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James Madison said something prescient about this, but he was kind of a dick
As it turned out, I was fighting off a new cold. It did not prevent me from attending a housewarming party on Sunday, seeing Ray Harryhausen's It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday, or buying two new kinds of honey (sunflower and avocado blossom) from Follow the Honey with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel on Tuesday, but the rest of the time it pretty much flattened me. I am currently skeptical of my ability to stay awake much longer, which might be a good thing. But I did get out last night to meet Rob for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the SpeakEasy Stage, and even if we hadn't managed to hit The Salty Pig for dinner beforehand and Finale afterward for dessert, it would still have been an entirely worthwhile evening.
Writing tohandful_ofdust this afternoon, I glossed the show as "a fascinating failure of a musical" and I don't think that's giving it shorter shrift than it deserves. I would nevertheless encourage anyone who finds themselves around a local production to check it out, because it's one of the most Brechtian things I've ever encountered on a stage and unlike most musicals with a punk-rock conceit, its songs are actually as catchy and thrashy as they're supposed to be and they're good. (A fragment with one of my favorite lines here. I want a recording. [edit] derspatchel found me one!) Structurally, it's a gleeful and merciless takedown of the history pageant. We open with a narrator and a small collection of characters engaged in traditional frontier activities like stirring soup, mending shoes, and intoning earnest scene-setting infodump: it's all very Ken Burns-lite until the cobbler accidentally suggests that hardscrabble Tennessee might compare unfavorably to the rich cities of the American Northeast and the next thing we know Jackson Sr. is holding the poor fucker down in his own soup pot while he screams things like "Holy fuck! My face is literally melting off on my fucking hands!" and thirty seconds after that Jackson's mother is dead of cholera (the lights gel blue for a second), Jackson's father keels over with a plastic arrow sucker-tipped to his back (Indian raids), and the teenaged Andrew is left to wander upstage for a numb, shocked moment and then start bitching about his life into the microphone some thoughtful stagehand dropped off stage left: "Life sucks! And my life sucks in particular!" This will be the prevailing tone of the rest of the show. Any time the script remembers there's a fourth wall, it knees it in the nuts. And it has a perfect excuse for its metatheater: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson's genius is to present our seventh president as an anachronistic, literal rock star of a politician, rising to power in early nineteenth century America on the strength of his badass swagger and his tight black jeans and his willingness to—nay, inability not to—meet the world as if all its problems can be solved by shooting them in the face. (Sic transit the narrator, in fact, about half an hour into the show when Jackson decides he doesn't like the idea of his life being laid out in advance for him. I was impressed; I had expected her to make at least the halfway mark of Sondheim's Assassins or Into the Woods. Nope. The band takes over her duties with a slightly embarrassed collective shrug—this sort of thing happens when your frontman met his wife through their shared fetish for medicinal bleeding.) He's sympathetic in his love for Rachel and for Lyncoya, the Creek infant he adopts off a battlefield and sends home to his wife at the Hermitage as a kind of apology for the children and stability he's never been able to give her; he's chilling in his treatment of Native Americans otherwise, as the song "Ten Little Indians" (the singer doing the best Amanda Palmer impression I've ever seen from anyone who still had her own eyebrows) counts down crooked deals and depopulation and treachery and despair; he has a skinny-shinned emo charisma and the show never confuses his mix of hotheaded impatience and restless yearning with an excuse for Manifest Destiny, although as a personification of adolescent America, he doesn't make a bad metaphor at all.
