So, what rhymes with Obama?
Yes, former president Barack Obama is the subject of a new play –a musical!—at one of New York’s most prestigious off-Broadway houses. Opening Nov. 6, the production, titled 44, follows a run in Chicago (where the future president began his career, of course) and a highly successful run at Los Angeles’ Kirk Douglas Theatre. “We thought the show would do well,” says Brett Webster, a rep from that theatre. “But we certainly didn’t expect it to extend and then go on to break box office records.”
The main man behind that journey is Eli Bauman. He worked for the 2008 Obama campaign, primarily in Las Vegas. But it was four years later that this idea struck.
“I was alone in a hotel room in Charlotte, having worked the last week on the Hillary campaign,” he recalls.” And then when those results came in, I just went, ‘How the hell did we get here from where I was eight years ago?’”
He was neither a playwright nor a musician, but, somehow, he found a way to put his feelings into words and lyrics. “I figured I can at least check that off my list of kind of a silly thing to do,” he says. “I didn’t know, really, how to play an instrument, and I hadn’t written a song since high school. So, my expectations were super low, which was probably a very good way to approach it.”
Political pieces on stage aren’t particularly common, or, frankly, successful. Unless, of course, you count the way-back historical ones like Hamilton. It’s worth noting that creator Lin-Manuel Miranda first tried out songs from that gestating concept for, and was encouraged by, then-President Obama. The rest is theater history. Ten years and counting.
More recently, Suffs, about women attaining the vote (one producer: Hillary Clinton) had a nice run as well and is on a national tour. The Lyndon B. Johnson-centered duo of plays, All the Way and The Great Society, which began at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, did nicely in limited runs.
Bill Rauch, currently head of Perelman Performing Arts Center in NY, says, “I was privileged to direct both of the LBJ plays on Broadway, the first with Bryan Cranston and the second with Brian Cox. Robert Schenkkan’s writing is entertaining and emotionally gripping, and it made both these plays thrilling rides for audiences. They explored questions that are at the heart of the American experiment: Who holds power and how can it be used to benefit society? Performing arts that explore American history are always important, but they feel urgent right now given the especially polarized moment that we’re living in.”
At this moment, A Face in the Crowd (eerily Trumpian, based on the classic movie) has been making a slow road to stage. (Also going musical, with songs by Elvis Costello) It’s possible many folks get enough from the news. Not to mention living under a current leader shunning all things cultural. (Unless he can put his name on them.) “We live in a world where the body politic has become more reliant on performance art than policy,” one of the show’s producers, Scott Zellinger, told me. “Budd Schulberg [the screenwriter of A Face in the Crowd] over 60 years ago, foresaw how the advent of mass media was to foreshadow this. It is the perfect story for our time, and the perfect medium to deliver his message is that of a musical.”
Even America’s pastime can veer political. Right now, a mounting of Damn Yankees is playing in Washington, D.C., and hoping for a Broadway transfer. Its adapter is Will Power, a black man who gave us Fetch Clay, Make Man, a show about the (actual) relationship between Stepin Fetchit and Cassius Clay. Will the baseball players now slug left, so to speak? “I would say we have layered the work a bit to speak to our time while still holding true to the original,” says Power. “I think they are using the term ‘revisal.’”
44 has managed to appeal to what its creator claims is a non-partisan, open-minded audience. “I know a lot of lifelong Republicans, including some in my family, who have seen the show and love it,” says Bauman. “We have found that people actually leave with a feeling of joy and hope. And even nostalgia for a time that felt less heavy and let’s face it, when the country felt good about itself.”
Not surprisingly, small venues often take the biggest chances. The Rogue Machine company in Los Angeles, in particular, has earned awards and loyal audiences for regularly tough material. “I don’t look for things that are political, per se,” says Artistic Director Guillermo Cienfuegos, “but I don’t shy away from challenging material.”
In fact, this production is not the first time Obama has been on a stage as a character. In 2016, another L.A. company, the Skylight Theatre, took an election-year look at politics with the American premiere of OBAMA-OLOGY by Aurin Squire. That playwright said, “I worried about an electorate’s misguided and messianic beliefs in ‘the one.’ It can be a terribly fraught and untenable position because even the slightest setback seems to not only reflect poorly on your entire race, but enrages your supporters who feel as if they have been morally betrayed.”
We shall soon see if the electorate is ready to vote for 44 one more time.
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