Post 675 - November 8, 2024

Yesterday, Russel Brand posted a selfie online of a red baseball cap that at first glance looks like a MAGA hat. Instead of the usual slogan, however, what was written on its brim was, “Make Jesus first again.” Nicole Scherzinger, the current star of the Broadway revival of Sunset Blvd. commented on the photo saying, “Where can I get this hat?”

I am trying to disengage from the national news as much as I can. At the same time, I want to be aware of what is going on. People are understandably losing their minds. While I completely sympathize, getting lost in the maelstrom of public churning emotions is not going to get any of us through this. Terror and anxiety feed on themselves and grow stronger. None of us need that.

We can expect to hear about all manner of idiots being appointed to the President-elect’s Cabinet and Inner Circle. That’s just a given. We can also expect to hear attempts by the GOP to implement some of the policies they formulated in the Project 2025 document. 

At the height of the election, the then ex-President claimed he didn’t know anything about Project 2025. Yesterday he announced that one of its authors, a guy named Tom Horman, was, “coming aboard.”

None of that should be a surprise. When a dam breaks, you expect water to come through the hole. Water will indeed come through the hole we just made. The question is, how much of the sludge that had settled on the bottom of the reservoir behind the dam will now be released as well.

The Republicans are not going to be able to do everything they said they plan to do. Their candidate said anything and everything he could to get himself elected. He constantly contradicted himself. Most of that garbage that flowed out of his mouth is not going to make it through the breach. Some of it, practically, can’t.

Even had they won the election, the Democrats would not have been able to accomplish everything they said they would, either.

A GOP strategist is already trying to pull the President-elect back from fully endorsing Robert Kennedy, Jr. “… a lot of people think he’s kind of a loony tune,” the strategist said on CNN yesterday.

Not everyone on the Republican side is a full-blown idiot, but the loudest people at the top certainly are. Elon Musk and his nonsensical ravings take up more than their fair share of the news headlines and may be drowning out the calmer more reasonable voices amassing around the new administration.

The President-elect seems to love Musk, but will he follow along with everything the guy is spewing? Who knows, and frankly, now, who cares. Let Musk rant and when the dust settles, we can respond to what’s really happening as opposed to giving all this frantic energy to what might happen.

It does seem to me that at some point, if almost anything the GOP ran on in this election is implemented, the people who supported the party are the ones who are going to feel it, themselves.

Deporting millions of immigrants is going to cost a fortune and take up a lot of time that could be far better spent doing something else. Say the Republicans are successful in purging the country of the people they deem undesirable, then who is going to replace the banished in the workforce? Who is going to do all the work that people who have been in this country for several generations don’t want to do?

If you think our food prices are high now, just wait until there is nobody left to do the work necessary to get the food we buy into our stores.

I don’t think that anybody who voted for the Republican ticket used critical thinking in their decision. The people who voted Republican seem to have done so emotionally, not rationally. That we, on the other side, didn’t recognize that and try and combat the misinformation on that level, may very well turn out to be the reason we failed.

So many of the people in this country seem to think our economy is in a shambles when, in fact, it’s in the best shape it’s been in for a long time. The markets are at peak highs, and inflation is at a record low. Half the country refuses to believe that.  All they can see is that prices are up in their supermarkets so the economy must be floundering.

As I said, just wait.

Back to Nicole Scherzinger. Russell Brand is a comedian and a podcaster. During the COVID pandemic, Brand became increasingly right wing and began to embrace all manner of conspiracy theories. Last year, five women came forward and accused Brand of sexual assault and abuse. When the Metropolitan Police in London made a statement urging any others who may have been victimized to come forward, they reportedly received seventeen more reports against Brand. None of the allegations have come to trial yet. Brand, nonetheless, has been labeled a predator.

The court of public opinion is not a real court, nor should it be treated as such. If Nicole Scherzinger is friendly with Russell Brand, maybe she knows something about him that the greater public does not.

The issue with the post is that given the design of the hat and the reference implied by the quote on it, Nicole Scherzinger’s comment seems to indicate her support for the President-elect.

Last night, my social media accounts exploded against her. “Nicole Scherzinger nuking her public image at its most ascendant in years for a comment on a f%$^ing Russell Brand Instagram post is wild,” someone wrote.

Someone else has found her “liking” a Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. post in which he states his support of free speech for people like Brand and Tucker Carlson.

All of this seems like a tempest in a tea pot and, what does it matter? Who cares about Nicole Scherzinger’s political leanings?

Well, I do.

Finding out that she may be a MAGA supporter has somehow made the full weight of the consequences of this election land on me.

I was in London a few months ago working on Mandy Patinkin’s concert. Michael came with me. Mandy only performed every other night, so in-between concerts, Michael and I went to see other shows. On the nights I was working, Michael went to something I wasn’t interested in seeing. I had zero interest in seeing Sunset Blvd., so Michael went on his own.

Back in the day, I saw Betty Buckley play Norma Desmond on Broadway. She was dependably great the two times she was given a real song to sing, but I found the rest of the show severely lacking. The thought of having to sit through it all again was too much to bear. I was more than happy for Michael to see it without me.

