Musical comedy is a very American idiom with its roots in vaudeville. The form was born on Broadway in a series of shows produced between 1878 and 1884 and featured characters and situations from New York's lower classes. The term 'musical comedy' was first used to describe American shows in 1893. The popularity of shows like 'Evangeline' and 'The Brook' led to a new fashion in New York theatre, and musical comedy was born.
The producers of Broadway and Hollywood have been geniuses at creating myth - wonderful fanciful stories of adventure, love, romance all with happy endings, all perfectly tailored to provide a happy sanctuary away from the humdrum, Hobbesian 'solitary, brute, nasty, and short' life outside.
The great musical comedy epics of the Golden era - Oklahoma! and South Pacific - left no doubt as to the iconic Americanism of the genre. The productions were big, outsized versions of an America that never existed but could, exceptional stories of heroic adventure, ambition, family and community. Later shows like West Side Story reflected the zeitgeist of modern America, but never retreated from the genre's basic principle - love conquers all and America is a great country.
The musical comedy's fundamental civility helped preserve the ethos of the Fifties - a patriotic, post-war optimism and belief in family, community, and faith. Ordinary lives became those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, My Fair Lady, High Society, and Hello Dolly. The men wore tuxes and the ladies long dresses. They spoke well, behaved mischievously, and all ended happily together.
What more suitable musical comedy for the Trump years than 'Oklahoma', a show that tells the story of love and rivalry in the early 1900s, Oklahoma territory, focusing on the relationships between a farm girl and a sinister farmhand.
The musical follows the lives and loves of farmers and cowboys as they navigate love and rivalry, all set in the context of coming statehood. The story is about jealousy, love, and the struggle for acceptance in a changing society.
There is nothing shopworn or commonplace about Donald Trump. A man of glitz and glamour, tinsel and sequins, arm candy, yachts, and mansions; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York. This is a man who not only embodies America but is America. He is our ambition, our bourgeois taste, our commonfolk sensibility, and above all our love for image, show, and the impossible dream.
Hollywood is not just a reflection of Americans' desire for what never can be, but the very heart and soul of the dream that it can be. It is also the venue for righteousness and hard-won honor. America is the land of Gunfight at the OK Corral were good triumphs over evil - not in the resolution of great armed conflict, but at 100 paces, man to man, an individual struggle for what is good and right.
Trump's press conferences remarks are pure Borscht Belt - he is Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, and Rodney Dangerfield all rolled into one. His remaking of Washington - striking the set of bureaucratic government, building the most grandiose, baroque, flouncy ballroom only imagined in a 40s Hollywood period piece - his courting of movie stars, wrestlers, and football players; his going from one public arena to another, all with marching bands, fireworks, and flyovers are things to behold.
This is America, Iowans and Kentuckians say. Donald Trump is the first real American president, one who is either like the people or what they want to be. He is as exaggerated, oversized, self-assured, and armed with an insouciance and indifference to criticism no different from the great shoot-'em-up heroes of Westerns, riding into town, tall in the saddle, six-gun on his hip, dusty from the long ride across the prairie, but here to set things straight.
He is neither a patrician JFK, all Harvard, Boston, Pablo Casals and Robert Frost - Camelot as Edwardian romance - nor a simple man like Harry Truman showing his mettle at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor LBJ, all cowboy but without the white hat and the romance. He didn't ride at the head of the herd fighting Indians who had surrounded his men, whooping and hollering and killing, but dragged America into a needless, bloody, endless war in Vietnam.
No, Trump is America - he is loud, showy, full of beans, and ready to burst into song, just like Rosanno Brazzi on the Broadway stage. He is our president, not Europe's or Asia's. Donald Trump could be on no other world stage than this one.
Which is why the Left hates him so. It is not just his politics - his radical conservatism and promise to undo each and every progressive, cant-filled, absurd and venal policies - nor his unrestrained use of executive authority, nor his challenges of the courts - it is who he is. Progressives cannot stand such a man, such a showman, a tummler, a clown.
Worst of all, they cannot stand that he is a lowbrow rube, a man remaking America in an unconscionable image. If he has his way, the country will be a blonde, blue-eyed, white jamboree. The Bible will be back, women will be homemakers, men will be men.
Of course it will, and who ever had any doubts? The country, even after one year of the Trump presidency, has already turned its back on the hysteria of the Biden era. The circus freak show, the hall of mirrors, the bearded ladies and two-headed babies, are gone, dismissed, ignored as though they never existed.
Looking at the past few years of progressive 'reform', they don't seem real. The black man was never meant to be put on any pedestal let alone atop the human pyramid. The gender spectrum is nothing but the dream of gay men in peacock feathers and sequins on Mardi Gras floats. Illegal aliens are not asylees, refugees, and needy newcomers. There is no such thing as a free lunch, giveaways are entitlements, socialism is other people's money.
Enjoy three more years of the Greatest Show on Earth - enjoy the fanfare, the trapeze acts, the operatic solos, the best musical comedy to be played in Washington since 'Stars and Stripes' in 1852.
Progressives may be crying in their beer, but most Americans are throwing their hats in the air, cheering for an encore.
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