Review: What’s Eating Trump? The Singing ‘Ghost of John McCain’

Usually, critics wait until a show is running to slam it, but Meghan McCain broke the embargo. By more than five months.

“This is trash,” she posted on social media on April 2. “Nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people. I hope it bombs.”

Perhaps she can be forgiven her haste for distaste. “Ghost of John McCain,” the show she was pre-emptively attacking, is about her father, who died in 2018. A musical satire that pictures him in purgatory — bedeviled by Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and a pole-dancing Lindsey Graham in a studded pink dog collar — probably seemed unlikely to be reverent.

If only irreverence were the problem! But the show that opened on Tuesday at SoHo Playhouse turns out to be, in its muddled way, something of a love letter. It’s just a bad one.

Start with the title, which promises a posthumous haunting of America by the former Arizona senator but mostly delivers a familiar and unfunny indictment of Trump. McCain and the other characters are figments of 45’s fevered imagination, imprisoned in his brain (depicted as a three-star hotel) until they admit that he is “the greatest president who’s ever lived.” For McCain that means abandoning what he considers his legacy as a principled politician and maverick Republican.

This baroque and entirely internal conflict puts the title character in a dramaturgical purgatory even worse than the theological one. He’s essentially stuck playing Trump’s game, with no agency of his own. It’s Trump who thus scores the few smart zingers in Scott Elmegreen’s unruly book: “You started Trumpism,” he tells McCain. “When you picked Sarah Palin.” Palin, McCain’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election, then shows up shooting an already dead wolf at close range with a shotgun.