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On August 5th, 2017 I went to see America’s biggest thorn-in-the-side, Michael Moore. He was doing a short run one-man show on Broadway called The Terms Of My Surrender and the balcony tickets were only $40. I was in town for a string of Phish shows at Madison Square Garden and figured a Saturday matinee with the Left’s favourite scallywag would be a nice way to break up the week’s entertainment.
I can tell you, this Michael Moore fellow is popular. Though this was only the third Broadway theatre I had set foot in it was by far the largest, and the line to get in was literally around the block. No matter, the seats were reserved so I cooled my heels in a cafe across the street with my crew until the line let up and we strolled right in.
The place was packed and anticipation was high. Soon a trapdoor opened in the stage and through the magic of Broadway hydraulic trickery up rose…a mic stand. Michael just opened a door in the flag-draped backdrop and walked out. It was a very appropriate entrance for the down-home no BS political activist. He gets you with words, not flash.
And he got us. Sure, spouting democratic and liberal concepts in New York City might be preaching to the choir – okay no “might be”…it is, plain and simple – but Moore’s show was more of a rally, a call to arms. He spun vastly entertaining stories, like the time he entered a speech contest when he was fourteen and he ended up changing the membership rules for the Elks Club, how he was elected to his city council when he was just seventeen and immediately fired his high school principal and vice-principal, about how he and a friend were the only protesters when Reagan visited a Nazi concentration camp in Germany, and as glaringly self-promoting as he was, he was really just trying to prove that one person could really affect change, and if we all became that one person then this Trump character wouldn’t have a chance.
Actually, the show was surprisingly short on Trump-bashing. He did this shtick where he pitted the smartest American in the audience with the dumbest Canadian (“I need an American who has at least one post-graduate degree and a Canadian who preferably has never finished high school”) and asked loaded questions like “How many states are there? Now, how many provinces?” You can guess how that went. He also went on a very eye-opening diatribe about the governor of Michigan and the water issue in Flint.
The show closed with two faux police officers onstage who turned out being Chippendale dancers leading a song-and-dance number with the big man himself.
Really.
In the end I was right: seeing Michael Moore’s one-man Broadway show was an excellent mid-Phish diversion and a heck of a lot of fun, as was everything I did on that trip.
Todd Man Out 