Word: wintergreens
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...what seemed the depths of the Depression - how little they knew - the play relates the machinations of political bosses to get its man, John Wintergreen (here, Broadway veteran Victor Garber), into the White House. Bereft of ideas or ideals, they take the advice of a chambermaid and run on a platform of Love. Their scheme is to stage an Atlantic City beauty contest and marry off the winner, a Southern honeypot named Diana Devereaux (wowser Jenny Powers), to the bachelor Wintergreen. The candidate, though, has fallen for his secretary, Mary Turner (Jennifer Laura Thompson, fresh from playing Glinda the Good...
...when French soldiers sing, "A vous toot dir veh, a vous?" and the nine Supreme Court justices declare, "We're the A.K.'s / Who give the O.K.'s" - A.K.'s meaning alterkockers. (For this lore I thank Alan Abrams, Time's Broadway-musical scholar in residence, who played Wintergreen in summer stock a few years back...
...contempt for the electoral process and an acute ear for political B.S. Realizing that stump speechifying is the art of couching nonsense in stentorian cadences, they have a Southern Senator intone this bilgewater: "Not for us the entangling alliances of Europe, not for us the allying entanglances of Asia." Wintergreen, who gets high marks for oratory if not for geography, tells voters that he has campaigned "in the cornfields of Kansas, on the plains of Arizona, in the mountains of Nebraska...
...your hearts, not your intelligence." Confronted with Lincoln's quote about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time, the boss snorts, "It's different nowadays. People are bigger suckers." (That got a conspiratorial roar from the opening night Encores! crowd.) Toward the end, Wintergreen lapses into candor when he confides to Throttlebottom the basics of White House governance: "Of course the first four years are easy. You don't do anything except try to get re-elected. ? The next four years you wonder why the hell you wanted to be re-elected...
...sexual triangle that leads to his impeachment, needs no footnote from me for its relevance to recent White House history. True, the image of a Vice President with neither power nor notoriety may seem anachronistic, not to say utopian, these days (though at the end, Throttlebottom does say to Wintergreen, in a neat presentiment of Maureen Dowd, "You can be the President and I'll go back to Vice.") But the pertinence of the show's disdain for the motives of the President, the Congress and the press carried a wallop then, and retain a sting today...