‘A Face in the Crowd’ Isn’t About Trump. It Just Seems Like It.

Stop me if you think you have heard this one before: A man gains television fame on the strength of his purported connection to everyday Americans and their resentment of elites, and before long he converts that fame into political influence in a right-wing presidential campaign.

That is the rough outline of the 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” which featured a pre-sitcom Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a wild-eyed, guitar-slinging hustler who is discovered in an Arkansas jail by an ambitious radio producer and becomes a national phenomenon — until a hot mic moment reveals his bottomless contempt for his fans and they abandon him. Written by Budd Schulberg, based on a short story he had written years earlier, and directed maximally by Elia Kazan, “A Face in the Crowd” was an outlandish but eerily plausible speculative satire about the dangerous seductions of mass media.

Now it has been adapted as a musical with a book by Sarah Ruhl and songs by Elvis Costello, which is scheduled to open at the Young Vic in London on Sept. 20. Ruhl and Costello, talking amid rehearsals last month, took pains to stress that they don’t see their show as directly addressing the rise of Donald Trump, who turned television fame into political capital. But there is no escaping that, much as Schulberg’s original was partly responding to the hysteria of the McCarthy era, their musical version began gestating during Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, and a large part of it was written during that year.

“We’ve been careful not to tie the thing directly to Trump,” said Ruhl, “partly because it’s all there — Budd Schulberg was so prescient. There have been lines I’ve had to take out because they seemed too on the nose. At one point, some of the merch that Lonesome was selling included steak, something that Trump was also pushing.”

Costello also brushed aside a narrowly timely interpretation. “I’m resistant to the notion that this is an analogy,” he said. “It’s right in the title: It’s ‘A Face in the Crowd,’ not ‘The Face of Lonesome.’ It’s about what is within us that we can be persuaded to desire, and the fact that we desire it means it’s within us in the first place, like original sin.”