'Ghost of John McCain' is vulgar, ambitious and could fail.

When the curtain rises in Manhattan on September 3, a man dressed all in white will step onto the stage and into the spotlight with a bleached suitcase behind him.

He is John McCain, but this is not the white dress uniform he wore in Annapolis, and we are not in this earthly world.

“So this is it,” he sings. “The prize at the end of the mission. The gold at the end of the rainbow.”

But McCain is wrong.

He didn't land in heaven. And he didn't parachute into hell. He's in a place much worse than hell.

He is in Donald Trump's head.

Trump's brain is a twisted place for McCain

So begins “Ghost of John McCain,” a new off-Broadway musical conceived by political consultant Jason Rose and former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods.

Rose and Woods worked on the concept until Woods' untimely death in 2021, but to make it into something, it had to be put in the hands of more experienced musical professionals.

Written by Scott Elmegreen, the book is a kind of junk heap of American politics, consisting of discarded old cans, fish bones and heads of lettuce from Capitol Hill and beyond.

They overload Donald Trump's brain, as only he can process them in a unique way, and give us characters like Hillary Clinton with devil horns, Lindsey Graham in sadomasochistic leather, and Teddy Roosevelt sitting on a toilet.

It's not a pretty picture.

It's hard to imagine how this detritus scraped from the bottom of the Potomac could separate itself from the written page and form a coherent fabric when combined with the music and lyrics of Elmegreen's collaborator and fellow Princeton student Drew Fornarola.

But I'm open.

A vulgar play premiered in a suitable theater

The mix of sometimes vulgar people and sometimes profane dialogue begins Tuesday at the SoHo Playhouse in New York City and is preparing for its official opening on September 24.

And what a venue! SoHo is perfect for such a show. It is its own mishmash of dirty American politics.

Housed in an old row house, SoHo was once the secluded meeting place of shady New York Democrats – the Irish-Catholic corruption and nepotism machine known as Tammany Hall.

In its early days in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the then Huron Club became famous for its bar on the ground floor and the brothel on the upper floor with a meeting room in between.

Because of these amenities, local politicians called the place “one-stop shopping,” according to the website Untapped New York.

The Huron Club was eventually transformed into one of the first off-Broadway theaters in Manhattan and is now a fitting venue to showcase the inner parts of Donald Trump's gray matter.

The John McCain of the play is the John McCain we knew later in his career – calmer and more thoughtful than in his combative days as a Navy cadet or U.S. congressman, or even in his early days in the Senate, when he could still blow like Krakatoa.

McCain tries to win back a MAGA supporter

He is the moral center of the piece, using the cunning he has acquired in a life of deals and deliberations to bring a loyal MAGA supporter, named – how could it be otherwise – “Karen,” back to her senses.

She's a teacher from Scottsdale wearing a form-fitting Trump T-shirt, and unlike McCain, she's over the moon about being hooked up to the neurons of Trump, the Great and Powerful.

McCain asks her why she is so in love.

And in a song called “Invisible,” she remembers when she was young and pretty and men “stopped to hold the door.” But as time went on, the smile faded and she had “become invisible.”

“Not hated, not oppressed, just ignored. A faceless, nameless guest.”

When she finishes her memories, she sings her answer to McCain:

“I know I'm not as clueless as my daughter seems to think / Or as angry as my brother was / But I'm looking through old photographs when a man comes up and winks / And says, 'I know a way back in time.'”

Song lyrics trying to understand Trump voters?

And with sensitivity?

That is ambition.

Meghan McCain doesn't like the portrayal

This ambitious goal would never have been realized if Meghan McCain had had her way.

When John McCain's daughter learned that the musical was taking shape, she tweeted: “This is garbage – nothing more than a disgusting rip-off by mediocre, desperate people. I hope it flops.”

“Ghost of John McCain” is riddled with profanity, disrespect and Donald Trump. If it were a story about my father, I would cringe, too, I told one of the producers.

In fact, it has long been the McCain family's habit to cringe at such things.

Meghan McCain at the DNC:Reveals a Republican family feud

Although John himself swore like a sailor, when Washingtonian Magazine published excerpts from his book, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, his mother, Roberta McCain, was furious when she read the obscenities he had hurled at his Vietnamese captors.

“She said, 'I was so embarrassed,'” McCain told Dan Nowicki of the Arizona Republic during “Maverick's” second presidential run in 2008.

“I said, 'Mom, those were really bad guys. Those were really bad people.' She said, 'That's no excuse. I never taught you not to talk like that under any circumstances.'”

This is art, and McCain belongs to the world

Any McCain is free to complain about the musical.

But John McCain no longer belongs exclusively to the McCain family. He has transformed his heroic story into a global figure. He belongs to the world, not just Meghan.

This means that playwrights, historians, comedians and politicians will portray him as they please.

This special musical is produced by Rose, Max Fose and Lynn Londen. It is in the hands of people who adore McCain, and it began with Grant Woods, who of all the friends who praised John McCain, was the one who most eloquently described his virtues.

“Ghost of John McCain” could fail. Spectacularly, even.

But art deserves the space to fail. Without it, the good things that most of us could never have imagined would never have the chance to grow.

Phil Boas is a columnist for The Arizona Republic. You can reach him by email at [email protected].

'Ghost of John McCain' is vulgar, ambitious and could fail.

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