After our respective shows were done, we met up somewhere for a bite. Michael walked into the restaurant and said to me, “Get out your phone and order us tickets to see it again, tomorrow.” He was deadly serious. So serious, that I did. I got us two tickets to see Sunset Blvd. the following night.

I was, to be honest, dreading it. I really didn’t want to go. The next night, we sat down in our seats and all I wanted to do was get out of there. About ten minutes into the show, though, I turned to Michael, and I said, “I’m good.”

As it happens, I would put Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Blvd. among the top ten theatrical experiences I have ever had over the course of my entire life. Nothing I could say to describe why would make anyone want to go and see it. My description, in fact, would only make it sound worse. It was, however, a remarkable night in the theatre and one I will never forget.

This may be about nothing. Nicole Scherzinger may have just liked the Jesus-ness of the hat. Given the immediate upswell against her, though, one might expect an immediate response from either her or her press team to put us all at ease. It’s past noon as I write this and so far, there has been nothing. That, in and of itself, is rather telling.

Given what’s at stake here for our country and for us as its citizens, making comparisons to Germany in the 1930s doesn’t feel like hysterical hyperbole. Too many things are lining up.

A quote by Toni Morrison has been circulating like mad. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no time for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Leni Riefenstahl was a film director, writer, producer, actor, and photographer in pre-war Germany. She was born in 1902 and came into her own during the 1920s and 1930s. She was one of the very few women to direct their own film during the Weimar era. She was an innovator and extremely well regarded.

When Hitler came to power, Riefenstahl began making propaganda films for him. Two of them, Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, received world-wide acclaim. They are still, despite their content, admired for their craft and execution.

We continue to argue whether an artist’s work can be judged on its own or whether political biases can and, maybe should, change our perception of what we, the audience, experience.

Can we still watch a Bill Cosby comedy routine and laugh at his jokes knowing who the man truly is? There is an enormous disconnect between Cosby’s on-camera persona and the person the countless sexual abuse allegations against him paint him as.

Should Nicole Scherzinger’s political affiliation mean that she will not be nominated for a Tony Award for her performance? It very well might if she doesn’t do something soon to change the tide of public opinion rising against her.

Hearing that Nicole Scherzinger may be a MAGA-supporter was like a gut-punch. It isn’t even just Nicole Scherzinger, herself, that was so upsetting. It was the implication. Is this what our lives are going to be like moving forward? Will we all be on the lookout for who our neighbors support? Who is on our side and who isn’t?

Isn’t that what happened in Germany?

At a deli yesterday, a big Eastern European man was standing behind me in line at the cashier. There were stacks of the daily newspapers on the floor beside us with the election headlines emblazoned across their front pages. As we were waiting, I took a picture of them. The guy behind me, who must have thought I was happy about what I was reading, said something like, “I am so happy for him that he won. He deserves it.”

I didn’t say anything. This was somebody from my own neighborhood. This was in New York City, one of the bluest places in the country.

If Nicole Scherzinger does turn out to be a MAGA-supporter, my feelings towards her will change. That realization saddens me more than I can say. What she is doing onstage in Sunset Blvd. is transformative but if it is in service to the ideals of Project 2025, no matter how indirectly, then I am going to need to step away.

It’s funny how hard that potential loss has landed on me. It shouldn’t matter. She’s only an actor. It’s only a show. I think it’s hitting me because it’s happening in my home.

I have lived and worked on Broadway for decades. It’s always seemed like a safe space. In recent years, bad behavior and prejudicial tendencies have come to light that have made us take a hard look at how our theatrical businesses were operating, but it was still our place despite the bad apples.

So many of us gravitated to careers in the theatre because we didn’t fit in anywhere else. Whatever it was that we were wasn’t always welcomed in the outside world. For many of us, theatre became our church, our school, and our place to be accepted for who we are.

The Republican Party’s base is against us. They don’t like any of us who are other. We are the enemy and, by their measure, need to be changed or expelled. They believe we all need to be punished and marginalized for being different.

Our theatres have been our battlefields against ignorance. Our theatres have been where we’ve fought for our right to exist. Our theatres have been the place where we’ve tried to show, through example, that who we are, as different from anyone else as we might be, is not bad. In fact, just the opposite. We theatre people have always wanted to be able to welcome everyone into our space to share our stories and our experiences.

It took me an entire essay to get there, but that is why Nicole Scherzinger’s support of the MAGA Republican agenda hurts so much. It is a betrayal.

I feel betrayed.

What do I do with this? I dunno. I keep hoping that some press agent will issue a statement or that Nicole Scherzinger will clarify her stance and show us that it’s all just been a terrible mistake and a misunderstanding.

Who cares about what an actor thinks? I care. I care, and I feel betrayed by all of this.

I guess I am now on step three of the grief cycle. I’ve been through shock and denial and clearly, I am now in anger. I guess that’s a step in the right direction.

Time for a walk.