REVIEW ROUND-UP: EMPIRE RECORDS, THE BEACON, & THE GHOST OF JOHN MCCAIN

Senior Critic Joey Sims has been busy catching up on theatre around town. His latest roundup of productions:

EMPIRE RECORDS

One fatal error of Empire Records: The Musical, an unremarkable if fitfully enjoyable rock musical making its world premiere at the McCarter Theatre Center, is the treatment of its source material with any kind of reverence. 

The original Empire Records film was a flop upon its 1995 release, but later found cult classic status. A shaggy, endearing little flick, it was narratively shapeless in that specific way only ‘90s indie films got away with. Original screenwriter Carol Heikkinen now authors the book for director Trip Cullman’s slick stage adaptation, which features a breezy rock score by Zoe Sarnak (The Lonely Few) and choreography by Ellenore Scott. 

Minor adjustments aside, Heikkinen has transposed all the clichés and tonal disjointedness of her screenplay directly to the stage. What played as agreeably shambolic on screen feels, in musical form, like a tonal mess. All the tropes just collide into each other: a predictable will-they-won’t-they, a looming corporate takeover, an accidental drug trip. Most bizarrely, the team has kept in the sub-plot of a suicidal employee struggling with self-harm, despite having no time to handle the challenging questions raised.

As with her work The Lonely Few, Sarnak’s tunes are pleasing to the ear but ultimately unmemorable. The overqualified cast do what they can, with Samantha Williams and Tyler McCall particularly standing out (beloved Broadway hottie Damon Daunno is funny, but tragically underused). And Scott does find some staging magic in an amusing shoplifter sequence. But ultimately, you’ll wish the team had used this source film as a looser framework on which to craft a fresher, more original tale. 

THE BEACON

As the first-rate Friel Project recently demonstrated, Irish Repertory Theatre is a reliable source of sharply directed, extremely well-acted revivals. The theater’s track record on new plays, however, remains much spottier. Outside of an occasional Enda Walsh banger (a terrific 2018 revival of Disco Pigs sent subscribers fleeing), the theater’s new work tend to feel like lesser imitations of the Friel/McPherson/O’Casey canon, replicating some familiar structures—splintered family gathers and long-held tensions rise to surface, etc—without any of the necessary heart. 

That unfortunate trend continues with Nancy Harris’ The Beacon, a tiresome and bloated family drama burdened by (banal) family secrets, (dull) shadowy pasts and all the like. Ever reliable, Kate Mulgrew does what she can as prickly matriarch Beiv but is handed writing that often feels like a parody of itself. (And why we need to watch Mulgrew fully set a table, in a bizarre, silent scene that seems to stretch on endlessly, was beyond me.) A final dramatic reveal intended to produce audience gasps as the lights fell was met, at least by my audience, with only beleaguered silence. 

THE GHOST OF JOHN MCCAIN

If you set aside its sophomoric humor and grating music, The Ghost of John McCain is actually a fascinating object to find its way onto a New York stage. Conceived by Arizona public relations consultant Jason Rose and (now deceased) former Arizona attorney general Grant Woods, this chaotic new musical traps the titular longtime Arizona senator, former presidential candidate and Naval hero inside a hell of his own making—the mind of Donald J. Trump. The show is essentially an extended love letter to McCain, even encouraging us in the final number to: “Travel in your damn lane/Release your John S. McCain!”

So, who exactly is this for? Certainly McCain is held in higher regard by liberal New York audiences than present-day Republicans. But treating the fading “maverick” as a model for decency is a bygone, 2016 fantasy-world notion that now seems utterly irrelevant. An “I Told You So” number for Hillary Clinton felt equally passé, while the stream of Lindsey Graham gay jokes might have been offensive if they weren’t just so brain-numbingly stupid. 

The show’s only half-clever idea is depicting Trump himself as a horny, insecure 14 year-old boy. Young Luke Kolbe Mannikus has fun with this assignment, his mannerisms capturing that strange, childlike side of Trump that occasionally pokes through. It’s at least something a little surprising amidst a sea of lowest common denominators.