Five months before massive scrutiny around his mental competence led to Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Reuters reported that the oldest sitting president’s secret to a long-lasting marriage was “good sex.” That was the headline. The answer didn’t come from a direct ask; rather, Biden’s methodology was revealed in Katie Rogers’s American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, and reported on secondhand. I joked at the time that I wanted to meet the guy who changed his vote from Trump to Biden after hearing that remark. It felt like a bizarre highlight, especially given that Joe Biden has numerous sexual misconduct allegations to his name.
In Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s musical 1776, Thomas Jefferson literally cannot stop making out with his wife. His fellow delegates to the Continental Congress come to his residence and beg him to write the Declaration of Independence, and he cannot come up for air long enough to get it done because he cannot stop kissing his wife. It’s a fun running gag for an incredibly romantic portrayal of Jefferson, but it certainly obfuscates historical reality. Jefferson very well may have loved kissing his wife, but he was also a slave owner who raped and fathered several children with Sally Hemings, a woman he ostensibly owned. I feel like that’s probably more important to note than it is to maintain Jefferson’s image as a loverboy from Virginia—the state that’s for lovers. But here onstage, as in that Biden quote, an American president’s virility is used as shorthand for evidence of his strength as the leader of the Free World and the American national father.
American presidents show up in strange and silly ways all over the history of American musical theatre. From FDR’s tap-dancing cameo in Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right (1937) to the brotherhood of young, scrappy, and hungry Founding Fathers hanging out together in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Obama-era smash Hamilton (2015)—ever heard of it?—we clearly like to see our leaders reflected in entertainment. It’s one of the ways we can wrestle with the anxiety of being subjects of an empire.
At best, depicting a U.S. president in a musical takes a cultural temperature. It tells us what people were thinking about this country at the time of writing, and helps us shape and understand the legacies of leaders we’ve moved on from. Hair (1967) is interesting for its depiction of Abraham Lincoln as a Black woman; Assassins (1990) is interesting for the ways it doesn’t depict American presidents, instead turning to their would-be assassins for clues about how Americans were feeling during their presidencies; Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2008) tries to account for the Indian Removal Act by setting a song to “Ten Little Indians” and asking audiences to sit with how messed up it is that we have an American children’s rhyme centered around Indigenous genocide.
At worst, depicting a president comes off as a way of staying within the empire’s good graces. Shakespeare wrote about monarchs because he was patronized by monarchs; as our National Endowment for the Arts shrinks ever smaller, and fewer and fewer government programs prioritize the essential work of artists, that kind of stage adulation becomes more and more undignified. At least Shakespeare was being paid handsomely to sell out for the King.
Jefferson’s slave-owning does come up in 1776, in the context of the song “Molasses to Rum,” sung by South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge to take hypocritical Northerners and Southerners to task for profiting from the slavery they are trying to write out of the law of the land:
Molasses to rum to slaves
Who sail the ships back to Boston?
Laden with gold, see it gleam!
Whose fortunes are made in the Triangle Trade?
Hail slavery: the New England dream!
When called out for his specific hypocrisy, Jefferson gets small and shy. He admits to slave-owning, but insists he’s made plans to set his slaves free. That’s about as critical as 1776 gets; Jefferson only freed two of his slaves in his lifetime, and the rest were freed when he died. But that doesn’t serve the national narrative!
Alongside jazz, musical theatre is one of the only truly American artistic mediums, so it makes sense that our national story would play out onstage so often. It also makes sense that many musicals choose adulation over interrogation. The American empire needs us to see our leaders as deeply relatable. Why did Bill Clinton play the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show? Why did Richard Nixon appear on Laugh-In? Musical theatre, in its high pathos, is an excellent medium for this kind of reputation-laundering. A great deal of time, money, and effort goes into bringing a musical into the mainstream, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce theatre if you are not already a member of the ruling class. Shaina Taub’s 2022 musical about the suffragettes, Suffs, is produced by Hillary Clinton.
