Tag: American Idiot

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

American Idiot

Was it only a little more than three months ago when President Trump was loudly disparaging countries that hadn’t controlled the coronavirus — like China, Italy, Greece, and Germany? When the president of the mighty United States was smugly banning travel from China and the European Union?

Well, yes, actually, it was. I know it’s hard to keep up with such things when every day brings six new scandals, but on March 12th, in a nationally televised speech, the president unilaterally and abruptly announced that the United States would ban travelers from Europe, following an earlier ban on travel from China.

At the end of his 10-minute speech, Trump added this amazingly arrogant and stupid prediction: “The virus will not stand a chance against us.”

Actually, COVID-19 now stands a better chance against the United States than against any other country on the planet. Along with Brazil and Russia (two other countries with incompetent leaders), the United States is now a raging epicenter for the COVID pandemic. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases — and 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. The infection level in this country is rising at an unprecedented rate, as several Republican governors scramble to close down their states after arrogantly and stupidly opening them for business as infection rates were rising — following our “stable genius” president’s lead. 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee gets a special “I’m Extra Stupid” award for even now not allowing the state’s mayors to require masks in their cities. (And for pushing through an illegal and unenforceable abortion ban bill. But I digress.)

Science is so overrated, apparently. Karma, unfortunately, is not.

Thanks to this administration’s incompetent response to the global pandemic, my wife, a French citizen, can no longer go visit her family — nor can millions of other Americans who want to do business or take vacations or visit family in Europe. Now, we are a shithole country, banned from traveling to civilized societies.

Several other significant stories have broken recently, collapsing on top of each other like a tower of Jenga blocks, each a stunner that would have destroyed any presidency before this one.

The president’s personal lawyer, aka Attorney General Bill Barr, has been stepping all over the justice system — getting friends of the president out of stiff sentences, releasing them from jail, and firing the attorney general in the Southern District of New York (who happened to be handling several cases involving Trump and his allies). Barr’s behavior was so egregious it caused longtime Justice Department prosecutors to turn whistleblower. But, meh, now it’s just another small explosion in Trump’s media minefield. A mere diversion.

Then CNN broke a story from Trump officials who had witnessed the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders. Here’s a sample: “In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior U.S. officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers, and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the president himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

“The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that the president was often ‘delusional,’ as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.”
CNN.com

One final detail: Our president called German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid.” Merkel, it should be noted, has a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry.

Okay, so Trump screwed up the coronavirus response and got us banned from Europe; his AG is deconstructing the Justice Department; he’s stupid, ill-informed, and abusive on phone calls with foreign leaders. A pretty devastating week, right?

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that little thing where Trump was informed that Russia had set up a cash bounty hunt with the Taliban on U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan — and ignored it.

The president at first denied he’d been informed about it. The next day, The New York Times, citing two U.S. intelligence officials, reported that the information was in Trump’s daily briefing on February 27th. The White House spokesperson then responded that the administration was still considering its options.

The United States has become a banana republic, run by a narcissistic grifter, the kind of guy who blithely posts a video of a man shouting “white power” and then goes to play golf. We have a vice president who again this week praised the president’s response to the pandemic as “wonderful.” We have an administration run by incompetent toadies and lobbyists. And we have the entire leadership of a major American political party marching in lockstep with it all, as if blindfolded.

I’ve run out of faith that the American democratic institutions that have guided the country past the pitfalls of nefarious leaders and human inadequacy for 250 years are going to put the brakes on Donald Trump. Except for maybe the election process. Maybe. At this point, our only hope seems to be to survive this idiot until November and vote him out, along with his corrupt enablers. Only then can we begin the long and painful recovery from this unprecedented disaster of an administration.

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Theater Theater Feature

Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll

Go to The Other Place. It’s not an uplifting play, this story of Dr. Juliana Smithton, a biophysicist developing drugs to treat dementia while losing her grip on reality. She has brain cancer. Or maybe she doesn’t. Her husband is screwing around. Or not. Her daughter’s dead in a ditch, or maybe she’s dropping by the family’s second home and bringing the twins. No, it’s not uplifting. But for fans of good acting and unconventional mysteries, its arrival at Circuit Playhouse is fantastic news.

Go to The Other Place. You’ll see Kim Sanders play a woman who’s come home to drown her sorrows in wine and Chinese takeout only to find a stranger in the kitchen who wants to hug it out. This scene between Sanders and Kim Justis is funny, tense, hard to watch, impossible not to watch, and as fine a thing as anyone is likely to perform on a stage probably ever.

