Bush! The Musical by The Mollys Productions had the last show of its run at the Moser Theatre, Wadham College on Saturday 31 May, 2025

 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the Internet in the turbulent year of 2022. In the final days of Weimar  Twitter, a long-awaited tournament was finally held. The prize? The laurel wreath crowning the winner ultimate Tumblr Sexyman. The poll ended on 8 September, 2022, the same day as the death of Her late Majesty Elizabeth II. In the final round of voting, Sans from Undertale faced Arataka Reigen from Mob Psycho 100, and won the closely contested poll with 50.1% of the votes.’

 

 

7 weeks later, on 27 October, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, which he subsequently renamed X.

 

 

In her seminal video essay on the political implications of Red White & Royal Blue, YouTuber Jane Mulcany describes Hamilton (2015) as ‘the last big hurrah of the Obama era’. It was the ‘absolute pinnacle of American liberalism’, imbued with a ‘near-blind faith in the American project. Hamilton’s reign of sentimentality culminated in a performance at the White House, bringing several members of the Obama administration to self-congratulatory tears. The next year, Don.

 

 

Hamilton spurred a movement— suddenly, every other 14 year old girl was writing alternative universe coffee shop fanfiction about the Founding Fathers. The wig-wearing, never bathing, slave-owning Founding Fathers. All of a sudden, it was the dreampolitik of Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson.

 

 

On Tuesday the 27th, I went to see Bush! The Musical by The Mollys Productions on opening night at the Moser Theatre, Wadham College. At the interval, I couldn’t help but wonder—is Al Gore the new Tumblr Sexyman?

 

 

Bush! is a fantastic production, with an original script by Vincent Chan, directed by Rosie Howroyd. It has got catchy songs and the jokes were on point. And in a way, it is more serious than Hamilton.

 

 

Susan Sontag wrote in Going to theater, etc. (1964), ‘the hope for intelligence in the theater is not through conventional ‘seriousness’; Not didactic ‘analysis’, nor ‘the documentary’, but rather, ‘I think, through comedy. The intelligence of comedy lies in its distance: in the words of Sontag, ‘the precarious ascendancy of comic detachment over the morally ugly or the terrifying.’

 

 

Bush! has accomplished both. The musical was a classic study in the canon of comedy. It emcompasses some of the most timeless devices Sontag attributes to the genre. For example, ‘employing the same actor to play several key’ and often ‘morally opposed’ roles, so as to distance the audience’s feelings and ‘subliminally undermining the reality of the entire plot’.

 

 

Think Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940), playing both the Little Jewish Barber, and Hynkel, the Hitler stand-in. Or Peter Sellars in Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964), as the relatively sane British officer, the weak American president, and the Nazi scientist.

 

 

In Bush! Arthur Bellamy plays both Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who determines Bush the winner of the 2000 election, and is written as a wizard, and Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and Gore’s Evil Minion 1, and near the end, before the draw of the curtain, appearing from the corner, Obama…

 

 

Freya Owen plays both Nancy Pelosi, Gore’s Evil Minion 2, and a journalist who interviews Bush on ‘No Child Left Behind’ and the Iraq War, as well as an unfortunate Cabinet member subjected to Cheney’s wrath early on.

 

 

At the beginning of the show, the Narrator, played by Molly Dineley, the central figure of the company, who is later revealed to be God himself, announces that due to a gas leak in the Oxford Union, actress ‘Absen Tee’, represented on @themollyprods Instagram with an Alamy photo of a bush, would not be able to attend the show.

 

 

This leads to Riya Bhattacharjee, most brilliantly, playing both Bush’s mother, Barbara, and his wife, Laura (whom I believe is not named in the play), often in the same scene as she takes off or puts on her hat.

 

 

Bush! is about one of the darker times of American history, which people seem to have forgotten with Trump in mind. 9/11. The ‘War on Terror’. Of course, in true comic fashion, these events have been rendered something almost entirely symbolic, serving only  narrative, formal functions.

 

 

In comedy there is a certain purity, which stems from a purity of style. If tragedy is, as Sontag defines, ‘the stylization of a radical change’, comedy is the stylization of radical consistency. This is why the characters of comedy typically don’t achieve anything, but rather reside in a permanent state of peak mediocrity. Both Bush and Gore find themselves there in the play. The characters also don’t really die. Like Tom and Jerry coming back after each fight, Gore returns with an arm cast in the final scene, after being violently mauled by his Big-Oil-supporting polar bear.

 

 

It is through this purity of style that we’re able to, even justifiably so, enjoy art of horrible subjects. This stylistic purity which Sontag finds in, say, the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, through which ‘we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing “Hitler” and not Hitler, the “1936 Olympics’’ and not the 1936 Olympics.Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker, the “content” has—let’s even assume, against her intention, come to play a purely formal role.’

 

 

Each character in Bush! is explicitly styled as a parody of their real life counterpart. The parody is helped along by the aforementioned triple casting. But it isn’t just the characters who are sharply parodied: so, too, are the historical events that the play revolves around. ‘9/11’ in Bush is not really 9/11. In the play, it is revealed that Al Gore planned 9/11. Gore’s 9/11 is not the twin towers falling, and the Pentagon, and Flight 93 in the field in Pennsylvania. In fact, Gore was horrified when Bush showed him the footage. ‘At least the second tower is still standing…Oh! No!’ Gore’s 9/11 turns out to be the Doofenshmirtzian sabotage of Bush’s ice cream button on the 11th of September, which did not even matter in the slightest because Bush prefers sorbet.

 

 

In a way, I’m in disagreement with Jane Mulcany’s video essay. I think Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson is superior to Hamilton the text. As it has truly liberated itself from the subject matter, through which history comes to play a purely stylistic role. It is for the same reason that praise has been attributed to works like Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and Larraín’s Spencer (2021), and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible I & II (1945) and Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Problems arise when a work could not entirely divorce itself from certain non-stylistic duties which make it hostile to a unity with style.

 

 

Hamilton, The Great Dictator and Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove are all works that engage with history and the comic. Yet, they lack grace, due to their dual loyalty. They only ever exemplify what Sontag describes as ‘the solitary autistic acts of grace,’ comic excerpts that would’ve been fantastic had the story fully committed to it. Their stylistic potential is aborted over the works’ misguided ambition towards conventional ‘seriousness’, towards ‘having something to say’, or saying one thing and doing another.

 

 

To quote Sontag’s critique of Baldwin’s Blue for Mister Charlie, ‘the surface may be Odets, but the interior is pure Tennessee Williams.’

 

 

For Bush!, the surface is Tumblr, and the interior is even more Phineas & Ferb.

 

 

Bush! The Musical is not Cabaret— although watching students in Republican drag tap dancing in the first year of Trump 2 felt distinctively close to Weimar Germany. I experience none of the philistine cynicism widely sold on the market today. The play is, as The President’s Husband’s Drama Reviews puts it, ‘refreshingly unpretentious.’ It is hopeful, in its dedication to pure comedy, to style, to the craft of the musical, the magic of stage. It is really moving, without having to preach anything.

 

 

Maybe I am feeling nostalgic for those days that felt like 104 days of summer vacation, then school comes along just to end it. And maybe I should just whisper into the holes in the wall, like a Wong Kar Wai ending. But instead, the writer and the cast of Bush! decided to sing, unreservedly—towards a dreampolitik.∎

 

 

Words by Zac Yang. Photo courtesy U.S. National Archives via Picryl.