In conversation with Brittany Luse for NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, I posited that American history is a form of IP. In a period where most new musicals on Broadway are adapted from narrative films (Back to the Future, Death Becomes Her, Moulin Rouge!) and the lives of popular entertainers (MJ the Musical, Beautiful, The Cher Show), Suffs and Hamilton are historical outliers, both based on non-fiction biographies. But, insofar as adaptations of existing intellectual property function to (1) reup copyright on popular stories/songs and (2) regurgitate stories we already know to profit from public nostalgia, American history can absolutely be considered alongside Back to the Future as part of our national mythology. We have all been fed the same American folktales; they’re more recognizable to us than the classic cultural reference points of Shakespeare and the Bible.
Unlike comparably wealthy countries around the globe, Americans do not have a state theatre. We have alleged free speech, but we do not have government-given resources to wrestle with our issues with the state onstage. We do, however, have historical precedent for it. The Federal Theatre Project was a Depression-era New Deal program introduced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935 to fund projects for the stage in a historical moment where economic instability threatened the arts.
I think we depict presidents the way we do in order to cope with our own powerlessness, but I also think we do it to represent whole historical periods. I’ve always wondered if the Federal Theatre Project is why FDR is given the role of a kind of benevolent king in Annie (1976). Annie, based on Harold Gray’s reactionary comic strip,[1] tells the story of a plucky orphan saving America from the Depression with her can-do spirit. When the president comes to Daddy Warbucks (whose name is like that for a reason, but he’s considered a war-profiteering good guy because the War he was Bucksing was World War II) for guidance, meeting Annie makes him believe in optimism again. They sing “Tomorrow,” and she inspires the New Deal. Roosevelt exists here as both figurehead and friend; if only our presidents saw our suffering, they would understand why we need things to change. It may be silly that meeting Annie inspires Roosevelt to fix misconduct in New York’s orphanages—and then he does it(!)—but he’s onstage to represent not just himself, but any one of the social programs that became a hallmark of his presidency. He is here to celebrate the ways Americans benefited from his policies. Accordingly, no one mentions his Japanese internment camps.
FDR is not the only President Roosevelt to appear in an American musical. He’s not even the only President Roosevelt to appear in an American musical about orphanages and children’s rights. In a similar onstage stand-in for larger social programs, Teddy Roosevelt appears in Newsies (2011) to overhaul Joseph Pulitzer’s mistreatment of the striking underage workers who want to sell their papes for a fair wage. He makes sure they get paid that fair wage, and he even closes the “refuge” where many orphaned child laborers have been imprisoned and abused. These onstage actions position TR as pro-worker and pro-labor. The story also takes place before Roosevelt became president, when he was still Governor of New York. Newsies highlights the things about Roosevelt that were truly progressive without having to reckon with the cruel, imperialist foreign policy that would define his later presidency. That’s about all I’d ever expect Disney to be comfortable with.[2]
Newsies also wants us to know that Teddy Roosevelt fucks. Not only does he fuck, he fucks extramaritally. Not only does he fuck extramaritally, he is having an affair with Ms. Medda Larkin, a nightclub owner and performer who takes care of many of the newsies in her offstage time. In the stage show, Medda is almost always played by a Black woman. To tell the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s progressivism (something that got him shot), Newsies employs a marginalized person in the same kind of shorthand Annie uses to deify FDR. In Newsies, Teddy Roosevelt is great, and he is progressive, and he is definitely not racist—just look at who he’s sleeping with.
Patriarchy reproduces itself over and over again in American musical theatre through the bizarre and constant choice of humanizing the presidency through sexuality. Even the Jefferson of Hamilton, which puts the mythology of the Founding Fathers into the bodies of the marginalized people who actually built America, only mentions Sally Hemings in an offhand way in one line during one high-energy musical number. Suffs and Hamilton both attempt to erase generations of mythology that favors white men, and to reinstate the contributions of women and people of color to the founding of the nation. That’s what’s so troublesome to me about Clinton’s involvement in Suffs, and Hamilton’s development history beginning inside the Obama White House. If musical theatre is how we’re trying to tell our national stories, and those stories are now being bankrolled and championed by some of the country’s most powerful individual pursestrings, how is the result distinct from propaganda?
[1] When FDR was elected to a third term in 1944, Gray killed off Daddy Warbucks in the strip and said that he “died of despair.”
[2] It is hilarious that Disney has a musical about workers’ rights.
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