I am only two years older than the Capitol Steps, the much-lauded
political/comedic/musical satire group that began as an act at a Christmas party
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1981. Producer and writer Elaina
Newport is the last remaining member of the troupe who was a part of the group's initial, impromptu holiday performance, the one that would spawn their acclaimed and public debut run
at the Shoreham Hotel, as well as establish their fame within, and beyond, the
Washington Beltway. While cofounder Bill Strauss passed away in 2007, and longtime collaborator Jim
Aidala appears to have left the Steps in 1994 after taking a high-level
position within the Environmental Protection Agency (his LinkedIn currently
describes him as a “Senior Government Consultant,” working through Bergeson
& Campbell, P.C.), Elaina Newport has continued for over three decades to not only
keep the Steps’ satirical repitiorie fresh, but to develop a steadily lucrative
economic engine within an artistic and satirical enterprise. All of my life, the
Capitol Steps have had plenty of fodder for their repurposed pop songs, with
lyrics retooled to lampoon the scandal of the day: from “Thank God I’m a Contra
Boy” (1986) and “Workin’ 9 to 10” (1987) during the Reagan administration to
“Papa’s Got a Brand New Baghdad” (2004) and “I’m So Indicted” (2006) during the
Bush years (their most recent recording is titled “Fiscal Shades of Gray”).
For a number of years, the Steps have been operating multiple
touring companies, allowing for the troupe to perform—literally—in more than one
place at a time. During most of the calendar year, the Steps operate a touring
company that, not unlike the traveling versions of Broadway musicals, fills
medium-size venues from coast to coast; in summer, however, in addition to the
gaggle of former Congressional staffers-turned-amateur Vaudevillians that take
the stage at the Reagan Building amphitheater in Washington, DC on Friday and
Saturday nights, a separate, revolving subset of the cast performs almost
nightly through August at Cramwell Resort, Spa & Golf Club in Lenox,
Massachusetts: this perennial gig/residency seems to be the Steps’ incubator for
new bits, there among the Guilded Age mansions of the former elite, now tucked
neatly between golf courses in the Berkshires (“contemporary comfort with the
experience of a luxurious bygone era,” reads Cramwell’s ad copy).
Neil Diamond titled his live-from-the-mid-1970s album "Hot August Night." This evening with the Steps was the opposite: torrential rain drove the golfers from their courses, streamed across the parking lots and winding driveways, and soaked the manicured lawn of Cramwell. The basement of the Olmsted Building resembled the
recreation room of a posh assisted living facility, where its tanned,
pastel polo-shirt’d crowd smelled of nothing but money. A crowd of maybe 150
filled the 200 chairs arranged in the room, where an Electro-Voice PA and four
mics on stands sat before the Steps’ banner, beside which sat pianist Dr. Marc
Irwin, ready for his cues. Earlier on that Friday afternoon in August, Tiger
Woods, having risen like a phoenix from scandal, had come in 9 under par at
Bridgestone—big news to the idle rich. Even bigger news: there was only 1,001
days left in the Obama presidency. It would have been a reasonable guess, that somebody in the
room would play a heavy role, in picking the next head of state.
I was surprised to see The Steps’ show at Cramwell was more of a
‘recent greatest hits’ compilation than a breeding ground for new material; the
Battle Hymn of the Republic(ans), the medley from the musical Grease
reworked to represent the broke country in Europe (“Hopelessly Devalued to
You”), and a predictable tribute to the NSA, featuring the clever lyric “I know
your new pin/I know every sin.” The crowd was least emphatic about the version
of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” that recounted the IRS’ intentional targeting
and auditing of political opponents; the only song that forced some to leave the
show parodied gas guzzling SUVs, using Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an
American.” And a few songs were clunkers, if only because time had not been kind
to the subjects of the satire: a jovial actor with an explicit faux accent
pretended to be from Afghanistan, before dancing merrily while singing “On the
Sunni Side of the Street.” Though the Steps’ lyrics to the pop classic included
one great line (“our state bird is the… DUCK!”), the laughs were hard-earned:
all week, news of continued rocket attacks curdled the humor, making it nearly
unpalatable. An Obama impersonator sang a soliloquy based on the Sam Cooke hit
“Wonderful World,” but I couldn’t buy it, the portrait of a naïve,
media-obsessed Barack crooning “don’t know much about agencies […] I only know
what I see on TV.” This, alongside full skits pretending that Chris Christie
saved the Hostess Twinkie, a monologue-in-progress featuring a detective sent to
track down Edward Snowden, a hypothetical meeting between the two female Supreme
Court justices in the restroom (they end up singing the praises of Antonin
Scalia, to the tune of Roger and Hammerstein’s “Maria”), and a nearly-toothless
send-up of the Rolling Stones’ recent tour (no jokes about the
ticket prices!) summed to create a wonderous, if generally impotent, ninety
minutes of theater. Biggest (and inadvertently, the most cruel) laugh from the
crowd? A casual joke from the detective mentioned above, about having ‘less work
than a West Virginia tooth fairy.’ The hardest truth for the crowd may have come
in the skit about the President of Mexico wanting to “immigrate to Casa Blanca
[…] to do twice the work for half the pay.” Do the golf caddies and
groundskeepers, servers and barkeeps of Lenox, Massachusetts, get paid what they
themselves would consider livable wage?
While the Capitol Steps’ final number—a spastic review of their
history of parody, through keen use of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the
Fire”—did end with a sign that read “don’t blame us—you voted for
them!,” I was still left feeling that the spirit of the show could have
challenged the audience more effectively: there are individuals and
organizations that, were they to satirize, would get them effectively banned
from the erudite Cramwell. Yet The Steps’ are somehow aware of these unspoken
taboos (not even their opening number, a full intellectual assault on the
stalwart Congressional Republicans, made mention of John Boehner), and are able
to play it as safely as possible, in order to maintain their own reputation—were
social justice or political mobilization their game, but alas, bringing an
audience to the very brink of revolt, and no further, is more lucrative than
poignant. While I understand that there was more than one troupe of the Capitol
Steps operating on the night that I saw them perform, these individuals and
groups earned no mention whatsoever in The Steps’ August 2013 shows at Cramwell:
Rand or Ron Paul, Ben Bernanke, the National Rifle Association, John McCain,
Sarah Palin, Roger Ailes, Michelle Bachmann, the Occupy Movement, Twitter, Mitt
Romney, George W Bush, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, the Koch brothers, Alec
Baldwin, the “1%”, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Stewart, Facebook, Wolf Blitzer,
Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly. There is a club, and through the lens of
national media, it’s unclear who was in it, has been, and is not still a
member—the hefty ticket price (ten more bucks would’ve gotten one onto the lawn,
to see Phish at SPAC) allows The Steps’ to safely assume their audience at
Cramwell was seeking a specific brand of political satire. Perhaps my idealism
had left me hoping to witness how a group of former Congressional staffers in an
off-Broadway venue, having lived through some of the virtual and rhetorical wars
of our nation’s capitol, would feel compelled to use the end of their show to
challenge: of participation, a call-to-action, over a sardonic ‘told-you-so.’
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