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    • ‘Ghost of John McCain’ is vulgar, ambitious and can fail. Let it
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    ‘Ghost of John McCain’ is vulgar, ambitious and can fail. Let it

    Vaseline Posted on

    ‘The Ghost of John McCain’ is a musical version of the book of the same name, starring Hillary Clinton on the horn and a MAGA supporter named Karen.

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    When the curtain rises in Manhattan on September 3, a man dressed in white and carrying a bleached suitcase enters the stage and into the spotlight.

    He’s John McCain, but this isn’t the gala whites he wore in Annapolis, and this isn’t an earthly domain.

    “This is it,” he sings. “The prize at the end of the mission. The gold at the end of the rainbow.”

    But McCain is wrong.

    He didn’t land in heaven. And he didn’t parachute into hell. He’s in a place far worse than hell.

    He lives in the spirit of Donald Trump.

    Trump’s brain is a sick spot for McCain

    So begins “Ghost of John McCain,” a new off-Broadway musical created by Arizona political consultant Jason Rose and former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods.

    Rose and Woods worked on the concept until Woods’ untimely death in 2021, but if it was to really get off the ground, it had to fall into the hands of more polished musical theater professionals.

    Scott Elmegreen’s book is a kind of junk heap of American politics, the discarded old cans, fish bones and lettuce heads from Capitol Hill and beyond.

    They cloud Donald Trump’s brain because only he can process them in a unique way, giving us characters like Hillary Clinton in devil horns, Lindsey Graham in sadomasochistic leather, and Teddy Roosevelt sitting on a toilet.

    It’s not a pretty picture.

    It’s hard to imagine how this detritus, scraped from the bottom of the Potomac, will rise from the written page and make sense when combined with music and lyrics by Elmegreen’s collaborator and fellow Princeton student Drew Fornarola.

    But my mind is open.

    A vulgar play debuts in a fitting theater

    The hodgepodge of sometimes vulgar people and sometimes profane dialogue begins Tuesday at the SoHo Playhouse in New York City in preparation for its official opening on September 24.

    And what a location! SoHo was made for such a show. It’s its own mishmash of dirty American politics.

    Housed in an old row house, SoHo was once the secluded meeting place of seedy New York Democrats: the Irish-Catholic corruption and patronage machine known as Tammany Hall.

    In its early years, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the then Huron Club became notorious for its downstairs bar and upstairs brothel, with a meeting room in between.

    With such equipment, local politicians called the place “one-stop shopping,” reports the website Untapped New York.

    The Huron Club was eventually converted into one of Manhattan’s first off-Broadway theaters and is now a fitting venue to showcase Donald Trump’s inner lobes.

    The John McCain of the play is the John McCain we came to know later in his career: more serene and contemplative than in his frugal days as a Navy cadet or a U.S. congressman, or even in his early days in the Senate, when he could still blow like Krakatau.

    McCain tries to win back a MAGA supporter

    He is the moral center of the piece, using his wiles, learned from a lifetime of deals and considerations, to try to bring one of the MAGA faithful, named — how could it be otherwise — “Karen,” back to his senses.

    She’s a Scottsdale school teacher wearing a tight Trump T-shirt and, unlike McCain, she’s thrilled to be connecting with the neurons of Trump, the great and powerful.

    McCain asks her why she’s so in love.

    And in a song called “Invisible,” she recalls the time when she was young and beautiful, when men “stopped to hold the door.” But the smiles faded over time and she had “become invisible.”

    “Not hated, not oppressed, just unnoticed. A faceless, nameless guest.”

    When she finishes remembering, she sings her response to McCain:

    “I know I’m not as clueless as my daughter seems to think. / Or as angry as my brother has been. / But I’m looking at old photos when a man appears and winks. / And says, ‘I know a way back then.'”

    Song Lyrics Trump Voters Try to Understand?

    And with sensitivity?

    That’s ambition.

    Meghan McCain doesn’t like the picture

    It’s an ambition that would never have gotten off the ground if Meghan McCain had had her way.

    When John McCain’s daughter heard the musical was taking shape, she tweeted: “This is garbage — nothing more than a gross money-making scheme by mediocre, desperate people. I hope it flops.”

    “Ghost of John McCain” is full of obscenity, irreverence and Donald Trump. If it were a story about my father, I would shudder, too, I told one of the producers.

    In fact, the McCain family has a habit of regretting such things.

    Meghan McCain at the DNC: Exposure to a Republican family feud

    John himself may have cursed like a heretic, but when the Washingtonian magazine published an excerpt from his “Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir,” his mother Roberta McCain was furious when she read the obscenities he had hurled at his Vietnamese captors.

    “She said, ‘I’m so embarrassed,’” McCain told Dan Nowicki of The Arizona Republic during “Maverick’s” second presidential campaign in 2008.

    “I said, ‘Mom, these were really bad guys. They were really bad people.’ She said, ‘That’s not an excuse. I never taught you to use that kind of language under any circumstances.'”

    This is art, and McCain belongs to the world

    Any McCain is free to thwart the musical.

    But John McCain is no longer just a member of the McCain family. He took his heroic story and made himself a global figure. He belongs to the world, not just Meghan.

    This means that playwrights, historians, comedians and politicians can portray him as they see fit.

    This musical is produced by Rose, Max Fose and Lynn London. It is in the hands of people who revere McCain, and it began with Grant Woods, who of all the friends who praised John McCain, is the one who most eloquently described his virtues.

    “Ghost of John McCain” can fail. Even spectacularly.

    But art deserves the space to fail. Without art, the good things that most of us could never imagine would never have the chance to grow.

    Phil Boas is a columnist at The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].

    Vaseline
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