A Night Out

Here's an odd piece in The New York Times by Christopher Isherwood lamenting the closing of three Broadway productions set in the past and featuring political themes. He's afraid they were too challenging.  As he puts it,

none of these adventurous shows come from the staid, talking-diorama school of theater represented by such recent productions as the revival of “Inherit the Wind” and Aaron Sorkin’s “Farnsworth Invention,” presenting history as a comfortable stroll through a sepia-tinted, safely processed past.

Odd, since these two works both ran approximately three months, about the same time as the three failures.  So I have to ask if Isherwood has been paying attention--most plays fail on Broadway.  It's the handul of hits each season which pay the electric bills.

Worse, he's blaming the audience.  They may not be perfect, but they know when they're entertained.  Why should they be asked to cough up $100 dollars a ticket plus incidentals if they don't enjoy themselves?  Apparently word got out these shows didn't deliver.  Maybe they'd have been better served at smaller, cheaper venues.  Or maybe they were no good.

What shows?  Two musicals, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Scottsboro Boys, plus John Guare's latest comedy, A Free Man Of Color.  The first is about America's populist President and the forced removal of Indians.  The Scottsboro Boys, of course, is about the black teenagers in the 1930s who were railroaded into rape convictions.  A Free Man Of Color is set during the Louisiana Purchase and deals with how it helped spread racism.

I haven't seen any of them.  Maybe they're as stimulating as Isherwood claims. But from his descriptions, I can imagine better ways to spend a few hundred bucks for a night out.

For instance, Guare's play is a mix of political satire and sex farce:

Mr. Guare freely mixes blunt lampooning with more sober portraiture in depicting the various statesman [...] Napoleon is portrayed as a bratty egotist who views France’s West Indian properties as a laundry. (He enters in a bathtub.) Toussaint L’Ouverture, on the other hand, the leader of a populist revolt in the French colony of Santo Domingo (later Haiti), might have stepped forth from a Black History Month pageant, with his ringing orations on the evils of tyranny.

I don't know.  The whole thing sounds woozy, and even if the farce works (though it's Isherwoods least favorite part), the last thing it needs is to be interrupted by lectures.

Here's another weird note:

Mr. Guare also strikes a sharp contemporary note when Napoleon, having ceded the Louisiana Territory for the then exorbitant sum of $15 million, predicts that the rapidly expanding country will be riven by irresolvable conflict. “No country can be this big and survive,” he sniffs.

That's contemporary?  Maybe in 1860.  If Guare means this as a cutting thrust, then it's not only your classic bad anachronistic writing in a period piece, it's also wrong.  But maybe the line is there to show what an idiot Napoleon was, and Isherwood doesn't get it.

The Scottsboro story has been dealt with dramatically before, but this time it

...engages [...] more bluntly, and daringly, with winking stereotypes of American culture. The story of one of the most brutal miscarriages of justice in the history of American jurisprudence is presented within the frame of a minstrel show, the disgraced theatrical tradition that traded in outrageous comic caricatures of African-Americans.

I suppose it could work, but even with a score by Kander and Ebb, it sounds like one of those one-note ideas that uses an alienation effect to send a message though ironic presentation. (Come to think of it, this is one of Kander and Ebb's favorite strategies, and I've never especially liked it even when they did it well.)

I haven't seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, but I've heard the score.  Once again, we have anachronism and blatant message in place of subtlety (but don't you get it, stating things obviously through emo rock is what makes it so clever!).



The tunes are actually quite catchy, but if the whole show is like the lyrics, then it's poorly written and fairly childish.  But Isherwood practically falls over himself praising how it comments on today's world:

...this Andrew Jackson is the public figure as American idol and empty vessel for popular dissatisfaction, and, as such, is a clear emissary from the current moment. “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” panders cheerfully to the taste for ribald humor that is a primary ingredient in the more frat-boyish elements of late-night comedy. But there is a more mature intelligence at work in the show’s overriding architecture and its analysis of the American scene, then and now.

[The show's creators] evince a canny (and sometimes uncanny) ability to draw connections between the messy, polarized politics of the early 19th century and the last few years of posturing in Washington and on the various Main Streets across America where the malaise of Average Joes is honed to a pitchfork-sharp point by media commentators and Tea Party candidates.

So let me get this straight.  Politics was ugly, dirty and dishonest in the past, and guess what, it still is.

The show was developed and first performed during the Bush years, but thank goodness since then the Tea Party arose to save Isherwood.  After all, an "empty vessel for popular dissatisfaction" so clearly applies to Bush and all those Tea Party candidates, but no one in between.