Weaponized show tunes a fitting sendoff Talk-show hosts, comedian turn Broadway against outgoing president By: Randall King  Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021

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This article was published 26/01/2021 (1432 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the few days before and after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Americans bore witness to no fewer than three significant performances online and on network television that employed Broadway show tunes for a potent final takedown of outgoing President Donald Trump and his family.

• On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Broadway star and Melania Trump impersonator Laura Benanti imagined the former First Lady returning to her Trump Tower home in New York City — "the city that never sleeps with a porn star and then lies to you about it." — only to be summarily rejected by everyone from a city worker to a Times Square Elmo.

"Starting to wonder if New York dislikes me," Benanti sings to the tune of Belle in Beauty and the Beast. "What is this word: ‘complicity?’"

• On The Late Late Show with James Corden, also on CBS, host Corden showed off his musical stage chops on One Day More, a parody of the song of the same name from Les Miserables, putting himself at the centre of an intense, Jean Valjean-esque Trump farewell — "It’s been four years of endless crimes but now he’s finally out of time," backed by a smorgasbord of brilliant Broadway performers including Joshua Grosso, Jillian Butler, Emily Bautista, Shuler Hensley, and Patti LuPone.

• Randy Rainbow, who has carved out a specialty in Broadway-inspired parodies in the past four years, delivered what may be a final kiss-off (but don’t count on it) lifted from Seasons of Love from the musical Rent, that allowed a kind of inventory of Trump grotesqueries in the past four years. Rainbow asks the question: "How do you measure four years with this orange garbage can?" and then provides the answer: "In Spicers, in Conways, in Sanders, in McEnanies, in Fake News, pee tapes, alternative facts…"

It was an enjoyably fierce display of cleansing rage, coupled with awesome performances, but it all begs the question: How did something as joyous as the Broadway show tune become so weaponized?

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The song parody is nothing new, of course. It’s been going on for centuries.

But it became its own art form in the 20th century thanks to practitioners such as Allan Sherman, who added the letter-from-camp lyrics of Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah to the ballet Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli. "Weird Al" Yankovic offered his own take, satirizing pop music since the ’80s. One sensed Yankovic was probably inspired less by Sherman and more by Mad Magazine humourist Frank Jacobs, who once transposed the musical West Side Story to the U.S.S.R in the Mad feature East Side Story, in which the song Maria became Nikita! ("We’ve just seen a Red named Nikita! He said we ought to know, the world would soon be So-vi-et.")

Rainbow was the first to really exploit the catchy, ear-worm power of the show tune and turn it against the Trump administration, while highlighting his own considerable performance skills in Broadway-inspired pastiches such as Gee, Anthony Fauci, He’s Just a Gurl Who’ll Quid Pro Quo and Cheeto Christ, Stupid Czar.

His work highlighted the line that had already existed between Trump and the arts community, which first became apparent when no especially worthwhile artists showed up to perform at Trump’s inauguration, later amplified by the Trumps’ break with tradition in not attending the annual Kennedy Center Honors like most presidents have done in the 42-year history of the event.

No less an artist (and Kennedy Center recipient) than Bruce Springsteen took notice of the schism, quoting a poem by Elayne Griffin Baker about Trump on his SiriusXM show: "There’s no art in this White House. There’s no literature, no poetry, no music." 

Poem by @b_elayne

— Bruce Springsteen (@springsteen) October 29, 2020

Naturally, those voices turned against Trump with a vengeance in 2020, when the Trump administration’s epic incompetence in handling COVID-19 freed up a lot of Broadway talent who had good reason to resent the closure of theatres in the wake of the pandemic.

Many of those artists strutted their stuff on Colbert and Corden’s shows as a kind of victory lap in response to Trump’s defeat. Lesson learned: Don’t underestimate the power of a show tune.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
Reporter

In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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