"Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" comes roaring onto the stage at Teatro Zuccone with the driving rock number "Populism, Yea, Yea!" and drives straight through the career of the seventh president of the United States.
Renegade Theater Company's production of Alex Timbers' book, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman, is political commentary with an emo-rock score, brilliantly cast and directed by Katy Helbacka.
The show is a mélange of techniques, with rapid-fire sight gags, anachronistic modernisms deftly inserted in solemn 19th Century pronouncements, a haunting shadow-puppet recounting of the genocide of American Indians and deliberate self-references. (Jackson fires his cabinet and announces, "From now on, the band will be my cabinet," gesturing to the five on-stage musicians.)
The intensity of the production demands no less a performer in the title role than Zachary Stofer, whose personal charisma, combined with his dramatic range, his expressiveness and his sense of timing, make Jackson's rise from backwoods boyhood to the nation's highest office feel as current as a 21st century political career. Stofer would be a formidable candidate in his own right.
But "Bloody Bloody" is no one-man show. Julia Rickert as the Storyteller takes the over-the-top narration over that top and beyond, as a 6-foot-6 drama queen in vaguely fairy attire whose super-
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saccharine commentary at one point drives Jackson to shoot her in the throat, silencing her only temporarily. And Kendra Carlson is heartbreaking as Rachel, who has wed young Jackson while still married to another man and who pleads with him to abandon his quests.
Stofer, Rickert and Carlson are the only players with named characters, but the 11-member ensemble, rich in talented, seasoned performers, are key to the story's richness, many playing multiple small vignettes such as Andy Bennett's simpering President James Monroe.
The ensemble also is essential to creating the sense of excitement that permeates the first two thirds of the play, covering Jackson's campaign against the Indians, the Spanish and the British, his fomenting frontiersmen's discontent with what they see as government's disregard for their safety and his campaign for the presidency. The scene in which Jackson announces his candidacy carries all the passion and excitement of a national political convention.
Furthermore, the ensemble executes Amber Burns' fresh, lively choreography with crispness and élan, enhanced by Bennett's and Jon Moyer Grice's lighting design.
The parallels between then and now are facilitated by Sasha Howell and Trista Rider's costumes, which are at once whimsical and evocative.
The show's breathtaking pace slows noticeably about two-thirds of the way through, as Jackson confronts the difficulties of governing, dealing with an obstructive Supreme Court and a do-nothing Congress as well as renewed conflict with the Indians.
His plight clearly reflects that of the incumbent, but this happens only after a lifetime of thoughts, words and action that are more reminiscent of George W. Bush's or even Sarah Palin's.
"Bloody Bloody" is no partisan screed, but rather an examination of American political history, set to a really neat beat.
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Paul Brissett is a Duluth writer and amateur actor who has appeared in numerous community theater productions.
