For His Broadway Début, Michael Moore Tries a Little Tenderness

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“How the fuck did this happen?” Michael Moore said last Friday night, from the stage of the Belasco Theatre. “You know what I’m talking about—not me on Broadway.” Dressed in his trademark untucked shirt, ball cap, and square glasses, Moore stood before an American-flag backdrop, a set-design troll for anyone who considers him less than a patriot. Sure enough, there was a guy outside the theatre yelling, “Trump, yes! Hollyweird, no! Fake news! Fake Broadway!”

Moore’s ballyhooed #FakeBroadway début is called “The Terms of My Surrender.” It’s a cheeky rebuke to the Trump Administration that plays mostly as a liberal pep rally. A bunting-lined box seat, Moore tells us, is reserved for President Trump, who has yet to show up. Friday’s show started hours after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, and Moore, in the manner of a late-night host, riffed on the news: “I’ve been saying, ‘Bring Steve Bannon here and fire him on Broadway!’ He couldn’t wait till tonight.”

The audience had filed in to pre-show music including Green Day’s “Working Class Hero,” which is how Moore has always presented himself. As the show wore on, clocking in at nearly two and a half intermissionless hours, it was easy to see why people love Moore, and love to hate him. Though he’s best known for his agitprop documentaries such as “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his defining onscreen moment came at the 2003 Academy Awards, where he was booed off the stage for blasting George W. Bush and the Iraq War. He was right, of course—the invasion, then four days old, was a catastrophe in the making. But Moore’s gleeful grenade-throwing rubbed people the wrong way, and plenty of his ideological allies have yet to warm back up to him.

The disorienting Age of Trump would seem to offer Moore a platform to reclaim his fans. Last July, Moore laid out “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win” on his Web site, positioning himself as a Midwestern Nostradamus whom coastal liberals would be wise to heed. Now he’s working on a new film, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” and taking this anti-victory lap on Broadway. Directed by Michael Mayer (who should have chopped down the running time), the show is a summation of Moore’s strengths and weaknesses—which aren’t the ones you might expect. It begins with a monologue about the sorry state of blue America, including a twelve-step program for Democrats (Step No. 1: admit that Donald Trump “outsmarted us all”), and then dabbles in memoir, variety show, and political call to action.

What’s clear within minutes is that Moore doesn’t have a late-night comedian’s timing. He punctuates his own jokes with nervous giggles, mumbles between lines, and, despite his baggy frame, has little sense of himself as a physical comedian. Bill Maher—another gadfly hampered by self-regard—does this kind of thing much better. The show’s low point was a special guest appearance by Keith Olbermann, who dropped by, “Laugh-In” style, and sat across from Moore for twenty minutes of mutual appreciation.

More compelling by far were Moore’s dips into autobiography. When he was seventeen, he tells us from behind a desk, he entered a speech contest in Michigan that used Abraham Lincoln as a prompt. When he found out that the Elks Club, a sponsor, was whites-only, he went onstage and delivered a reproach to a representative’s face. Walter Cronkite picked up the story, and the chain of events that followed led to the integration of the Elks Club and other private organizations. A year later, Moore became the youngest elected official in the country when he ran for the school board in Davison, Michigan, and won—in a bid to get his jerky vice-principal fired. Moore describes himself, in these flashbacks, as a hapless, pimply teen-ager who just happened to get caught up in political action. That’s a bit hard to believe—clearly, he relished his troublemaking—but the tales are potent regardless.

Midway through, Moore plays game-show host, pulling from the audience the best-educated American and the least-educated Canadian he can find to face off on trivia. The night that I saw the show, the American volunteer was a writer who had gone to Columbia and Harvard. When Moore called him onstage, it became apparent that the man had some kind of muscular condition and had difficulty moving. When he got onstage, the man whispered something to Moore, and it was uncertain whether he’d be able to hit the buzzer. In that tricky stage moment, Moore leaned in and had a tender way with him. When the segment was over, Moore told him to exit through the wings, not the downstage stairs, slowing down an already choppy show to make sure the man found his way.

It was tenderness, again, that distinguished the show’s finale, when Moore settled into an armchair and narrated the scandalous recent history of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, where the water has been poisoned by lead. Moore laid the blame squarely on the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who installed “emergency managers” in poor and majority-black cities, cutting crucial services to pay for a corporate tax cut. Snyder then ignored early warnings of medical problems in Flint. Moore talked about the victims of lead poisoning, especially children under six, who are at risk of permanent brain damage. As the backdrop filled with blurred projections of children’s faces, Moore asked the audience members what they would do if someone decided to sneak into their homes and poison their children’s water. “I’d kill them!” someone yelled back.

It was a rousing piece of rhetoric, one that reminded me of the climax of “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore’s 2002 broadside against American gun violence. Moore takes two survivors of the Columbine shooting to the lobby of Kmart’s headquarters, demanding a refund for the bullets lodged in their bodies. After a P.R. person tries to assuage them, they return the next day with news cameras, and the company agrees to phase out the sale of handgun ammunition within ninety days. “That’s more than what we asked for,” Moore says, stunned. It’s impossible to be annoyed by him in that moment. When Moore casts himself not as a pundit but as a protector—Ann Coulter would surely call it “parading victims”—he uses his tenderness as a tool for inciting change. It’s his ace card, as an activist and as a showman, whether he realizes it or not.

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