This works beautifully while tracing Jackson's trajectory to the White House. We get anthems like "Populism, Yea, Yea!" and backwoods constituents staving off moonshine blackout just long enough to endorse, "There's a candidate I'd really like to have a beer with," campaign promises that start "I will be good at what you ask me to do, wise when it is required of me, and always stop when you use the safeword" and stump speeches that conclude "We're going to walk right up to President Monroe's house and we're going to show him that the name 'Old Hickory' does not pertain only to the length and girth of my penis—it also pertains to the inflexible and unyielding brand of populism we're going to shove four and a half inches up his ass!" (Stadium concert roar.) It's a sharp, snarky translation of historical issues into political cartoons without dumbing them down; it allows the show to use Jackson as a commentary on contemporary politics while illuminating his character with examples more pop-culturally close to home, even including a shout-out to Reagan's "Morning in America." The problem is that it cannot, after a certain point, sustain the weight of history. There's a wonderful over-the-top satire in presenting Monroe's old-guard administration as a bunch of preening queens in nineteenth-century waistcoats and twenty-first-century glitter (I have a particular admiration for Henry Clay's weasel coat) who come onstage in a cameraflash of runway poses and play out the "corrupt bargain" of 1824 with the petulance of toddlers and the bump and grind of Chicago. You cannot run the same gag on the Trail of Tears. And to the show's credit, it doesn't try, but it doesn't work out any other solution, either. The further it goes into Jackson's presidency—his wife's death, the nullification crisis, the Indian Removal Act—the more it begins to feel as though it simply never figured out how to handle the very real darkness that haunts not just those few years in the nineteenth century, but all America's past and present after; it just sort of stops, and breaks, and the actors come out for their hollering, ska-stomping curtain call of "The Hunters of Kentucky" and this time it doesn't feel like a deliberate dislocation of audience expectations, it feels like the writers just not knowing what the fuck. I thought it might have broken less if it had been willing to follow through from entertaining antiheroism into full-on pitch-black if-you-laugh-it's-only-so-you-don't-kill-someone, but Rob thought that would just have alienated whatever audience had survived the swerve into tragedy. You can tell they're trying. A song called "Second Nature" reflects on the myth of the empty land merely waiting for the settlers to make it grow. Monroe's ghost dismisses Jackson's last speech to the graduating class of Harvard with a snorted "Some people never change," while Martin Van Buren pipes up apologetically, "I thought he had an arc!" The dead narrator, roller-skating in from the wings with a spring-bobbing halo and a cardboard harp, tells Jackson that some historians have referred to him as an "American Hitler" and when he grimaces, hurt but still oblivious—"I really thought history would vindicate me"—snaps back tartly, "You don't shoot history in the neck." But these are not coherent gestures; they're not even as effective Verfremdungseffekt as Jackson dismissing his cabinet and appointing the band to handle his paperwork. The first two-thirds are terrific gonzo punk musical, but it still ends in fuck this is depressing what do we do now? All these reservations in mind, however, I am still very glad to have seen it.
There are just not that many musicals that afford the opportunity for someone to yell "And James Monroe was a douchebag!" Especially when, in context, you can't disagree.
derspatchel on Tuesday, but the rest of the time it pretty much flattened me. I am currently skeptical of my ability to stay awake much longer, which might be a good thing. But I did get out last night to meet Rob for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the SpeakEasy Stage, and even if we hadn't managed to hit The Salty Pig for dinner beforehand and Finale afterward for dessert, it would still have been an entirely worthwhile evening.Writing to
handful_ofdust this afternoon, I glossed the show as "a fascinating failure of a musical" and I don't think that's giving it shorter shrift than it deserves. I would nevertheless encourage anyone who finds themselves around a local production to check it out, because it's one of the most Brechtian things I've ever encountered on a stage and unlike most musicals with a punk-rock conceit, its songs are actually as catchy and thrashy as they're supposed to be and they're good. (A fragment with one of my favorite lines here. I want a recording. [edit] derspatchel found me one!) Structurally, it's a gleeful and merciless takedown of the history pageant. We open with a narrator and a small collection of characters engaged in traditional frontier activities like stirring soup, mending shoes, and intoning earnest scene-setting infodump: it's all very Ken Burns-lite until the cobbler accidentally suggests that hardscrabble Tennessee might compare unfavorably to the rich cities of the American Northeast and the next thing we know Jackson Sr. is holding the poor fucker down in his own soup pot while he screams things like "Holy fuck! My face is literally melting off on my fucking hands!" and thirty seconds after that Jackson's mother is dead of cholera (the lights gel blue for a second), Jackson's father keels over with a plastic arrow sucker-tipped to his back (Indian raids), and the teenaged Andrew is left to wander upstage for a numb, shocked moment and then start bitching about his life into the microphone some thoughtful stagehand dropped off stage left: "Life sucks! And my life sucks in particular!" This will be the prevailing tone of the rest of the show. Any time the script remembers there's a fourth wall, it knees it in the nuts. And it has a perfect excuse for its metatheater: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson's genius is to present our seventh