The concept of “living rent-free” in someone else’s imagination gets a lot of use online, a brag about how obsessed someone else is with you while you don’t think about them at all. Yet like all jokes of the “I know you are, but what am I?” type, the line easily falls into the realm of playground humor, especially if you’re the one bragging about having moved into someone else’s mind — you care enough, at least, to be dragging yourself into the back-and-forth in the first place. The concept and all its contradictions get a thuddingly literal interpretation in The Ghost of John McCain, a musical that imagines the late senator expecting to end up in heaven after his death in 2018 and instead finding himself trapped in a crumbling, gold-encrusted three-star hotel that is the mind of Donald Trump.
Suffice it to say, McCain may be the title of this thing, but it’s really all about going after the other guy, and it does it with all the bottom-of-the-barrel #resistance humor tropes you might have seen or heard in late-night TV monologues, on Saturday Night Live, or in Facebook reposts from MSNBC-obsessed relatives. (I was surprised that no one says “Drumpf.”) McCain, played by Jason Tam, is presented as an aw-shucks straight man who can’t believe what his party has come to. Tam’s a capable performer, and he’s wisely not doing an impression here, but he’s at sea trying to figure out how to play a blank part. As he stumbles his way through the hotel, he encounters the likes of a horny leather-dog-collar Lindsey Graham (Ben Fankhauser, also playing Roy Cohn and a decrepit Biden), a raging, wine-drunk Hillary Clinton (Lindsay Nicole Chambers, also Trump’s “daughter-wife” and a Fox News anchor), a tweet-happy “Karen” (Zonya Love), and a Trump who is trapped in teenagerhood (Luke Kolbe Mannikus, though Aaron Michael Ray provides Trump’s booming voice over a loudspeaker and, at one point, comes out dressed as his actual brain). The jabs at Trump here are predictable and scattershot, perhaps aiming to equal-opportunity offense, but they land nearer to incoherence. Matching the tone of the Lindsey Graham jokes, there is also a lot of not-not homophobic harping on Trump’s obsession with musical theater. After all, he once produced a show and has a guy who plays “Memory” to calm him down. The Ghost of John McCain clearly couldn’t convince Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group to license that tune, but they do have Love dressing up as Evita. The musical also takes potshots at Hillary’s megalomania and the fact that Biden is near death, and — once McCain gets locked in a Trump hotel room — it drops some references to his imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton that are just in bad taste.
Who is this for? Certainly not John McCain’s daughter Meghan, who blasted the show, calling it “trash” and a “gross cash grab” (the latter, at least, is hard to believe with Off Broadway theater). I think it’s aiming for the sliver of the American population centrist enough to believe there’s still something valuable in pointing out that norms are being shattered. (Never mind that ruling without adhering to convention has always been part of Trump’s pitch.) The Ghost of John McCain originated with a concept from Grant Woods, a former McCain chief of staff and Arizona attorney general who died in 2021 and passed the idea to Max Fose, another McCain staffer, who brought on the show’s book writer, Scott Elmegreen. This is not a producing history that bends toward self-reflection. McCain’s encouragement of proto-MAGA populism by choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate gets some lip service (of course, she makes a goofy gun-totin’ cameo), but the show leans more on the notion that McCain was a noble man finding himself in the wrong circumstances than someone complicit in creating those circumstances. In the back half of the show, Love’s Karen makes a futile attempt to stand up against both Trump and McCain with an aria about how she feels left behind by the economy, unable to afford the life she expected, and ignored by both parties (here, as elsewhere, Drew Fornarola’s score goes for diet mega-musical). She makes a valid point, if one that’s already been raised in a thousand voters-in-diners newspaper stories since 2016, but The Ghost of John McCain’s satire can’t provide much of a response to Karen. Sure, McCain’s GOP has lost her, but she needs to realize, the musical insists, that Trump doesn’t care about her either.
With that untreated thorn in its side, The Ghost of John McCain tries to build, instead, a (I guess) joyous bipartisan coalition of political meme figures. As the upcoming election nears, there are drop-ins from Bernie sitting in that chair and Kamala sipping coconut juice — though this is all still happening inside Trump’s head, an Inside Out or Herman’s Head if the characters were all from New Yorker cartoons. The notion must be that there’s something rebellious in imagining Trump’s own obsessions all turning on him, but I found the singular focus on Trump himself tiresome. The musical has nowhere to go except to loop back, continually, to the same jokes about the same man’s mental state. That’s less a rebellion and more like tenancy, and the artistic and imaginative rent this show pays to the concept of Trump is way too high.
