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Bush Is Bad:
The Musical Cure for the Blue-State Blues
Bush is Bad Website
At
The Triad Theatre
158 W. 72nd Street
New York, NY
212.362.2511
Starring: Kate Baldwin, Neal Mayer, Michael McCoy
Piano: Joshua Rosenblum
Costumes by Anne Auberjonois
Lighting and Sound by Tonya Pierre
Assistant Director/Assistant Choreographer: Janet Bushor
Directed and Choreographed by Gary Slavin
Concept, Music and Lyrics by Joshua Rosenblum
Creative Consultant: Joanne Lessner
Production Coordinator: Ayelet Arbuckle
Props: Julian Brightman
Graphic Design: Colin Stokes
Website Design: Guillermo Acevedo
Digital Imaging: Julian Rosenblum
Press Representative: Kevin McAnarney
Catering: Showstoppers, Inc.
Susan Weinrebe
October 27, 2005
Like most containers holding volatile substances, the caustic revue, Bush Is Bad, gives fair warning that the audience listens at its own risk. For more than an hour of belly-hurting laughter, rapier-edged musical sketches skewered our current Presidential administration and cronies with topics that ran the gamut from misuse of power to moral values.
Joshua Rosenblum’s wittily wicked lyrics and original tunes were delivered with crystalline diction and consummate acting ability by Baldwin, Mayer, and McCoy, who used the minimal stage and props to maximum effect. As an ensemble, the three were well matched to the material and one another.
Titles of the twenty-one numbers are largely self-explanatory and never waffle on their opinions.
How Can 59 Million People Be So Dumb, the introductory song, broadsided the American public for wearing blinders when they voted and making America the “laughing stock of the world,” by electing the “smiling chimp who currently occupies the White House.” It got worse from there.
New Hope for the Fabulously Wealthy championed the rights of a minority group… the top 1/10 of 1%, who deserved money because they have, “…the most experience spending it.”
Three clever take offs of Robert Schumann, Noel Coward, and Kurt Weill, gave McCoy, Mayer, and Baldwin solo time to add another dimension of satire to numbers, using the styles of other composers.
Das Busch Ist Schlecht, delivered by Michael McCoy, in the plumy and fulsome tones of a self-important art song, Yiddish scatology, made-up words, and English with Germanic pronunciation, ultimately delivered the message, Bush Is Bad.
Neal Mayer lounged on top of the piano and camped up his ultra-sophisticated and world-weary caricature of Noel Coward wittily throwing away, “Bush is bad/One finds oneself nostalgic for his dad.”
Completing the series in the styles of other songwriters, Kate Baldwin created a tragic portrait of Laura Bush, the wife behind the sort of man her mother had warned her to avoid. Heartbroken and just broken in the fashion of Weill’s down-and-out females, she is reduced to the only response left as she responds to her husband, “Sure, you betcha, Georgie.”
Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, John Bolton and other friends of Bush merited their own parodies, which even a partisan audience would have to find funny – if they had a sense of humor and any perspective. Can anyone not find irony, for instance, in the debacle of Bush to “…find the meanest, angriest man and make him our nation’s top diplomat”?
So it went, song after hilarious song, criticizing and pointing out the foibles, as it is our right to do. Entertainment, however, was not the only agenda. Building to a climax, the cast let Bush’s own malapropisms speak for themselves.
Our democratic liberties ensure that incendiary material such as Bush Is Bad, will enjoy a public forum. The spoonful of honey in the humorous aspect of the material makes the message palatable. But at day’s end, the cast sang, “It’s our job to expose the things they say/And that’s how we show we love the U.S.A.”
The intimate cabaret atmosphere of The Triad, where everyone is close to the stage, sipping wine or beer, rubbing shoulders with people at the next table, where the wait staff is attentive and personable, and where you’ve laughed uproariously for an hour, makes it easy to feel that you’re all in the same like-minded club…or maybe lifeboat, together! The run of Bush Is Bad has been extended, lacking no material to keep the satire going.
Bush is Bad
Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg
Bush is Bad
Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg
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