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So, in "The Madness," Bush 43 rails xenophobically against "tourists an' brown folks who come to America and do real bad things. So we are having a War on Tourism." He chest-thumps that "I'm the elected President. [Pause.] I'm the President." He approves a Project for the New American Century — PNAC — which is a euphemism for the Plan for Nukin' Arab Countries. His advisers are out of "Reservoir Dogs," tough guys with color-coded names. (Donald Rumsfeld, who calls anyone opposing him "a cheese-eatin' surrender monkey," is "Mr. Black.") They sing "Dixie" with new lyrics: "Look away,/ Look away,/ Let's all play/ Kick Saddam."
In the play, as in the war, Bush the Conqueror abuses staunch allies and critical ones. He treats Tony Blair — Tony Bleer in the play — with the easy contempt any he-man Texan would lavish on any nellie Brit. On hearing that chemical weapons have been found in the Moselle, he sternly advises the French people to "Lay down your weapons, as you did in 1940," and proclaims, "My quarrel is not with you, but with your evil leader, Jacques Iraq." (That pun will be familiar to "Daily Show" viewers.)
The show also notes the Administration's bizarre act of transference, from Osama to Saddam, and nails it to the War Room wall. The play's Bush and his Caligari cabinet of advisers conflate names and nations — "Saddama bin Laden," "Pak-arabistan," "Iraqistan," "Talibanistan" — to demonstrate both their ignorance and their willful distortion of geopolitics.
The play's one original, articulate and provocative moment comes in Act II, when an Iraqi makes a passionate speech about his country's sorrows at Western hands. He describes the creation of his nation as a British whim, and notes that in 1937 (actually the spring of 1941) the U.K. bombed Iraq, forced its ruler to flee and installed a puppet monarch. "Saddam," the man says, "is the child of Western policy." He blames the U.S. for the 80s' Iran-Iraq War, in which, he says, "a million more Iraqis died." (The accepted number is a million from both countries.) He derisively dismisses the charge that Iraq hoarded WMD: "We will shoot down your missiles with, what — a large catapult? UNSCOM took all our fucking weapons."
Now that the invasion is a success, what can Bush (whom the Iraqi calls the "Thief-in-Chief") claim credit for? Two things: "the looting of our hospitals, libraries, museums — 5,000 years of history destroyed, so you can work your imperial delusions." And the assurance of worldwide terrorism. The result, the Iraqi says, will be not democracy but the "crowning achievement of Western civilization: jihad."
"Dubya" has another spokesperson for the Arab side: Yasmina the Cleaner, a terrorist for peace. Yasmina proposes to kill all the Bush biggies unless they agree to her five-part plan: a Palestinian state; the liberation of Chechnya and Vladimir Putin's trial as a war criminal; free AIDS treatment for Africans; U.S. approval of the Kyoto Accord; and fair trade (a bit of an anticlimax, that one). The Bushies refuse, the world blows up and the company sings Tom Lehrer's nuclear-incineration march, "We Will All Go Together When We Go."
There, now, is everyone offended? "George Dubya" closes August 23. But, I'm assured by a source close to the White House, the madness will linger on.
"SPRINGER" FEVER
"Slut junky! Crack whore! Three-nipple cousin-fucker!" Those are some of the epithets flung, and sung, in "Jerry Springer: The Opera," playing to packed houses full of scalped-ticketholders at the Royal National Theatre. One reason the seats are hot is that — all right, the second act takes place in Hell — but also because the National is a repertory theater, and "Springer" has played as few as seven performances a month. (It moves to the Cambridge Theatre in October.) The main reason is that this is a thrilling show, wild and canny, with a point of view under its delight in exposing people who can't stop exposing themselves.
These are the guests on Springer's daily talk show, still on the air after a dozen years of demeaning every standard of propriety, humanity and entertainment. The first half of "JS:TO" is a surreal musical version of the TV show: domestic depravity and depression raised to farce pitched at C over high L. Jerry, the 20-person chorus sings, is "Bigger than Dave Letterman/ Bigger than Bob Hope/ ... As big as the fuckin' Pope." On comes the parade of trailer-park detritus — the lesbian dwarf, the morbidly obese Romeo in a diaper, the ex-lap-dancing post-operative transsexual — all getting in touch with their "inner Valkyries." Though Jerry does muse, "We never had a maggot-eating gimp on this show."
