So Michael Moore Has a Play on Broadway, and Even Liberal Reviewers Say It's a Godawful Hour and a Half of the Most Boring Fire and Brimstone Progressive Church You Could Imagine

Husky Huckster on the hustings.

From Vulture's review:

There is no challenge in The Terms of My Surrender. Well, there is the external challenge to the Trump regime, but no call for those of us participating in the event at hand to reexamine the ideas we presumably walked in with. Despite Moore's protests (in the Times and in Time Out) that the show isn't a "political rally," what else are you supposed to call a room full of people chanting and cheering every time a majority opinion is reaffirmed, and hissing and cursing whenever the Enemy is mentioned? And the audience was cheering all right -- and cursing. This crowd was there for Moore. "We are the majority!" he repeated, each time to whoops and applause. "We" and "us" were two of the most frequent words out of Moore’s mouth, and though they seemed to fire up a good number of my neighbors, I quickly started to feel like my significant other was ordering for me at a restaurant: "We'll have the salmon." The salmon in this case being Trump's impeachment.

Michael Moore reminds me of Jabba the Hutt. No, not in terms of weight; that would be a cheap joke entirely beneath me.

I'm making the more elevated comparison between the two fat alien's repulsive skin. Michael Moore's face is nothing but moles, wattles, dry patches, and what-the-fuck bumps. His face looks like a relief map of Tibet, if Tibet were obese and looked like melting wax made of melanomas.

The guy's got so much estrogen in him he's naturally transitioning to spectacularly ugly fat woman with a face that looks like Mars during the Late Bombardment.

Michael Moore is visual proof that miserable, sad lonely losers choose a politics of misery, sadness, and lonely loserdom.

More: Sexton excerpts the pans from the NYT and LA Times too.

Here's the NYT:

“The Terms of My Surrender,” which opened on Thursday at the Belasco, is a bit like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous, self-regarding, time-sucking uncle. Gotta love him -- but maybe let’s turn on the television.

...

Mr. Moore, awkward and often tongue-tied, is not a natural stage creature. There is a script, but it seems to be more of a reconfigurable scaffold, changing from night to night…A lot of the material is thus delivered semi-impromptu, with all the stutters and longueurs that entails.

To make up for this Mr. Moore affects a cute, common-man delivery that fools no one, though the crowd at the Belasco, including a few shills, claps for almost all of the bait he tosses. Some toss bait back, including vulgar imprecations against the president that are hardly distinguishable from the cries of “Lock her up” that horrify us in other settings.

By the way, "longueur," in English, means a tediously long passage in a book. (I had to look that up; never heard that before.) In French it just means "length."

posted by Ace at 02:55 PM

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