POTUS: Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive
A review of POTUS; Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive
Oh, man y’all. I am so glad that I did not pay for this show—I work a theatre associated with the League of Professional Theatre Women, so I was given a free ticket to POTUS. I was debating going because I had saw that the show was pretty much on TDF every single day at every time, but because I was given this free ticket I decided to really go for it then.
The first bad start was that I missed the first thirty minutes of the show since I didn’t somehow realize that Tuesday night shows were at 7 PM, not 8 PM, and so I rolled up to the theater in a bad mood because my boss at my job called me and left me stalled for about fifteen minutes.
God bless the usher who led me to my seat. She saw that I looked like I was ready to cry, and instead of making me wait until intermission she went ahead and sat me down in the middle of a scene change.
And although I missed those thirty minutes, I felt like I didn’t need them much besides to establish the basic grounds of each character and what exactly their stakes are. I was seated in the center mezzanine by myself—and the show really wasn’t selling well, that was obvious.
Anyways, onwards with the review!
After the President of the United States reveals himself as an asshole, it’s up to seven women to save the day.
POTUS is a show that I would call pretty relevant. It tries to be a girlboss show with a ton of humor to lure in the rest of the audiences, and I would describe this kind of humor as similar to SNL, within that kind of brand, but different. I had no understudies the night I went on, so I got the cast in its full entirety. There’s one praise I will give POTUS: the acting is absolutely incredible. While some characters are completely unlikable and fall within very specific archetypes, the actors really blow it out of the water with representing them.
The cast consists of seven remarkable women. Suzy Nakamura is the press secretary of POTUS, while the Chief of Staff is Julie White. Vanessa Williams in the First Lady who is entirely done with her husband’s shit, especially because she knows that he is a cheating liar.
She has a tendency to wear Crocs with heels, which is when I walked into the show. Rachel Dratch portrays another secretary who, after falling into a drug-induced stupor, essentially wanders around the stage with an inner tube attached to her.
A journalist with a child (not seen here) wanders onto the scene, who is portrayed by Lilli Cooper. Julianne Hough makes her Broadway debut as a dumb Midwestern blonde who becomes pregnant with the president’s kid and seems to only exist for horrible sex jokes. Finally, the ex-girlfriend of Nakamura, played by Lea Delaria, has just busted out of jail and is ready to begin her operations drug dealing within the White House yet again.
The show revolves around a PR nightmare induced by the President: he says a word that riles up the feminists, and that’s for a good reason.
Considering his entire backstage team here is female, that has some loaded connotations. With a revolving set that depicts different offices, scenes, and janitor’s closets located within the White House itself, the women race from room to room in order to solve crisis. But then a new one easily pops up when the journalist throws a suffragette bust across the room: she has hit the president and it looks like she killed him with that one.
Intermission is at that moment—how convenient—then act two quickly delves into the territory of oh shit what do we do. Without humor, this show would have come across as a little soulless, and, while Dusty (Hough) doesn’t want her Baby Daddy to die and is willing to blow some veterans for him, there’s not much that can save them here. And I don’t think there is much that can save this show either.
The jokes were clearly funny to a majority of the audience, as the people around me were crying from laughing, but I simply didn’t find this show to be very funny.
I laughed like three times. It seemed like it relied too much on the relevant factors and buzz keywords in order to make a statement, which wouldn’t make it an enduring piece in the long run. It’s very representative of the time that it came from, but the humor just was not my style. It had mixed reactions among my coworkers, too, which made sense considering our varying tastes. Those who leaned more towards artsy Broadway—Company, Hadestown, Little Shop—did not end up liking this show.
As I mentioned before, I was seated in the mezzanine, which probably was not ideal for a show like this. Yes, I could see everything on stage perfectly clear, and the seats were angled so that you didn’t have the person’s head in front of you blocking the entirety of the stage. I liked my seat a lot, except for the fact that POTUS has a scene where the cast members run into the audience. If you’re not sitting in the front row of the mezzanine, you’re not going to be able to see any of it. So that gag completely goes over your head.
And that’s my review of POTUS! It was not my cup of tea, but it was definitely other people’s passion.
