Two clusters of people around me found Ghost of John McCain (SoHo Playhouse, to Nov. 10) howlingly funny. They shrieked with laughter, snorted, squealed, and whooped—responses that are even more jolting in the compressed confines of SoHo Playhouse. Were they friends of the cast or production? Maybe. Even at its wildest moments, the show was not that funny—and for that we have its primary target of its satire to blame: Donald Trump, and the divisive politics that swirl around him. The urgency and nervousness of the present moment neutralizes much of the show’s attempts at humor.
One person not happy about the musical’s existence is Meghan McCain, John McCain’s daughter, who railed on X when the show was announced earlier this year, “This is trash—nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people. I hope it bombs.”
One can empathize with her upset—it’s a satire about a beloved family member imagining him in a kind of post-death life—while also questioning the validity of her critique. She hadn’t seen it, after all.
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In an open letter to McCain, the producers noted the same, adding, “As you might not be aware, this show was co-conceived by the late Grant Woods, former Arizona Attorney General and more to the point, your dad’s first Chief of Staff. We all saw Grant beautifully eulogize your father, alongside President Biden. Grant loved your dad. He would have never done anything he felt would besmirch your father’s legacy, nor would we. All three of us producers also admired your father, and now wish only to honor him.”
Ghost of John McCain doesn’t exactly honor McCain (Jason Tam), or dishonor him; he is weirdly the least distinctive character on stage. As imagined, he is dressed all in white, and a cheery idealist trying to make the best of things. He is not controversially imagined, does not cause offense, or is the subject of that much criticism, nor are his own motives and character that rigorously investigated.
In a musical mostly devoid of fresh insight, he is in the role that he played in the later part of his life: Donald Trump’s nemesis, but made folksy and genial. Meghan McCain would likely find much to like about it.
The show is funny in places—lightly funny, not as funny as the howlers around me found it. It has elements of familiar things: The Book of Mormon, Hand to God, and the breeziest of Broadway musicals. After all, as it notes of one of its chief characters, Trump, he is a fan of musicals. One silently looming character is the Phantom of the Opera himself.
The show, with a book by Scott Elmegreen, score by Drew Fornarola and direction by Catie Davis, has a clever conceit. After his death, McCain finds himself in what he assumes to be the reception room of Heaven (Lawrence E. Moten III has whipped up a lovely gold and gilt-speckled design). But McCain isn’t in Heaven. Neither is he in Hell. Neither he is in Purgatory. He is, in fact, in Donald Trump’s head, where—post-death—he and a group of others, including that Phantom of the Opera and the teenage Trump himself, reside. They are a rag-tag resistance movement and kvetching Greek chorus.
The performers—most playing multiple characters—marshal the variable material with élan: Luke Kolbe Mannikus (teenage Trump), Aaron Michael Ray (an eye-rollingly arch Donald Trump’s Brain), Zonya Love (Eva Peron, a Trump-supporting Arizona voter named “Karen,” and Kamala Harris), an excellent Lindsay Nicole Chambers (playing a well observed Hillary Clinton, and a cleverly mashed-up Daughter-Wife amalgam of Ivanka and Melania Trump), Ben Fankhauser (Roy Cohn, Lindsey Graham, and excellent as Joe Biden imagined as a janitor who bumbles around fixing things).
All these characters interact with McCain, to chew over Trump, and their own failings and ambitions—most memorably, Chambers-as-Hillary.
The musical imagines the effects of their clashing voices on Trump himself, up to and including the 2020 election and Jan. 6 itself. Can Trump be changed? Can they escape? Should they escape? Can they effect change? Can they change Trump?
Luke Kolbe Mannikus, standing, as Donald Trump and Jason Tam as John McCain in "The Ghost of John McCain."
Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMadeThe musical wants to be riotous and irreverent as it asks these questions, but an early sour note is seeing the most basic satire of Lindsey Graham’s sexual orientation, with him decked in shiny kinkwear. This doesn’t skewer Graham in any way—his possible hypocrisies and character; it just feels like a tired, one-note laugh-at-the-gays joke.
The producers would no doubt object to this. In their note to Meghan McCain they wrote, “We believe art, broadly, and comedy, specifically, are essential tools for bridging ideological divides, fostering understanding, and even changing hearts and minds. Even at its most absurd, our show is making a point about the meaning of leadership and the importance of democracy—two topics about which your father was most passionate. An uproarious exploration of power, rivalry, and the human condition, The Ghost of John McCain is the ticket we need during the election cycle from hell.”
Perhaps it is that election cycle from hell that really torpedoes all their venerable intentions. It feels impossible to laugh at Donald Trump, at history we cannot change, and a future many people feel incredibly alarmed by, when the election cycle and its daily insanities are happening too near and adjacent to this stage. The membrane between show and reality is torn asunder. The attempted humor is smothered under the reality its audience is experiencing outside of it; the 90 minutes of hit-and-mostly-miss knowing snark feels blunted, a little futile, and certainly past its sell-by date.
Still, the musical ends with its lights up on us, the audience—and one final clever twist, which puts all of the present-day responsibility back on us. It’s not funny, but—just as with the best bits of Ghost of John McCain—it’s piercingly true.