Go to The Other Place, where Michael Gravois vividly falls apart and pulls himself together after taking more than anybody could ever be expected to bear. Go to The Other Place, where Kinon Keplinger shows, once again, that he’s among the most versatile character actors in town.

Go to The Other Place. Director Dave Landis and his first-rate cast and crew have served up 90 minutes of bracing uncertainty. Good stuff, not to be missed.

At Circuit Playhouse through February 21st

People who are bored are also boring, and the junkie life is a study in redundancy. These are just a few of the hurdles any production of American Idiot has to overcome. Playhouse on the Square’s production of the Green Day musical fails to clear any of them, though it might get some extra lift if somebody would just TURN UP THE BAND!

Director Gary John La Rosa felt like much of American Idiot‘s story had been lost in Broadway’s noisy assault. To correct for this, he placed the band behind the scenery and pushed it to the back of the theater. It’s a good theory, and an enormous miscalculation.

American Idiot isn’t a traditional musical. It’s a sonic screed responding to 20th-century excess and 21st-century wars — a collage of sights and sounds that remind us of just how fractured and confusing life could be at the turn of the most-recent century. The story — if you can call it that — revolves around three young bros from the burbs striking out on their own and making life choices that turn out badly. Plot points related to addiction, a failing marriage, and combat are prosaically grafted to a heap of mostly catchy songs.

It ain’t rock-and-roll unless it upsets the parents, and, to the show’s credit, people got up and left when Alexis Grace (Whatsername) and Nathan McHenry (Johnny) stripped down for the big sex scene. It’s an easy way to shock, but I knew how the fleeing couples felt. I was embarrassed and wanted to leave every time an actor with no business playing guitar plunked his way through music he never should have been asked to play in the first place.

The banter that makes The Lion in Winter such a joy when it clicks can also be the filigreed anchor that drowns the old show in its own stilted cleverness.

James Goldman’s play appears to revolve around a power struggle between King Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor, and three sons who want to replace daddy on the throne. But the play’s central conflict is raw barbarism in all out war with civilization.

Director Irene Crist’s production of Lion gets a lot right. Jack Yates’ unit set projects an air of impregnability, but his compact castle is a subtle shape shifter and as pliable as it needs to be. Andre Bruce Ward’s costumes are the perfect mix of thick fur pelts, rough textile, metal, and fine fabric. Jeremy Allen Fisher’s lighting lacks texture, but that’s a small complaint. It’s also one of the very best examples I’ve seen locally of using lighting to edit out all the stuff we don’t need to see. The problem is, there’s just not a lot action to frame.

There are key aspects of Henry Charles K. Hodges simply fails to communicate. The king’s not some sage older gentleman reflecting on youthful indiscretions. He’s still able to behead rivals while bedding contessas, milkmaids, courtesans, novices, whores, gypsies, jades, and little boys. Hodges’ Henry is too much the victim of his family tragedy and not enough the swinging dick whose preoccupations set all the bloody nonsense in motion.

Eleanor is a plum role, and Christina Wellford Scott’s head fits the crown.

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American Idiot at Playhouse on the Square

“Call it ignorance,” American Idiot director Gary John LaRosa says, having some fun at his own expense and searching for the right way to explain why he’d never given punk rock a chance.

LaRosa’s musical tastes were always eclectic, but he was classically inclined. He liked opera and was in the business of staging Broadway-style musicals. He never thought he’d like snotty-boy guitar anthems, so, when Green Day’s concept album-turned-musical hit Broadway in 2010, LaRosa wasn’t eager to go see it. “I didn’t think a punk group’s music would appeal,” he says. “But for 90 minutes there was an explosion of energy and this visually rich storytelling. I was blown away. I was moved, which is the last thing I expected to feel.”

LaRosa was sucked in by the music and caught up by the story of three media-saturated high school buddies from the suburbs looking for a way to escape. Battles with boredom, addiction, and America’s sworn enemies ensue.

Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s presidency, Broadway’s American Idiot used cutting-edge digital projection technology to flood the stage with news clips from sources like CNN and Fox. Unfortunately, not every theater can spend $18 million dollars to capture the spare, DIY essence of punk. Not to fear, LaRosa, who’s become an enormous fan of the show’s music and Billie Joe Armstrong’s lyrics in particular, thinks the musical’s content is better served by a lower tech approach.

“It reminds me very much, generations later, of Hair,” LaRosa says, “because of the complete dissatisfaction with the status quo and the bill of goods being sold in Vietnam. There are so many parallels. I think the musical score is an important one, and there’s a lot there you lost on Broadway because of the spectacle. I’m trying to flesh that out and make it more important.”