New Review Posted: Rush Limbaugh! The Musical

Centerstage put up my review of Rush Limbaugh! The Musical at Second City. It has flaws, yes, but to an angry lefty like me, it's pure catharsis. I laughed like crazy--though I also occasionally cringed at the overly loud sound. If you aren't a leftist hater of the conservative noise machine, I don't know how you'll react, but in my subjective opinion, it's fantastic.

Here's the text:

Rush Limbaugh (Mark Sutton) is praying: he needs some event to rally everyone behind conservatism, and give them a greater appetite for Limbaugh's brand of hate-mongering. At that moment, someone jumps in to tell him that the twin towers have been hit. Limbaugh looks to heaven, and fervently gives thanks.


As the above joke makes perfectly clear, Ed Furman and T. J. Shanoff's "Rush Limbaugh! The Musical" is not a light, funny parody, like the author's previous, lesser show, "Rod Blagojevich Superstar." This is a vicious satire, with real teeth. It's primal-scream therapy for liberals, or anyone fed up with political discourse in America. Someone who doesn't agree with the show's politics probably won't have a good time, but for those of us continually horrified by Limbaugh and his ilk, it's cathartic.


The story looks back at Limbaugh's life from 2014, narrated by Shasta (Karla Beard), who is apparently the embodiment of Limbaugh's fears about black women. The device doesn't really make sense, but it doesn't matter, as Beard is giving a spectacular performance — she's got comic timing as strong as the rest of the cast, but she's also a truly exceptional singer. Her solos blow the roof off the place. While the rest of the cast's voices range from passable to good, it hardly takes away from the show, as they all jump into the gleefully malicious material with both feet. Sutton makes a frightening Limbaugh — though he's far too healthy-looking for the part — and the other four cast members each have truly brilliant moments in a variety of roles.


The show definitely has flaws — it loses steam during the last half-hour, and the sound mix is often ear-splittingly loud — but they don't detract much from one of the sharpest political satires I've seen. See it before Limbaugh's lawyers shut it down.

Conservative Theatre?

So there has been much ballyhoo recently about the relative lack about conservative voices in theatre. The New York Times had an article about the issue. Terry Teachout, of the Wall Street Journal, published his conservative perspective on his blog, and my good friend Leonard Jacobs wrote a typically spirited response on his blog.

The issue being questioned is why so few contemporary playwrights are conservative, and why so few plays express a conservative point of view. While I agree that it would be good to have a greater ideological diversity on stage, I feel that there may be more variation in the canon that we might recognize. What follows are a few pieces that seem to have a definite conservative ideas--I'm sure more can be found.

The first that came to mind immediately was Lerner and Loewe's Camelot. This is the story, essentially, of a man who tries to create a Utopia, but fatally ignores the inherent violence and lust in people. By refusing to recognize either the evil of Mordred or the affair of Lancelot and Guenevere, the terminally naive Arthur dooms his fool's paradise. Not quite the classical liberal perspective--that humans are essentially perfectible and good.

Mark Ravenhill's wonderfully titled Shopping and Fucking, a British play from the 1990's, might seem liberal in its unflinching portrayal of sex, drugs and hedonism. The bizarre thing, though, is that it uses this setting to make a shrilly conservative point--that a permissive society has divorced people completely from their true values, replacing them with utter emptiness. No paean to open sexual mores to be found here.

Even Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun, though hugely progressive in its portrayal of race, has some elements in the plot that might please conservatives more than liberals. One is its uncompromisingly pro-life characters: the threat of Ruth aborting her pregnancy, due to the family's poverty, is a major plot point, and a decision which is portrayed as a horrible betrayal of her values. Another, trickier, point is the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" element to the Younger's story. These are people who get where they get without government help of any kind. I can imagine contemporary conservatives pointing to the Youngers as models--and perhaps arguments for cutting welfare and affirmative action.

Go further back, and the argument gets even harder--like with the Greeks. Aeschylus' Oresteia ends with the case being made that killing your mother to avenge your father is permissible. After all men are more important than women, because men are the seed and women merely the vessel. (Don't blame me for that ripe bit of misogyny, blame Aeschylus.) 

And what of Sophocles' Antigone? It is frequently held up by liberals as a story of someone whose principles force her to defy a repressive government--many contemporary adaptations stress this. But couldn't it just as easily be seen as a story of a woman whose religious convictions are so strong that they place her beyond the rule of law?

So am I totally off-base on these interpretations? Are there other plays similarly sympathetic to conservative philosophies, if not specific policies? I bet with a little digging we can find a lot more ideological diversity than we thought.