"Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"--The Recount

A windfall of shows descended on Broadway over the past couple of months but it came at a time when many people are still digging out from the recession. So it’s sad but not surprising that shows are closing almost as fast as they’re opening (click here to read my fellow blogger Jonathan Mandell’s excellent rundown of departing shows).  And this week came news that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is going to pack it in on Jan. 2.

I wasn’t a big fan of this satirical musical about the nation’s seventh president when I saw it down at the Public Theater last spring (click here to read my review) but I liked it more when my niece Jennifer and I saw it at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre this week.  

I'll admit that my semi-aboutface was probably influenced by seeing the show with Jennifer this time around. As regular readers know, she can be a far tougher critic than I and not one to mince her words. But she loved this show.  What I had called jejune, she thought hilarious.  What I’d found a sophomoric mishmash, Jennifer, a history nut, considered to be a sophisticated mashup of historical and contemporary events.

But what also won me over this time was the go-for-broke performance that Benjamin Walker gives in the title role. I'd thought he was terrific when I first saw the show but I've become an even bigger fan after learning that Walker, who has been with the show from the very start, turned down a part in one of the “X-Men” movies to bring Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson to Broadway.  It was a noble thing to do and it nearly broke my heart when I watched how unresponsive the audience was the night Jennifer and I saw the show.  But their listlessness didn’t deter Walker. Trouper to the bone, he pumped himself up and performed as though people were standing on their seats and cheering.

I suspect the wrong people were in the house.  The problem is that I have no idea how to get the right people there.  The reviews split right down the middle.  Some folks found the show sublime; others thought it silly. But the audience down at the Public, where tickets were less than half as expensive, was largely young, hip and rowdy in their appreciation. 

The seat warmers at the Jacobs looked to be their grandparents. And I mean that literally. Some of the oldtimers, like the guy sitting next to Jennifer, got into the spirit of things and looked to be having a good time. But too many others were like the woman in front of me, who slouched down in her seat and clearly wished she’d gone to see Promises, Promises instead.

Broadway can’t survive this way.  Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson isn't going to end up on my top 10 list this year but there are some terrific young people doing some adventurous work that other adventurous young people deserve to have the chance to see on Broadway.  But most of them, like Jennifer and my stepdaughter Anika, can’t afford Broadway prices.  It’s not enough just to bring new material to Broadway, someone has got to figure out a way to bring new audiences there too. Because we old diehards are eventually going to die out.

Producers are handicapped by the small size of the old landmark Broadway theaters we all love. Costs go up but the number of seats stay the same. That means ticket prices have to go up.  And that means fewer people can afford to go see a show. Which in turn means that fewer young people are getting in the habit of seeing one. Something’s got to give. 

Here’s a thought: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson runs just 90 minutes.  I wondered if it might have done better if it had offered two performances a night—say one at 6:30, another at 10—and cut the ticket price for each performance in half so that the show’s real target audience could afford to see it.

I know the unions would have to be persuaded to bend all kinds of rules to allow something like that to happen. And it's not my intention to pick on the unions cause I’m married to a longtime member of Local 802. Investor equations would probably have to change too. But unless the folks on the business end start coming up with ideas as imaginative as those on the creative side, Broadway could one day become no more than a memory just like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson will soon be.

"American Idiot" Brings Punk to Broadway

Broadway producers have been conducting a secret guerrilla war over the past year.  Their unsuspecting prey: straight guys in their late 20s to early 40s who usually go to see a musical only when their mom is celebrating a birthday or their girlfriends or wives make attendance a prerequisite for post-show nookie. 

The current revival of Hair, the original rock musical, was the first salvo, although it aimed more at Baby Boomers.  It was quickly followed by Rock of Ages, the boisterous but amiable tribute to the big-haired metal bands of the ‘80s.  There have even been a few outlying skirmishes like the emo-musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that is running at the Public Theater through May 30. 

But last week, they rolled out the heavy artillery: American Idiot, a stage version of the eponymous 2004 concept album by the punk revivalists Green Day opened at the St. James Theatre, where in recent years such Broadway classics as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy have played.

The guys sitting in the row behind my sister Joanne and me probably think of a forum as an internet site where people exchange gripes, a gypsy as a punch line in a Monty Python routine, and a Broadway musical as something to be avoided at all costs. But there they were, four abreast, bottles of beer in hand (the audience is allowed to carry drinks to their seats) and fists pumping in the air as the guitars in the on-stage band screeched the title song that opens the show.

If you’re a diehard traditionalist, you may not like their being there or the show they’re championing.  For this is really more a concert than a musical. The show is nearly all sung through and the lyrics are hard to follow without the album notes in hand or the words emblazoned in your memory from hours of repeat play.

Nor is there much of a book for American Idiot. The sketchy plot (concocted by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and the show’s director Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for the rock-inspired Spring Awakening) follows the lives of three blue collar guys who make bad choices—one becomes a teen dad, another signs up to fight in Iraq and the third is seduced into drugs by a Mephistophelean dealer known as St. Jimmy. (The bar in the St. James lobby has been temporarily named after the dealer and, clueless as I am, I thought at first that it was a play on the theater’s name). 

