TT: Emo-cracy comes to Broadway

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two Broadway openings, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and La Bête. The first impressed me, the second bored me. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” is a not-exactly-history play in which the life of America’s seventh president is given what might be called the Jon Stewart treatment (i.e., lots and lots of Irony Lite) and set to the style of rock known as “emo” (i.e., unabashed emotion accompanied by a just-kidding wink that draws the deadly sting of sincerity). And what are the results? Mixed–but also, if a middle-aged critic may dare to say so, hugely encouraging.
In “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” whose book is by Alex Timbers, Old Hickory (played with swaggering panache by Benjamin Walker) becomes a rock-star politician who speaks in the language of today, as do all his fellow characters. He’s an Indian-hating populist from rural Tennessee who trades on his sex appeal to get the plain people to vote for him–think Bill Clinton with a guitar–then discovers, much to his surprise and dismay, that he hasn’t any idea of how to actually run the damn country.
Comically speaking, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” is a one-joke show that gets three-quarters of its laughs from the incongruity of hearing 19th-century characters use 21st-century slang: “The Era of Good Feelings? Huh! More like the Era of Bad Feelings! You guys are so dead!” Politically speaking, it’s little more than an ultra-predictable mashup of Howard Zinn and “Dances With Wolves” (white people bad, red people good). We are, in short, in the land of cable-TV sketch comedy…
Michael Friedman’s hard-edged, guitar-driven score is, however, another story. The music is tuneful, the lyrics are honest-to-God smart, and one of the songs, “Ten Little Indians” (which is wonderfully sung by Emily Young), is catchy enough to hum on the way home. Nor is there the slightest trace of slickness: This is real rock, not the synthetic kind…
I confess to being impressed by the sheer gall, if nothing else, of the producers who decided that it was time to bring back “La Bête.” Though it went over well in England, winning an Olivier Award, David Hirson’s verse comedy was a disastrous failure on Broadway, where it opened in 1991, was greeted by universal critical catcalls, and closed 25 performances later, draped in ignominy from head to toe. So why in the name of the bottom line is this awful play–for it is truly, excruciatingly awful–back for a second go-round?
The answer is Mark Rylance, who starred in “Boeing-Boeing” and is now giving another over-the-top performance as Valere, a fathomlessly vulgar, monstrously vain street player who has been thrust upon Elomire (David Hyde Pierce), the celebrated 17th-century playwright, and his resident drama troupe by the princess (Joanna Lumley) who is the company’s all-powerful patroness. Mr. Rylance comes out belching and gets grosser from there, embellishing virtually every line he speaks with a fresh bit of business from his bottomless bag of comic trickery. Mr. Rylance is one of the finest stage comedians we have, but he has nothing to work with this time around. “La Bête” is a wan pastiche of Molière whose pancake-flat couplets rattle on endlessly, pointlessly and–above all–pretentiously….
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Read the whole thing here.