The Chris Moeller Archives

Mr. Vice-President Elect, you can't say Broadway doesn't love you

I wouldn’t say it’s a fair comparison to connect Mike Pence’s night at Hamilton to Abe Lincoln's night at the Ford Theater in 1865, but leave it to Rush Limbaugh to do such a dumb thing. Pence getting a lecture from a performer on stage has nothing in common with John Wilkes Booth assassinating our finest president, but it does have a little in common with the part where Booth jumped on stage at the Ford after the shooting and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis”-- Latin for death always to tyrants. Both acts carry some self-aggrandizing showbiz pizzazz.

As I’ve written, I’m all for protest, and for speaking truth to power, but good lord, what an ineffective stunt, swaying absolutely nobody anywhere from their current position on the matter of the vice president-elect, including the vice president-elect. Could we have been presented with a more-fitting encapsulation of the shortcomings of the modern Democratic Party in one emboldened action? Hamilton- An American Musical is a Broadway show almost universally beloved by the minuscule, insular elite segment of the population that goes to Broadway shows. Mere accessibility to the show itself costs hundreds of dollars, and this makes it utterly unknown, except perhaps by reputation, to almost the entire rest of the United States. I don’t give a rat’s butt about Mike Pence’s feelings-- he's generally a cretin, and I’m sure he didn’t even pay for the seat (itself a commentary about such events), but now he’s been martyred before America because of the perception of bad manners.

I get that the Broadway theater community represents a “safe place” for many marginalized Americans, especially in the aftermath of what to them is a terrifying election result, but another word for the safe place is “cocoon.” And while it’s impossible to imagine a verbal lecture from a Broadway stage directed at a member of Team Hillary, backing a candidate that came out in support for gay marriage the same week that Bill O'Reilly did, it's much easier for me to envision one directed at a Jill Stein supporter that supposedly didn’t do his or her part to prevent Trump from getting to the White House. Debra Messing presents one almost every day on Twitter. Last Friday, Mike Pence. This Friday, Susan Sarandon.

I said it last week. I’ll say it again-- but you can’t expect this free advice to continue forever: This shit needs to be a dialogue (said the lonely blogger). Monologues don't sway. Almost nobody could tell you, almost a week later, what Brandon Victor Dixon actually said to Pence in his post-performance address, breaking character as Aaron Burr. They only know the vague fact that he confronted him with a message via microphone and that Pence didn't have a microphone of his own. Dixon needs to know beforehand, since this was all orchestrated as part of the night of theater, that this is would be the likely outcome, and appreciate how the current national discussion will frame the occurrence. Nuance will be lost, and it was. Hamilton, a show dedicated-- ironically-- to the man that gave America the Electoral College, alleges to be a comedy show. I haven’t seen it, and again, only a cult-size sliver of the American population has, but along with those in the much larger group of Americans, I did catch the gist that the address to Pence wasn't funny at all. Dixon told CBS This Morning on Monday that, if you go to their political show, you should expect politics. It seems to me you should also expect comedy so the harangue was not exactly a natural extension of the show's tone.

Here’s another way to break down the disconnect I’m describing. We'll examine the first post-election episode of Saturday Night Live that aired on November 12th. Dave Chappelle’s stand-up performance was spectacular-- funny, pointed, nuanced, effective-- but then we've always been at the mercy of stand-up comics to be our national truth-tellers. Actors, conversely, are always, well... acting. Immediately preceding Chappelle's open was SNL cast mate Kate McKinnon in her Hillary Clinton drag singing a mournful song by the late Leonard Cohen, performing at a piano in the key of tragedy, intentionally mirroring the cold open the show presented just after the 9/11 attacks, as if to say that we have just been attacked again. This was preachy, petulant, extremely presumptuous about the show's audience, mistaking political angst for actual suffering, and purposefully humorless yet laughable. Whether McKinnon and the other players were aware of it or not, the Chappelle/Chris Rock sketch that arrived later in the evening was mocking the same sort of melodrama that McKinnon was engaged in during the open. If I wanted to experience a televised pity party that reinforced by own political beliefs, and still continue to dismiss the concerns of anybody else, while also not laughing, I would watch the Samantha Bee show. For what it's worth also, equating the death of Hillary Clinton's recreant political career with Cohen's actual death was a disgusting misappropriation of his work, and it took place only two days after he passed. The lyrics she adopted to Clinton's political cause actually included the line (here, Moeller stifles a laugh), I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya'.

It's just two weeks out. Hillary’s team is still in the denial phase of our rejection of their candidate so this has the potential to fade, but I reiterate my doubts that it will. The continuing trend of blaming their defeat on everybody but the candidate and her campaign is not a positive indicator. The most dangerous of these assessments are the ones that continue to dwell on the fact that the Democrat claimed a majority of the popular vote. If the party continues to believe that fact justifies a continuation of the same, perhaps best represented by the efforts we’re reading about now regarding the Obama administration’s efforts to keep Keith Ellison from becoming the new party chair, then they’re in for another hard lesson to be learned. And the hardest lessons don't get delivered from a New York stage, they get delivered via the ballot box.

posted by CM @ 9:09 PM