president as an anachronistic, literal rock star of a politician, rising to power in early nineteenth century America on the strength of his badass swagger and his tight black jeans and his willingness to—nay, inability not to—meet the world as if all its problems can be solved by shooting them in the face. (Sic transit the narrator, in fact, about half an hour into the show when Jackson decides he doesn't like the idea of his life being laid out in advance for him. I was impressed; I had expected her to make at least the halfway mark of Sondheim's Assassins or Into the Woods. Nope. The band takes over her duties with a slightly embarrassed collective shrug—this sort of thing happens when your frontman met his wife through their shared fetish for medicinal bleeding.) He's sympathetic in his love for Rachel and for Lyncoya, the Creek infant he adopts off a battlefield and sends home to his wife at the Hermitage as a kind of apology for the children and stability he's never been able to give her; he's chilling in his treatment of Native Americans otherwise, as the song "Ten Little Indians" (the singer doing the best Amanda Palmer impression I've ever seen from anyone who still had her own eyebrows) counts down crooked deals and depopulation and treachery and despair; he has a skinny-shinned emo charisma and the show never confuses his mix of hotheaded impatience and restless yearning with an excuse for Manifest Destiny, although as a personification of adolescent America, he doesn't make a bad metaphor at all.This works beautifully while tracing Jackson's trajectory to the White House. We get anthems like "Populism, Yea, Yea!" and backwoods constituents staving off moonshine blackout just long enough to endorse, "There's a candidate I'd really like to have a beer with," campaign promises that start "I will be good at what you ask me to do, wise when it is required of me, and always stop when you use the safeword" and stump speeches that conclude "We're going to walk right up to President Monroe's house and we're going to show him that the name 'Old Hickory' does not pertain only to the length and girth of my penis—it also pertains to the inflexible and unyielding brand of populism we're going to shove four and a half inches up his ass!" (Stadium concert roar.) It's a sharp, snarky translation of historical issues into political cartoons without dumbing them down; it allows the show to use Jackson as a commentary on contemporary politics while illuminating his character with examples more pop-culturally close to home, even including a shout-out to Reagan's "Morning in America." The problem is that it cannot, after a certain point, sustain the weight of history. There's a wonderful over-the-top satire in presenting Monroe's old-guard administration as a bunch of preening queens in nineteenth-century waistcoats and twenty-first-century glitter (I have a particular admiration for Henry Clay's weasel coat) who come onstage in a cameraflash of runway poses and play out the "corrupt bargain" of 1824 with the petulance of toddlers and the bump and grind of Chicago. You cannot run the same gag on the Trail of Tears. And to the show's credit, it doesn't try, but it doesn't work out any other solution, either. The further it goes into Jackson's presidency—his wife's death, the nullification crisis, the Indian Removal Act—the more it begins to feel as though it simply never figured out how to handle the very real darkness that haunts not just those few years in the nineteenth century, but all America's past and present after; it just sort of stops, and breaks, and the actors come out for their hollering, ska-stomping curtain call of "The Hunters of Kentucky" and this time it doesn't feel like a deliberate dislocation of audience expectations, it feels like the writers just not knowing what the fuck. I thought it might have broken less if it had been willing to follow through from entertaining antiheroism into full-on pitch-black if-you-laugh-it's-only-so-you-don't-kill-someone, but Rob thought that would just have alienated whatever audience had survived the swerve into tragedy. You can tell they're trying. A song called "Second Nature" reflects on the myth of the empty land merely waiting for the settlers to make it grow. Monroe's ghost dismisses Jackson's last speech to the graduating class of Harvard with a snorted "Some people never change," while Martin Van Buren pipes up apologetically, "I thought he had an arc!" The dead narrator, roller-skating in from the wings with a spring-bobbing halo and a cardboard harp, tells Jackson that some historians have referred to him as an "American Hitler" and when he grimaces, hurt but still oblivious—"I really thought history would vindicate me"—snaps back tartly, "You don't shoot history in the neck." But these are not coherent gestures; they're not even as effective Verfremdungseffekt as Jackson dismissing his cabinet and appointing the band to handle his paperwork. The first two-thirds are terrific gonzo punk musical, but it still ends in fuck this is depressing what do we do now? All these reservations in mind, however, I am still very glad to have seen it.
There are just not that many musicals that afford the opportunity for someone to yell "And James Monroe was a douchebag!" Especially when, in context, you can't disagree.
no subject
I thought it might have broken less if it had been willing to follow through from entertaining antiheroism into full-on pitch-black if-you-laugh-it's-only-so-you-don't-kill-someone, but Rob thought that would just have alienated whatever audience had survived the swerve into tragedy. Interesting. There's the history you want to tell, the type of theater you're hoping to offer, and then there's whether the audience can ride the horse you're providing (... because horse metaphors are what happen first think in the morning? I don't know...)
(the singer doing the best Amanda Palmer impression I've ever seen from anyone who still had her own eyebrows) Hah!
no subject
It didn't solve the second half's book problem, but it was a nice touch and a good way of illustrating Jackson's immediate legacy.
no subject