Former Obama Campaign Staffer Eli Bauman Talks His Inspiration For 44: THE OBAMA MUSICAL

Eli Bauman decided to write a musical about Barack Obama the day after Donald Trump was elected to his first term. 

The former Obama 2008 campaign staffer’s career has spanned politics, television writing for Martin Short and Maya Roudolph, and now, an Off-Broadway musical. 44: The Obama Musical begins performances at the The Daryl Roth Theatre on Oct. 14 for a limited eight-week engagement, after breaking records at Chicago’s Studebaker Theatre this summer.

Theatrely sat down with Bauman to talk about his writing process, how his time on the campaign impacted his writing, and what he’s hoping for out of the New York City run.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I wanted to start by having you tell me a little bit more about your background. I know you've had quite a career, very different sorts of things going on. 

So I graduated college and went into TV writing and was doing that actually, writing on mostly dramas, and then I quit that to work on the ‘08 [Obama] campaign. That was kind of enough for me out of a career in politics. I worked through the inauguration, and then was like, “this is just not for me.” And then I got back into TV. I went to one day of journalism school and got an internship out of it, so I worked for ABC News’ investigative unit for a hot minute, right in the Bernie Madoff period, which was exciting. 

And then, and then I went back to TV writing, and just did a bunch of stuff. None of it involved songwriting at all, until I was up for a position on a variety show with Martin Short and Maya Rudolph. And they were like, “we're looking for a comedy writer who also writes music. You can do that, correct?” And I was like, “Sure, yeah.” And then they were like, “Great, can you just send us over something? And I was like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Just give me the weekend and I'll clean it up and get it right over to you.” Of course, I had nothing. I hadn’t written a song since middle school, if you could even call it that, and I didn't know how to play an instrument. I, pretty much out of a dead panic, wrote something over that weekend and submitted it, and they were like, “great, you're hired. You start in two weeks.” I was getting married. So I got married on a Saturday, moved to New York on a Monday, started work on Tuesday, and then they were like, “can you pump out multiple songs per week?” And I was like, sure, sure, sure, no problem. It'll just be in front of Martin Short, Maya Rudolph, Lorne Michaels and like 60 other people, don't worry about it. So that's what I did. I was there right up through basically the election of 2016, so that kind of book-ended that eight year process. The decision to write this musical was the day Trump was elected in 2016. 

‍Tell me about that decision. That interesting day in 2016, what about that day made you think “I should write a musical about Obama”? 

Mostly, I'm insane. So that was it. But, you know, I just come off writing a lot under a lot of pressure. And I was like, “oh, maybe I'm decent enough at this that I should try to turn this into something else.” 

Really what happened is I was alone in a hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina, the day Trump won in 2016 and, I don't care what your political leanings are, I think there was a surprise in that. I was actually kind of not surprised, because I had been volunteering for the Hillary [Clinton] campaign for a week, and I just kept calling people and was like, “Hey, I got a feeling that this is not going to go the way we think it's going to go.” Just anecdotally, that's what it felt like. 

Anyway, Trump won. I was alone, and after kind of scratching my head for a good 20 minutes, I just started laughing, and I just thought to myself, like, wow. Eight years ago, almost to the day, I was in Las Vegas working on the Obama campaign, and I just remembered that feeling. And then I had the feeling in 2016 and I was like, “how the fuck did we get here?” I actually gave that a good amount of thought, and was like, “Oh, I could kind of see how,” and I just thought that was an interesting story to tell. I didn't want to tell Trump's story at all, which was a good decision. I still don't want to — he's not in the musical at all, which is kind of a nice break. But this was, in a weird way, a Trump origin story. I kind of dabbled with it off and on until about 2019 and then once the pandemic hit, we had a young kid. My wife was working. We had no help, so I wrote most of this musical between 10 p.m. and two in the morning over the pandemic. 

I'm curious about your time on the campaign, and what that experience was like for you. How did it influence this writing process for you?

In a few different ways. One is that it gave a good glimpse into what Americans are capable of in a good way. The ability to try something new, which can also bite both ways, but the amount of hope that was in the air, how incredibly hard all of us work because we believed in something. I highly recommend campaigning for anyone in the sense that you just meet so many people, and I think it's really easy for people to echo chamber and think they know what other people are thinking or kind of generalize. What you realize is that people are just all over the place, and some people have no clue what's going on in politics. And that's fine. Also, it was in the peak of the housing crisis, and the economy was in the tank, and Las Vegas was really hard hit, so you also just get to see how people are actually living. But also, I will say, in hindsight, when people talk about those like Obama/Trump voters and people like, “Who the hell are those people?” I was like, I've met so many of those people.

When people who maybe were kids during the Obama era come to see your show, what are you hoping that they might get from it?

One of the things is, I don't try to predict or wish that people have some sort of reaction to it. I'm kind of like, however people react, they react. Obviously, it's a satire, and it's ridiculous at times. But I do think it fairly accurately tells what was in the air at the time. I think it does capture the kind of forces that were at play over that time, and the kind of sense of optimism mixed with opposition that was going on on parallel tracks during the Obama years that then, I think, basically led to Trump in a lot of ways.

I'm curious about the experience of doing this particular show in Chicago. I feel like with Obama having been from there and spending so much time there, doing it in Chicago felt so specific. Any takeaways you had from that experience? 

Oh, it was great. We love Chicago. I think the show really resonated there. We've actually done the show in a lot of different places now, and we're coming to New York, which is exciting. And different cities take different things with them. They respond to different things, which actually is  really fascinating as a writer. I think for a lot of people in Chicago, there is that feeling of “we knew him when,” or, even more specifically, “we knew Michelle when.” So many people are like, “Oh, my cousin went to school with her brother,” or “we went to the same church.” There’s, in a lovely way, kind of an ownership in Chicago over that story. They're protective in a lot of ways. And again, it’s not like I made radical changes to the show, but I felt some responsibility to make sure that I delivered on the story for the people who actually know them and have a place in their hearts for like, the pre-President Obama version.

In coming to New York, do you have any aspirations? What went into the decision to bring it to the city?

I mean, I have aspirations. I hope it strikes a chord with people and that it resonates. I mean, we're in such a weird time, and I think the show offers people some joy and hope and nostalgia and fun. It doesn't feel heavy. It's not like an earnest partisan screed. It’s a joyous, joyful room. And so we just kind of want to spread that to New York and maybe be kind of an antidote to some of the poison that's going on right now. I'm really proud of the show, and it feels like the right time to be in New York.