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Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is the “smartest, sharpest new musical in years,” said David Cote in Time Out New York. A loose, satirical look at the life and times of America’s seventh president, the show, by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, is a winning “mix of emo rock, sketch comedy, and undergrad snark.” Played “with total rock star hotness by Benjamin Walker,” the 19th century’s most popular populist is anachronistically presented as a foulmouthed, tight-pants-wearing egotist with a penchant for stirring the pot. With ecstatic songs like “Populism Yea, Yea!” setting the tone, the show follows Jackson’s rise to the country’s highest office via an uncanny ability to capitalize on “popular anger against Washington insiders.”
“There isn’t a show in town that more astutely reflects the state of this nation,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Timbers and Friedman suggest, in material that’s “both smarter and cruder than your average Broadway fare,” that Jackson’s genocidal policies on Native Americans were tailor-made for an electorate that was consumed by anger and “a hunger for instant gratification.” Walker’s brutally funny performance is a “study in the ravenous, paranoia-driven urge to seduce and conquer” that we associate with popular leaders. Of course, when Jackson discovers that “he can’t be all things to all people, they turn on him.” Barack Obama and Sarah Palin may want to take note.
Not everything works here, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. The show gets “three-quarters of its laughs from the incongruity of hearing 19th-century characters use 21st-century slang,” and lines like, “The Era of Good Feelings? Huh! More like the Era of Bad Feelings!” quickly grow tiresome. The guitar-driven score, however, is a revelation. Until now, Broadway had never mounted a convincing rock musical. Friedman’s “hard-edged” songs are not the “scrubbed-up Disneypop” we’re used to hearing on the Great White Way; what’s more, they’re each fully integrated with the show’s book. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson isn’t quite a masterpiece. But it just might be the blueprint for “the future of the American musical.”
