It’s easy for an old actor like me to get depressed about the current state of commercial theater. Broadway seems to have been taken over by corporate interests and slumming movie and television stars. A cursory look at the Internet Broadway Database (www.ibdb.com) can be disheartening: Is there anything there that’s not a rock concert, a Disney franchise, or a revival?
I’m happy to report that Broadway is getting a scandalous blast of fresh air this week in the form of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a new musical by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman about our charismatic but highly controversial seventh President.
This is a crazy which show comes to Broadway from the downtown New York theater group Les Freres Corbusier. LFC is, according to their press materials, “devoted to aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, sophomoric humor and rigorous academic research.” Uh, so noted.
Your immersion into the world of this show begins the moment you enter into Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Donyale Werle’s set design spills off of the stage and engulfs the entire theater with an anarchic melange of frontier, rock and roll, and, well, blood. (Example: I was sitting almost directly underneath a suspended, full-sized, upside-down pony. No, don’t ask why.)
Blood? Yep. The galaxy of tiny red lights that fill the space set you up for one of the main themes of the evening. More on that below.
When the show begins, the young cast of fourteen (plus three on-stage musicians) take the stage with an aggressive swagger and high-octane energy that doesn’t let up for the next hour and forty minutes.
The best way I can describe the delightful show that follows is a combination of history class meets SCTV, blended together in a gumbo of rock and roll and classic burlesque theatrics.
Burlesque? Let me be clear. I mean the traditional sense of burlesque; that is, an entertainment style that characterized by extremely broad, even grotesque, parody, and short, staccato rhythms.
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson tells the story of Old Hickory through a series of raucous sketches and songs. It traces Jackson’s history from his rough-and-ready childhood on the Indian-plagued frontier to his military heroics and ultimately his political triumphs.
Benjamin Walker as Jackson has gotten a lot of buzz, much of it about how hot he is. In addition, the producers are aggressively marketing the sexy quotient of BBAJ, down to the blurb on the show’s poster – “History just got all sexypants, ” not to mention that the poster itself is a blatant rip-off of the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA album.
This approach may help sell tickets, but I think it’s selling the show, and Walker, short. Walker is certainly an attractive leading man, and he can pull off the form-fitting outfits the costumer has put him in with aplomb. But mostly he’s just good. It’s a demanding role that allows him to display a dizzying range as a performer. Like the rest of the show, his performance is funny, sad and smart.
One of the main weapons in the show’s arsenal is a cheerful sense of offensiveness. Far from trying to clean up the less politically correct aspects of Jackson’s character, BBAJ positively revels in them, and in fact goes out of its way to offend in any other way it can. This kind of humor – offensive jokes that are funny not because of their specific content but because of their sheer offensiveness – are right up my alley. Not everyone in the audience agreed, however. I heard several disapproving mutters from the theater patron sitting next to me as I guffawed at the tasteless fun the show has with the show’s studious narrator character (a hilarious
Kristine Nielsen).
As mentioned above, the show makes sure you think of Jackson as being drenched in blood.
I’m pretty sure the love song between Jackson and his true love Rachel is the first one I’ve ever seen in which the lovers are covered in blood by the last stanza.
As a production, BBAJ is a remarkable piece of controlled chaos. The feeling of spontaneity is palpable: songs and scenes regularly get interrupted or even completely derailed. The cast is uniformly nimble, strong, and convincing throughout all of the mayhem. I also could actually understand what they were saying and singing, which is more than I can say for other current shows (COUGH*Next to Normal*COUGH). Much credit for the antic and intense staging to director Alex Timbers.
Another genius thing the show does is to make the political world of the early 19th Century feel startlingly, alarmingly, familiar. Far from being a golden age of innocence, the show makes clear that politics and statecraft have always been a corrupt, rigged game. Playing Monroe, Van Buren, and Clay, respectively, Ben Steinfeld, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe and Bryce Pinkham regularly stop the show with their broad and brave clowning. And special mention must be made of Jeff Hiller, who turns John Quincy Adams into an astonishingly funny cartoon.
But the most transporting accomplishment of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is the fact that, well before the end of the show, you realize that the main character of the play isn’t really Andrew Jackson. It’s us. Jackson is merely a stand-in for a nation of people who have always believed two things: 1) We are the nice guy; the good guy; we believe in freedom and liberty; and 2) What we want, we REALLY want, and we’re going to take it, no matter what. The sad truth underlying the gonzo humor of the show is that these two beliefs are, of course, mutually contradictory, which means that our proxy Jackson is, like us, both guilty and insane.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of theater that more devastatingly explored the American character than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. I highly recommend you get to the Jacobs Theater posthaste and see it.
