Western Stage is perversely gleeful about their first big musical of the season, a profane, punk-rock, creative history/biography of Andrew Jackson’s life and presidency. It’s calledBloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a 2008 work by Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers with the tagline “History just got all sexypants.”
It’s set in the early 1800s, with Jackson reimagined as a brash, young, emo rock star with a six-shooter and a rebel yell, the American people as tattooed groupies, the young country as restrictive parents and Cabinet members as haters.
Western Stage has helpfully screened possible offending (or enticing) content and listed it for audiences to test against their sensibilities: language like shit, fuck, cock-gobblers, douchebag; alcohol and drug use; sexual innuendo and sex acts of the oral variety and otherwise; violence including shooting, flogging and fighting.
So, of course, there will be blood.
Kenneth Allen Neely, 29, formerly of Pacific Grove and now living and acting in New York City, is coming back to play the lead as Jackson. When he first read the script, he was caught off guard. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” he says.
He admired that it broke rules and left them littered all over the floor: “Love story, opening number, exposition, theme, song and dance – this says ‘Forget that. We’re playing punk music.’”
Neely used to sing in bands at clubs in L.A. and has worked on his rock wail, which fits right into the role. He compares the sonic palette to Incubus, Slipknot and Green Day’s American Idiot musical that came out around the same time.
In one song, Jackson shout-sings “Life sucks! My life in particular sucks!” The ditty “10 Little Indians” lists ways Jackson and white colonialism decimated Native Americans – execution, syphilis, religious conversion, dispossession. Any controversy in other productions seems to land on the portrayal of Native Americans, but Neely says the show doesn’t make fun of them as much as it does America’s treatment of them.
“America in the early 1830s was not a happy place,” Neely says. But he says there are levels of satire and self-mockery that redeem the cuss words and nastiness.
“It’s incredibly ambitious,” he says. He just hopes that the audience gets desensitized to the barrage of profanity early on and enjoy the show on its own irreverent terms… for fuck’s sake.
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