Would you pay upwards of $200 to have an old white man yell at you for two and a half hours straight? Unless you are searching for the fulfillment of some kind of sick dream, my guess is that it wouldn’t be the average American’s cup of tea.
And so I present to you Michael Moore and his hit show “The Terms of My Surrender” on Broadway. I was lucky enough to attend Moore’s 78th show, so allow me to paint the scene for you: an old white man literally yells at you for two and a half hours straight. No intermission. No overpriced bar provided to take the edge off. No people of color. It was a stunning sight.
The audience was anything but diverse. My presence only helped to strengthen the overwhelming ratio of white people in the audience, though I stood out like a sore thumb as the youngest person in the room by about 30 years.Then, on stage there was the infamous Oscar-yielding Michael Moore — one of very few strongly worded, outspoken, flustered, fiery liberals.
He had a few bones to pick, to say the least, the greatest one being the following:
Moore believes liberals are complacent, soft-spoken and not completing their civic duty to mobilize and impeach our common enemy, President Donald Trump. In other words, this show was anything but your typical romantic Broadway musical … or so it appeared on the surface.
I loved the show’s concept — an unapologetically progressive political rant on Broadway, accompanied by props and lights and booing and male strippers at the finale? Sign me up! But something didn’t seem genuine. Something about Moore being up there on such an acclaimed platform, affirming the preexisting beliefs of every white person in the audience made the hair on my neck stand up at times.
By all means, Michael Moore knows what he is talking about. The actual content of the play was certainly on point. Much of what he lectured about explained how Trump somehow weaseled into office a few months ago and how things have been looking more and more bleak ever since.
I walked out of the theatre on 44th Street understanding much better how the sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, racist, xenophobic and homophobic bully came to become the president of the United States. I also got a better grasp of the unfortunate reality of our current state. I never realized I was in denial — I didn’t necessarily want to. However, when the curtain closed and the male strippers exited the stage, I took away some honest facts.
He really is our president, he really is a horrible human being and two-thirds of all white American men voted for him, along with 53 percent of white women. It’s shocking, but it’s the truth.
Denying the disparity of the situation won’t get anyone anywhere. Moore certainly achieved this goal: he delivered these sentiments straight-up, without any type of sugar coating. It was extremely sobering to say the least. By sharing these statistics with his audience, it was clear he wanted to infuriate us in order to spark action and unrest.
Just before the grand finale, he pleaded that we turn our fury into movement and our pain into productivity by supplying us with actual ways in which we could get involved in making a change. According to him, this was our duty as Americans. I’ll buy the statistics, the yelling and the somber speeches, but this was where my eye started to twitch.
Who was Michael Moore to tell us that we weren’t doing our civic duty from the stage on Broadway? He has certainly put himself forward for the good of the country, but this seemed silly.
I loved the show, but I despised the audience. Each member of the audience spent a significant amount of money to sit in front of him and have their own belief system confirmed and validated. No one was there to expand their breadth of knowledge in any way. They were just a rowdy bunch of middle-aged white liberals excited to chip in and verbally respond to every rhetorical question Moore asked, all starting with “Did you know…” Of course they did, and of course they had to constantly interrupt to display their support.
It was laughable at times, painstakingly annoying at others, but either way, Michael Moore was simply preaching to the choir. I criticize him because if he was really doing his own civic duty as an advocate and an instigator of change, he would find a very different crowd in front of him, and probably wouldn’t be making so much money off of them either.
