Former first couple Bill and Hillary Clinton are getting more humiliating news. On the heels of embarrassing headlines about their speaking tour’s poor ticket sales comes news that the Broadway play “Hillary and Clinton,” which depicts the Democratic power couple during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, is being cut.
Broadway is closing the curtain on the fictional play a month early after the production returned abysmal ticket sales.
Box office bust
Instead of closing as scheduled on July 21, producer Scott Rudin announced Monday that “Hillary and Clinton” will be closing after a final performance on June 23. The play cost a staggering $4.2 million to produce, but earned a dismal $4.7 million at the box office, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Written in 2008 by playwright Lucas Hnath, it took eight years to get the production off the ground for its premiere at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago — and another two years before the play made its Broadway debut.
During the intervening decade, the Clintons have become political deadweights who are wearing on America’s last nerve. In fact, the pair were recently forced to give away floor seats to their joint book tour for a mere $6 — and this was after prematurely ending the tour last fall in hopes of opening up to more enthusiastic crowds in the spring.
But if the political couple couldn’t fill theaters, perhaps the actors portraying them in “Hillary and Clinton” would be a bit more enticing to Broadway junkies and liberal New Yorkers. As it turns out, this wasn’t the case.
Alternate universe
Although the play is set during the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hnath’s political drama takes place in an alternate universe. With the subtlety of a bulldozer, a narrator implores the audience in the opening monologue to imagine a universe with “an infinite number of planet earths.”
“It would be very helpful if — as you watch this play — you were to imagine that the play takes place on one of those slightly different planet earths located billions of light years away from our own,” the narrator instructs.
Except Hnath’s imaginary fantasyland looks remarkably similar to our own.” Not only are the play’s protagonists preparing for the New Hampshire primaries, but Mrs. Clinton is facing off against a charismatic “Other Guy” and worried about how her husband’s presence on the campaign trail will affect her electability.
The wokeness factor
If the play does depart from reality, it is only to satisfy the same compulsory wokeness on display in other recent Broadway productions, such as the acclaimed “Hamilton.” As such, Hillary was cast as an African American woman in all of the show’s pre-Broadway productions.
“Don’t even try to cast actors who look like these people,” Hnath admonished his directors.
Eventually, the playwright settled on Tony-award winning actress Laurie Metcalf as the failed presidential nominee and John Lithgow as former President Bill Clinton. Despite the poor ticket sales, Metcalf was nominated for a Tony for her lead performance in the play, but ended up losing to Elaine May for her performance in “The Waverly Gallery.”
By now, one would think that the former first lady has grown weary of failure. With the production’s demise — and a bit of good fortune — perhaps the Clintons will finally fade from the public consciousness and take a political backseat to the radical leftists who have replaced them.
But don’t count on it.
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