Full of Sound and Fury

Last year, the thespians of Dunster House created something of a success de scandale out of a musical comedy version of the life of Christ entitled The Greatest Musical Ever Sung: this year they've turned to the slightly less miraculous career of Richard Milhous Nixon in order to churn out a sequel. However, a good deal of the check has disappeared in making the transition from the purportedly profane to the presumably partisan. Nixon!, exclamation point or no exclamation point, is certainly nothing to write your home congressman about.

A tenuously plotted satirical review, Nixon! is a scattershot entertainment. As it traces the steps which lead poor Dick Nixon to blow up the world in the midst of the '72 elections (with a final Dr. Strangelove plot twist that the show's narrator brashly admits has been stolen from the film). Nixon! verges on the sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic--not to mention, its occasional lapses of taste. Of course, it's all meant in a spirit of fun (right? yes, right would I put you on?) and the Yiddish words get the biggest laughs of all. (Would somebody please tell me what's a Schwartz?) Even student radicalism comes under attack in a parody of last spring's counter-tech-in that would arm the cockles of A1 Capp's withered, old heart. (There is also a parody of the resultant Crimson editorial, calling the kidnapping of President Nixon an "indefensible act" and demanding "no punishment," that I must admit warmed the cockles of mine.) So you can't accuse the show of not being broadminded.

Simpleminded, perhaps. For the real problem with Nixon! is that it leaves most of its potential sources of humor undeveloped. The teach-in scene is a good example. It's full of sound and fury, but has to its credit only one sustained joke. (Nixon, told that the stage will be stormed with the first lie he tells, is struck speechless.) And the show's casual direction doesn't help any. A review should move fast and furious, blackouts should be punchy, and some traveling music never hurts, but Nixon!'s blackouts are more like periodic sessions of silent meditation.

On the other hand, Nixon! can boast the work of a fine Nixon mimic in the person of Glenn Stover. Although in his cockier moments he does tend to take on the accents of a Hubert Humphrey instead, for the most part Stover's impersonation of Nixon--the nervous hands, the calculated expressions, the condescending attempts at explanation--are right on target. In fact, there is almost a naivete about this caricature that would make Nixon endearing if he weren't already so incredibly appalling. One moment he's attempting to ingratiate himself with Chairman Mao by telling a few Japanese jokes, the next he's justifying his Vietnam policy by citing the example of a war widow and flag-saluting son and saying, "I only do it to humor these people." Later, he's complaining to his psychiatrist that he and Pat have never shared "the pleasures of the flesh"--"But what about your two daughters?" the psychiatrist asks incredulously--Off, they don't do it either Nixon solemnly intones.

Which brings up the whole subject of sex. Well now, you have to do something to make newspapers sell!) Gore Vidal writes in a recent New York Review that the sexual smear is a tactic of the right wing rather than the left. Until I saw Nixon! I was inclined to believe him. However, Nixon! brings into the open a theme that winds subterraneanly through a good deal of Nixon criticism. The Nixons, you see, are thought to be frigid, asexual, virgin or impotent. So no wonder the left never attacks sexual misadventure on the right--the left won't even admit to the fact that the right has discovered sex, too. "The last fascist we castrated wasn't even smart enough to know it had happened," complains one of the burlesqued radicals in Nixons! The remark is representative of a third of the show's total humor.

Blame for it all I'm afraid has to go to Alan Franken who wrote, directed and acts in the show (thus winning himself this week's Junior League Orson Welles Award). Nixon! lacks both the anger and vulgarity that is needed to make this kind of satirical statement compelling. Finally dissolving as it does into a trumped-up finale of song and dance, Nixon! is out to prove nothing but the cleverness of its participants. In the final analysis, it's as much an in-house entertainment as any of those other reviews which bob Hope periodically presents before his president.