Ring Around the Bushies
While everyone on the left-furious over the staggering, murderous and cynical ineptitude of the Bush Administration-talks about how awful it is that America has become an Orwellian nightmare, I'm unsure. Wasn't it Orwell who foresaw us sitting at movies and becoming so vexed that we'd purge all that vitriol?
Bush is Bad and Bush Wars are musicals, of course, not films, so maybe the chemistry is different. Still, when I was finished watching these two productions-which I saw on successive nights-I felt so much better.
Each piece appeals to my raging inner Democrat differently. In 80 minutes, Joshua Rosenbloom's Bush is Bad (cutely subtitled "The Musical Cure or the Blue-state Blues"), at the Triad, featured Kate Baldwin, Neal Mayer and Michael McCoy in the satirical equivalent of basketball-consistently shooting and scoring.
"How Can 59 Million People Be So Dumb?" the ensemble sings at the top. "I May Be Gay (But I'm No Lesbian)" warbles Mary Cheney, pussycat in hand. There's McCoy as Barbara Bush in precious post-Katrina mode, singing something about "15,000 Negroes." There's the dream of "chimpeachment," but perhaps only if we can rail against the ravings of a certain neurological nuisance-call her "Crazy Ann Coulter." Without her, without the Bushes, maybe a song called "Culture of Life" wouldn't be so poignant.
True, Rosenbloom's satire could be even more pointed-one senses he is content to merely prick when what we may be hoping for is an aortic embolism. Yet wherever he wants to go, his cast is game and willing to join in, especially energetic Mayer-a musical-comedy sprite surely in search of a stage to call his own.
Bush Wars, while not quite an embolism either, does draw several pints of blood. Running through April 16 at the Rattlestick Theatre, the production is directed and choreographed by Jay Falzone and is written by Nancy Holson. Together, the team previously created The News in Revue, a send-up that predates The Daily Show in tone, time and spirit, and still runs in that bluest of blue states, Massachusetts (Lenox, to be exact).
Not all the gags are equally funny, but Holson and Falzone do land some (let's pick a new metaphor) sucker-punches, such as when Jason Levinson, playing a bumbling George W. in the prime of his wayward youth, bluntly acknowledges, "I'm a fuck up." Later, safely ensconced in the sacred Oval Office, we see him reading "Warfare for Dummies," and while that's something of an obvious joke, it does warm-up the crowd.
One minor quibble might be that Holson largely bases the musical numbers on well-known tunes, and that leads to the fear, now and then, that some shoehorning-forcing a song unintended for satire to work as satire-is going on.
A bit about Karl Rove set to an old Melissa Manchester tune ("Don't Lie Out Loud") is a rim-shot: sing the title, you're done. A duet for W. and Jesus Christ ("Bosom Buddies"), an ensemble song for the Supreme Court ("Stop in the Name of Us") and another ensemble bit for those folks in New Orleans ("When the Saints Go Marching Out")-would all benefit from quick encounters with Ginsu knives.
Yet such moments are relatively rare. There's Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist, played brilliantly by Falzone in medical garb, emerging to sing "See You, Feel You, Heal You" like the demented lovechild of Boris Karloff and Groucho Marx. His number is interspersed with convulsively funny audience interactions in which Frist, half-mad on meds or perhaps just drunk on power, attempts to diagnose almost everyone in the theater; he commands one audience member to repeat the words "tits," "balls" and "donkey dick" before pronouncing her as afflicted with Tourette's syndrome-oh, and then there's Terri Schiavo on stage, alive but dead.
When W. takes his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, to the Olive Garden for Mother's Day, who do they meet but Osama bin Laden and, I presume, his mother. Like the Jets and the Sharks readying for a rumble, there's a showdown, all set to a re-written version of "America" from West Side Story and complete with blissfully amusing choreography that turns the diminutive stage into a ballet that mocks the neo-con con that is our current government.
I also like to be in America, we think afterward; one free of presidential malaprops, one free of political chicanery gussied up as a war on terror. I'd like to be in an America, I think, without any Bushes at all.