Musical theater fans loved Mel Brooks’ The Producers, and when I clicked on a Jimmy Kimmel Live! video a few months back and saw Matthew Broderick as Leo Bloom and Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock, I thought it was a scene from that Tony Award winner. They were hatching a scheme to make money — but this time not with a stinker of a Broadway show. Instead, they needed a stinker of a politician.
Leo suggests the pair can make more money from a losing candidate than from a winner. “First we find a bad candidate, then we raise money like crazy. We promise all the donors an ambassadorship to Italy or Sweden or Armenia. Then, when the public figures out what a nutcase our guy is, he drops out of the race.”
Max tunes in: “And we keep all the dough!” The challenge? “He’s got to be the worst candidate in history. A real trainwreck. A schmuck! A putz! A grade-A, world-class, gold-plated nincompoop. Where would we ever find a buffoon like that?”
Cut to a black-and-white TV screen with Donald Trump announcing his candidacy. Max and Leo are over the moon: They’ve found their man.
To their dismay their “foolproof plan” picked the wrong fool, and the world goes mad for the Donald. “How could this happen?” they ask. “What have we done?” A solemn voiceover intones, “A story that starts out funny and then gets really, really depressing.” This six-minute trailer for Trumped was an entertaining piece of humorous fantasia on this year’s presidential campaign. It set me to thinking about how politics often seeps into theater and vice versa.
Not long afterward, I read about how Michael Friedman, who wrote the music and lyrics for Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson (a 2010 New York hit produced by Know Theatre in 2012) followed the 2016 primaries, interviewed voters and turned their words into a song. (Listen to “Mock Caucus” at wnyc.org.) One lyric: “And that’s why we never talk about politics at my house.”
Jackson, America’s seventh president, has been in the news lately because he’s being bumped off the front of the $20 bill in favor of the visage of Harriet Tubman (his image will remain on the other side of the bill). It’s an interesting turn of events, since it was Alexander Hamilton who had been targeted for removal. But America’s first treasurer’s stock has risen considerably in the wake of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton!, the Hip Hop Broadway musical with the Founding Fathers portrayed by actors of color. It has been breaking Broadway records for nearly a year and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama on April 18.
American politics and theater often share the stage. George Gershwin’s 1931 musical about rival political parties fighting over a new national anthem, Of Thee I Sing, was an early example. In the late 1960s, MacBird!, a satire inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, offered a very skeptical tale of Lyndon B. Johnson’s rise to power following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was controversial, coming just a few years after the tragedy of Kennedy’s death, but it’s one more way that the stage held a mirror up to society.
In a more popular vein, the musical 1776, written for the American bicentennial, offered very personal portraits of some of the Founding Fathers as independence was being birthed. The American Dream stands behind a very different work, Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins, about people who, denied what they perceived to be their due, made history through outrageous acts.
Opera also seems to love the drama of politics. John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China (presented by Cincinnati Opera in 2007) reflected a historic international event. Michael John LaChiusa’s recent opera, The First Lady Suite, tells stories of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Bess Truman and Jackie Kennedy. This summer, Cincinnati Opera will present the world premiere of Fellow Travelers, a story about lives affected by anti-gay purges in the federal government during the McCarthy era.
Locally, I enjoyed Beertown, a production at Know Theatre in March. It was the story of a town that reexamines its past every five years to consider the contents of a time capsule by a democratic process. Audience members were invited to weigh in and vote on decisions, meaning the story’s outcome varied from one performance to the next.
Let’s hope that the outcome of our current contest for America’s presidency rises to the challenge of art, rather than low comedy. More democracy and civil dialogue should be the answer. Let’s hope the players live up to our nation’s heritage.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 4, 2016.
