Of Clinton The Musical, the reviewer for the New York Times has asserted that, despite a coy invitation from the producers, the Clintons are "not likely to show up at the will call window."
I don’t see why not.
True, the production is a farcical send-up of Bill’s presidency and some of its attendant hijinks and scandal, but the portrayal of the Clintons is the very one that the family’s gang of enablers, pimps, and fixers labored for year after thankless year to sell to the press and the American people: well-meaning liberals, caught up short by some personal flaws, sure, but also the targets of irrational, sexually repressed opposition and a squadron of floozies attacking the vulnerable commander-in-chief. If, for propriety’s sake, the Clintons need to stay away from the show, fine. At the very least, however, Blumenthal and Ickes and Jordan should sneak in to the back of the house at the New World Stages and admire the fruit of their political art.
If such a kid-glove angle seems like a weak basis for farce or musical comedy, well, it is. The show’s only consistently funny moments come when the spotlight is on Kevin Zak’s campy, obsessive, sex-crazed Kenneth Starr. In the show’s version of the ’90s, Starr’s loss of his job at the conclusion of the Bush I administration drives him to hatch a plot to stop health care reform and bring down the Clintons. That and the perverse fire that, deep in Kenneth’s loins, burns for Bill.
Kenneth tracks down Newton (John Treacy Egan), an apparently mentally disabled man-child who is drowning his sorrows with junk food in a Capitol sub-basement, bemoaning the fact that he will never be speaker of the House because, "Now we have a new president and he’s so wholesome!" Pushed by Kenneth, Newton manipulates the press to investigate the non-scandal of Whitewater—on which Hillary (Kerry Butler) comments, "It’s funny they chose to make a big deal out of the one thing where we did nothing wrong!" These events provide the narrative moment for one of the show’s only two good numbers, "A Starr is Born," wherein Kenneth, channeling some sort of BDSM fantasy of Ethel Merman’s Gypsy, strips down to studded leather underwear and performs a series of increasingly suggestive gymnastic maneuvers. (The production’s other showstopper, late in the show, also centrally features Zak, now explaining, "And that’s how you do the sexual relations!")
This is all deeply unfair stuff for the real-life Kenneth and Newton. It is also (you’ll have to take my word for it) hilarious. Comics will note that the relationship between these two factors is not just one of correlation, and the show’s writers—a pair of Australian brothers, the Hodges, who appear to have gained their understanding of American politics by binge-watching The West Wing—would have profited by extending some harsh treatment to the Clintons themselves.
No joy. The show’s fraternal authors couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with a figure like Bill, so they divide him in two. One actor, Duke Lafoon, plays Billy, a charming and occasionally cynical rogue (Lafoon has made a bit of an industry of his Clinton impersonation, having also appeared in Monica! The Musical a few years ago) and another, Tom Galantich, plays WJ, a statesman-like liberal forever being tripped up by Billy the Id. (The compartmentalized casting seems to spring uncritically from the pop-psych rationalization that the real-life Clinton provided for his behavior in his 2004 memoir, My Life.) Hillary’s role seems intended to be the show’s lead, but it’s awkwardly played—perhaps because awkwardly written—by Butler as a girlish pixie-in-a-pantsuit with a whole lot of big ideas, and a dash of egomania that seems forgivable, seeing how she’s so cute.
The only two of Clinton’s other women to appear on stage are Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. Jones is immediately dismissed as a publicity-seeking tramp, and Veronica J. Kuehn’s Monica, who enlivens much of the show’s second half, introduces herself by announcing to Billy that she once had an affair with her high school drama teacher. Later, in case the audience missed the point, she tells the president, "I’ve been with a married man before. I know the rules." The show’s catchiest riff (it was stuck, annoyingly, in my ear for hours) is Kuehn belting out, "I’m f***ing the f***ing president! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!"
Such a characterization, Lewinsky-as-starstruck-predator, was of course the objective pursued by the fixers of Clintonworld throughout the final years of Bill’s administration. Congratulations, guys: It stuck! And from the perspective of the Podestas, et al, not to mention the Clintons themselves, it’s for the best that the show never mentions, say, Kathleen Willey. It’s even better that Juanita Broaddrick never appears—perhaps because the brothers Hodge couldn’t figure out how to squeeze a good laugh out of rape.
That the actual Hillary has decided to structure her latest campaign around the rights of women and girls only goes to make final the status of American politics as an irony-free zone. Clinton The Musical, for all the energy of its cast, inadvertently highlights that the only thing more pathetic than the Clintons themselves is the way in which, like an abused girlfriend, American (and, I suppose, global) liberalism goes weak in the knees for such a beau. Never has the Clinton family delivered on any of its substantive promises to the left, or pursued very much at all beyond its own power and wealth. But all it takes is a dominating look in the eyes and some whiskey-scented babble about equality—or, as WJ puts it:
A place where we all are equal
Where Fox News is made illegal…
A place where two gay men will marry,
And then serve in the military!
and liberals take them right back in. Clinton The Musical is a lot of things. One thing it’s not is brave.