(Spoiler alert: naughty words abound in the next few paragraphs — if you haven't been sent running by my stream of political invective.)
Jerry (Michael Brandon) doesn't sing; everyone else does, to verdantly melodic, torridly gross-out tunes by composer Richard Thomas and his co-lyricist Stewart Lee, who also directed. They put trained voices to such dewy sentiments as "When you're dead and buried in the grass/ I'll dig you up and fuck you in the ass." They belt out hit-sounding numbers, if radio were X-rated, like "I Just Want to Fuck an' Dance" and "What a cunty cunty cunty cunty cunty cunty-cunt!" When Jerry is the defendant in a trial in Hell, he is told he has to put on his show from Hades. And what if he doesn't? He'll get "Tortured and toasted,/ Barbecued and roasted/ And fucked up the ass with barbed wire." Jerry asks if there's an upside, and the Chorus sings: "NOT getting fucked up the ass with barbed wire."
But Thomas and Lee know that obscenity is the flip side of sentiment. These trolls and trollops have dreams as well as outsize quirks. It';s been a while since you've heard lyrics like "O how my heart/ Aches for love" and "I wanna sing something beautiful." The astonishment is, they do: some of the ripest melodies since the ABBA guys' great score for "Chess" in the mid-80s.
Before the "show" begins, the warm-up guy tells his on-stage audience The Rules: "No heckling, no fighting, no throwing things or throwing up." When "JS:TO" opened, the same instructions might have been needed by the staid regulars at the Royal National Theatre. Thomas and Lee say they had rules of their own. One is: "Never write anything over three minutes in length." They break that rule twice in the first two songs, but by then the audience is so hyped, no one's keeping score. That's because the show is so smartly staged: it's a grand idea with attention to wonderful detail. One bickering bride, Sheryl, enters with a train of toilet paper stuck to her shoe heel. (I have a flashback vision of Gilda Radner's Roseanne Roseannadanna telling the "SNL" audience of the time she spotted Jackie Onassis at Elaine's with just such an accessory.) When Sheryl notices her gaffe, she is unflummoxed: she detaches the bathroom tissue, balls it up and sticks it in her bra.
LOVING AMERICA — THE WORST OF IT
Both "George Dubya" and "Springer" go after their subjects with a hatchet. But "Dubya" wants blood for Dubya; "Springer" just wants to give Jerry a scare and a haircut. The difference is partly one of craft. The sloppy "Dubya" goes after its target with the same finesse displayed by the U.S. troops storming the Hussein boys' hideout, whereas a crimson joy spurts out of "Springer." It's rough, not raw, and exhilarating in its inventiveness. The transsexual is described in song as a "Chick with a dick with a heart!" "Springer" is an opera that's improper, but with art.
Attitude counts too. "Dubya" simply hates Dubya. But Thomas and Lee have a fondness, a shout-it-to-the-rafters, spill-it-on-TV hard-on for the lurid, bombastic, melodramatic emotions that are so exhibitionistically exposed on the Springer program. They cherish the TV show for its operatic excesses — what is opera if not a scream sung, a catfight put to beautiful music? — but also because they recognize that cry as the most basic human need. The love that a typical "Springer" guest will do anything to get, Thomas and Lee pour out in their music.
I think they also love "Springer" for what they see as its torrential, quintessential Americanness. They love a thousand things about Americans that I hate. They love it at its worst, in a showbiz era when bad is great and no social defect is too embarrassing not to be a career move. (Am I alone in wanting to love America when it tries its polite, humane, generous best?) Yet I love "Jerry Springer: The Opera." Good theater can toss all kinds of prejudices into a cocked opera hat.
Can't fly to London? The QE2 sails from New York to Southampton on Sunday, August 17. Fares start at $1,899, if you don't mind swabbing decks. But you will hear English spoken, at least by the crew.