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Elvis Costello and playwright Sarah Ruhl have taken Elia Kazan’s unsubtle but prescient 1957 movie about the way the media creates monsters and turned it into a brash musical parable for the Trump age.
Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes is an Arkansas hobo who becomes a radio and TV star then a political kingmaker, but his plain-speaking common touch is built on lies, contempt and egotism. Today he’d have a podcast and a social media grift, peddling cryptocurrency and conspiracy theories.
Costello’s country-inflected score has some fine and some indifferent numbers and is beset by effortful rhymes and scansion. There are full-throated lead performances from Ramin Karimloo as Rhodes and Anoushka Lucas as his producer Marcia Jeffries, enthralled then appalled by her creation.
Overall, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production feels like a superior high school staging: energetic and gaudy, sketchy in its scene changes and choreography, and convinced that banal political observations carry great weight.
It’s entertaining but not the grand flourish he might have wanted for his final production after six years running the Young Vic, in which he broadened the theatre’s reach and had both spectacular hits and misses.
Part of the problem is the character of Rhodes himself: it’s hard to take his aw-shucks, good-ole-boy broadcast schtick seriously, even as a period piece; harder still to think it could propel him to demagoguery.
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Karimloo has extraordinary vocal range but his performance has a calculating, demonic edge from the start. The charm is missing. The fact that a certain rich, orange blowhard followed a similar arc through media to politics IRL doesn’t make the fiction any more credible.
Even if they’re drawn from Budd Schulberg’s film script – I haven’t done a scene by scene comparison – some lines in Ruhl’s book land with leaden obviousness. “Ever see crowds this big?” Rhodes asks a general. “You’re fired!” he tells his impulsively-wed teenage bride after learning that she, like him, is capable of infidelity. If anyone challenges Rhodes we’re told he “questions the legitimacy of their birth or calls them a commie”.
Anoushka Lucas, meanwhile, stalks imperiously through the action in a series of ill-conceived costumes, animating the underwritten part of Marcia by sheer force of will. Her sultry lounge number when succumbing to Rhodes, Burn the Paper Down to Ash, is a highlight, as is the anthemic No Man’s Woman. Her duet with Karimloo, Raise a Glass, is a rare moment when the characters seem to click.
Though some scenarios like the baton-twirling competition and the political rally look hokey and small on stage, the last scene is impressive, with Rhodes staggering around a desolate Manhattan penthouse toting a nickel-plated revolver. The accompanying number, Big Stars Have Fallen, drips with bathos, alas.
For the soaring finale, American Mirror, the full cast amble on, hands-in-pockets, as if for the credit-sequence of a star-studded Christmas TV special. The lyrics carry a prissy, finger-wagging message that the Americans – and we – should take a good, hard look at ourselves. Lucas manages to sell it.
Young Vic, to November 9; buy tickets here
