If Kings County is going to be the home of the capital-R Resistance (we had the highest anti-pumpkin vote among the five boroughs), then it has to show up for Michael Moore.
The idiosyncratic beat to The Terms of My Surrender, starring Mr. Moore, is precisely the sort of show that fits the right Broadway bill for this politically horrifying, disastrous era we’re now living in.
The one-man show brilliantly directed by Michael Mayer with an eye and ear for detail will be up through late October starting at $29 a pop, if you’re not in private equity, at the Belasco Theater. Afterwards, the production will not tour nationwide, nor be shown on television. For any anti-establishment Brooklynite looking for a ray of hope in these crazy times, Mr. Moore is likable, fresh, and frank with his audience about how to deal with Drumpf, which includes a 12-step program for helping people cope with this insane clown presidency.
At first, the show moves spaniel-like through Mr. Moore’s bashing of the orange Mussolini, but then it becomes incredibly moving, explosive, shocking as Mr. Moore at the top of his form breaks loose and begins to tell stories of how he erred on the side of gutsy sustaining victories and defeats through his life whether it was against an American president visiting a Nazi cemetery in Germany, the infamous Bill O’Reilly, a censoring HarperCollins, or an exclusive, restricted country club in Michigan. Hope I haven’t spilled the beans.
And while it’s easy to become easily distracted with our day-to-day, Mr. Moore dazzles the audience by offering part-time resistors eternal resistance, bathing all of us with the ways that our activism can be leashed.
Mr. Moore delivers the final period of his show with vibrant eloquence on how his hometown of Flint has been irretrievably decimated.
And yet, the crowd doesn’t go off into a hopeless future. Mr. Moore spares a moment of grace at the finale that brings the house down in the funniest and loveliest of ways. The crowd finds the resistance they’re yearning for.
In an effort to repatriate Mr. Moore cross-bridge, I approached him after the show and handed him my Medgar Evers College cap because while things look bad now, The Terms of My Surrender has led me to imagine how magnificent things will be when this is all over. The Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that it was our duty to be happy in difficult times. Other generations had seen far worse. The namesake of the Crown Heights college where I teach is based on the high-profile target for the assassin supremacists of 1963.
And like Bob’s song on Evers, Mr. Moore is telling us: we’re not screwed. What’s happening is the way forward. Everything is unfolding as it should. Pray for your enemies. And organize. That arrogant, entitled prez and guys like him feel their world slipping away. They’re scared. Have faith in our generation, and particularly in the one behind ours. Reject antifa violence emboldening more fascistic response. Bernie isn’t gone. The peace-filled resistance is only gaining in numbers.
The way forward is to get those Senate seats. Let’s focus on that, in whatever way we can. 2018 will be here before you know it….
The at times cartoonish-looking, at other times larger-than-life Mr. Moore provides all of the consequential anecdotes of his life that can educate us on how to create fundamental change in this every-man-for-himself jungle of American capitalism. His are the stories of grand prose. His show is the perfect kindling to spark up our local resistance. We just have to show up. Live in love. Do something nice for somebody else. Organize. Write something, etc…
The Terms of My Surrender featuring Michael Moore appears at The Belasco Theatre on Broadway thru October 2017. For Ticket Info visit here.