But if you’re a more free-thinking fan of Broadway musicals then you may find yourself rooting for American Idiot. Its music isn't my genre of choice but I couldn’t help but respond to the enthusiastism of the young folks in the audience. Just as at the Metropolitan Opera House, the most avid and vocal fans are in the cheap seats up in the rafters. And so while, the greyheads around me in the orchestra sat largely stone-faced, the shaggy-haired ones in the balcony cheered after each number (click here to watch some highlights from the show).     

Even I appreciated how Mayer pulled all kinds of tricks out of his hat (including aerial ballets) to camouflage the missing narrative. Christine Jones’ arresting set design is anchored by three dozen TV screens of different sizes that attempt to supply a storyline with news images from the last decade. 

The energetic 19-member cast, lead by Spring Awakening’s John Gallagher, Jr. and the lovely and affective Rebecca Naomi Jones from Passing Strange, barely stops moving throughout the show’s 90 minutes, although I wish Steven Hoggett’s choreography had been less derivative of the moves Bill T. Jones did for Spring Awakening.  I also wish Mayer had treated the black male characters less stereotypically; if the black guy in one number in the second act had a larger codpiece it might have poked me in the eye and I was sitting in the eighth row.

Green Day’s melodies, including some of the band's other songs interpolated into the score, are catchy enough but, at heart, this is a jukebox musical, which means what book there is has to be gerrymandered around the songs. I wish Armstrong (who has professed to have been a show-tune geek as a kid) and his bandmates had written an original score. But judging from the response of the guys sitting behind me, the show seems well on its way to winning the hearts and minds of its target audience. 

A Vote Against "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"

There seems to be no higher compliment these days than to call someone a “rock star.”  So I suppose Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, the creators of the new satirical musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which is currently playing at The Public Theater, thought it was damn clever when they hit on the idea of portraying the nation’s seventh president as a self-luminous emo rocker.

Emo, for the uninitiated, is a kind of punk music that specializes in self-consciously, self-pitying teen angst. “Life sucks and my life sucks in particular,” goes a lyric from the show. Which pretty much sums up the music’s philosophy and the musical’s world view, particularly about American politics.

The show’s flamboyantly anachronistic Andrew Jackson is a pouty frat boy who addresses his cabinet members as “bro” and bounds into the audience to give women lap dances. He makes references to Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag.  He is simultaneously too smart and too dumb for his own good.  And so is this show. (Click here to see a trailer that I find more enjoyable than the show itself.)

 Benjamin Walker gives a rock-star making performance of his own in the title role. And its bloodiness is meant literally as well as metaphorically; the real-life Jackson was not only a battle-scarred veteran of many wars but, it seems, regularly bled himself. Timbers, who has directed the show as Grand Guignol, takes advantage of that to regularly splatter Walker with blood.  

Tall, dark and hunky, Walker sings well and is amply endowed with lots of can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him charisma.  But his portrayal bears very little resemblance to Old Hickory, as Jackson was nicknamed in tribute to his toughness.

Besides the fact that his face is on the $20 bill, the main thing I knew about Jackson before seeing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson came from a story in my old elementary school textbook that told how, as an early populist, he declared the White House to be the People’s House and opened its doors to the public, only to have them trash the place.

The musical taught me more stuff about him—that he was a relentless Indian fighter but adopted and raised an Indian son; that like Al Gore, he won the popular vote in his first presidential election but lost the office when the Senate awarded it to John Quincy Adams; that he may have been involved in bigamy because his wife probably hadn’t divorced her first husband before marrying him, causing Jackson to fight numerous duels to defend her honor.

All interesting stuff, and all fodder for the show’s mocking humor, which, in essence, trashes Jackson all over again. Still, the reviews for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson have largely been raves, with the critics hailing it as trenchant commentary on everything from the George W. Bush presidency to the rise of the current populist-driven Tea Party movement (click here to see the reviews on StageGrade). Maybe I’m just getting old but Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson seemed more like jejune hijinks to me.

I get that the Great Man approach to history no longer works (a history teacher-narrator is literally trashed during the show) and that we need to face up to the wrongdoings (the enslavement of blacks, the genocidal wars against the Indians, the disenfranchisement of women) in the nation’s past.  I’m no flag-waving red stater either. But I do wonder what kind of nation we’ll be in the future if all we can do is find fault with or make fun of who were and who we are. Isn't there some middle ground between the hagiography of the past and the they're all hacks attitude of the present?

As the twentysomething young women sitting behind my pal Bill and me whooped with laughter at the antics on stage, I wondered if they had any idea of what figures like Jackson had done to shape this nation (and in Jackson's case, the Democratic Party) as well as the liberties we all now take for granted. And I was pretty sure that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson wouldn’t enlighten them.