Michael Moore's Trump-baiting stage show hits Broadway with a mission | Stage

Michael Moore's Trump-baiting stage show hits Broadway with a mission | Stage

The tagline of Michael Moore’s new one-man stage production â€" “Can a Broadway show bring down a sitting president?” â€" could be mistaken for the worst kind of New York City navel-gazing.

Even the best efforts to elect Hillary Clinton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who rewrote the lyrics of his mega-hit Hamilton for a fundraiser, fell short. Only from inside the coastal-elite bubble, surely, could a Broadway production be mistaken for a potent political weapon.

The crucial difference, in this case, is Moore himself. It seems safe to say that no one guilty of writing off Donald Trump as a presidential contender has any right to second-guess the political insight and activism of Moore, who predicted early and clearly that Trump would win â€" and who even explained why.

On Friday, Moore’s first Broadway show, The Terms of My Surrender, will open for a 12-week run at the 1,018-seat Belasco Theater. It is the latest entry in a large and growing body of theater to grapple with life under Trump, from a controversial production of Julius Caesar earlier this summer to a current Broadway adaptation of 1984, which became a bestseller after Trump’s inauguration.

“The rush is on,” wrote the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks, “to vent onstage about Trump.”

There are signs, however, that Moore, the provocateur-auteur behind the critically acclaimed documentaries Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine, intends to do more than just vent. Moore is not saying yet what his latest performance will entail, but he seems serious about its stated goal of bringing down the president.

“We have to form an army of citizens and come at him like a swarm of bees,” Moore said on the Stephen Colbert show Wednesday. “I suggested a few months ago that we have an army of satire, because I think the way to bring him down is with satire. His thin skin is so thin, all we need is like a thousand or a million little comedy shivs â€" non-violent, don’t hurt him â€" but just under his skin, because he can’t take being laughed at.”

“To say it’s just about Trump would simplify it,” Moore said of his new work in a separate interview with the New York Times. “I think people will find themselves laughing one minute and wanting to go look for some pitchforks and torches the next.”

The evocation of a clamoring mob does not appear to be accidental. The director of the Broadway show, Michael Mayer, suggested in an interview with the Times that at least some performances would culminate in some “some surprise post-show excursions”. The Belasco, on West 44th Street, is just 10 blocks from Trump Tower.

The Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in New York featured a Trump-like Caesar. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP

Even with Moore’s flair for political provocations, and his explicit attack on the president, he will be hard pressed to match the tempest that surrounded the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar last month, which featured a character resembling Trump as Caesar.

Multiple Fox News segments about the production, in which (spoiler alert!) the title character is assassinated, set off a conservative outcry, sparked protests at performances and resulted in death threats against the director, Oskar Eustis, and his family. Never mind that the protesters seemed to miss Shakespeare’s depiction of the assassination as a tragedy.

“I can’t tell you how many people, including me, watched that thing and thought, ‘You know what, we’ve got to do this through democratic means,’” Eustis said of taking on Trump, at a New York event on Wednesday titled Crossing Cultural Red Lines: New Threats to Free Expression in the Arts. “We’ve got to resist President Trump and that agenda through democratic means, because to try and do it otherwise has led to disaster.”

Theater has not become more political, Eustis said. Instead, the media machine and its desire for controversy, manufactured or otherwise, has become more ruthless.

“Directors interpreting Shakespeare in a politically controversial way has happened since Essex had Shakespeare put on Richard II in order to try to and stir up energy for his coup against Elizabeth, while Shakespeare was still alive,” Eustis said. “People have done that for 400 years.

“What’s new is that we have a media machine that isn’t interested in what my show was, wasn’t interested in seeing my show, was seizing upon it as a way to stir up this rightwing base which serves their interest to have that base stirred up. We were just the stirring-up thing du jour.”

Among the rightwing base to be stirred up by the production was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, who endorsed a connection between the production of Julius Caesar and an attempted mass shooting of Republican congress members at a ball field last month. Trump Jr appended the commentary in retweeting the message: “Events like today are EXACTLY why we took issue with NY elites glorifying the assassination of our President.”

The president has also waded into the new theater wars. Ten days after the election, after the vice-president-elect, Mike Pence, was booed by fellow audience members at a performance of Hamilton, Trump cried foul on Twitter.

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place,” Trump wrote. “The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

Moore told Colbert that he was hoping to attract the president’s attention as well â€" but he wouldn’t say exactly how he planned to do it.

“You have to come see the show,” said Moore, who is also working on a Trump documentary called Fahrenheit 11/9. “I will say this: I refuse to live in a country where Donald Trump is president, and I’m not leaving. So something’s got to change.”

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