of them just minutes after the opening night curtain rang down

It's so wonderful to watch him. What was it like working with him in the rehearsal room? I mean, you put him on Broadway

Yeah, it was dreamy because he knows that he doesn't know what, like, he's not an actor

You know, he's a, he's the great, you know, man of the people that he is

And he makes his films and he's in them and he does TV and he does interviews and stuff and live stuff

But he's not a Broadway actor, so to speak. So the challenge and the great, beautiful challenge was to take the stories that he has

and weave them into a narrative, which I call, you know, and he laughs when I say it

But I think it's true. It's like the story of an accidental activist

And that's what it is. And so you watch his progress from when he was a 16-year-old kid

and he wanted to eat some ruffles potato chips. And that sent him on his journey

which ends with him right now at the end of the show

He today talking about his hometown of Flint Michigan and the way in which the citizens of Flint are being systematically poisoned by a system that the governor has sanctioned the governor of Michigan has

sanctioned, and he equates that with the America that we're all living in under Trump

And it's quite a chilling moment. So you go from something quite innocent and beautiful and hopeful, and you watch how

he's made his journey and we end here. And the great thing about the show, the thing that I love the most

is that the audience walks out of that theater, feeling empowered to change things

I'm so honored to be here. I'm, I'm, I'm exhilarated by the whole experience

It's, you know, I, tonight was thinking about the first night of my first film

when it debuted. and that was back in 1989. So to still, at this age, still have like a new experience in a whole other art form

was profound. I learned so much from your show. Tell me why you wanted to do this show

Well, I know that we're in New York, very liberal city, the choir

Well, the choir needs a song to sing. People have been pretty depressed since November

and if I can try to lift people spirits give them something to do something to think about have a good laugh for an hour and a half then I will have done my job What are you enjoying the most about being here

I got to say the honest answer is the catharsis for my own soul

I was just saying to my producer, I'm in the middle of my next film

when I'm done with this run, we're going to have a different film because what this thing

this live theater of being in a room with a thousand other people every night

What that's already done to me in just these first couple weeks of previews

it's, it's, I can't put it into words right now, but I know it's, I just said, boy, people better

watch out the next movie. My final question is, what do you hope audiences leave with after seeing your show

I hope they feel like they just had an hour and a half of a great night out

You know, first and foremost, I mean, obviously the politics are important, all that stuff

But, you know, people pay a lot of money to come and go to see a show on Broadway

And so my first feeling is I hope they felt that that was worth it

And on the drive home, they are energized by what happened. I heard from a number of them on Twitter and Facebook and that seems to be what going on So that makes me feel people work hard People work very hard And to come to Broadway for a night I mean I made a part of my deal with the Schubert that the entire balcony is

And because I want everybody to be able to come see this. Do you realize in the first year, I'm talking about The Apprentice, by the way, the looks on

your face, you know, he was the host of a show called The Apprentice

How many people in here watch The Apprentice every week? when Donald Trump was on

Can I see a show of one, two, three, four in the balcony

Oh my God. You realize his first year on the air on some of those shows that first season

He had over 40 million viewers. Last week on TV, the largest rated show

was America's Got Talent. Not ironically titled, by the way. It's actually, that's a real show

It had 13.1 million viewers. He had 40 million people watching this

And I realized, I guess this isn't that crowd. But I want to tell you

in between the Hudson River and La Cienica Boulevard, there are a lot of people that loved him

because he knew how to keep it simple, stupid. Right