Did you know that Donald Trump ruined the new Broadway musical, A Bronx Tale?
How did he do that? Did Trump talk loudly in the audience? Nope. Did Trump pan the musical on Twitter? Nope. According to Vox web culture reporter Aja Romano, Trump ruined A Bronx Tale simply by being elected president. Until then it was quite an enjoyable musical based on the 1993 movie of the same name. Unfortunately, Trump's election totally ruined the musical...if you share Romano's liberal fantasies.
Here are some of the laughable extreme mental gymnastics she goes through in order to explain the destruction of a very entertaining musical by one man from the Bronx.
A Bronx Tale was supposed to be a simple coming-of-age narrative about a kid who grows up under the spell of a local mob boss during a period of tremendous racial and class tension. But it’s impossible not to see that this tale is also an American tale—one whose parallels with the 2016 presidential election are likely unintentional, but still hard to ignore.
Actually quite easy to not even notice...unless you are a Vox liberal completely obsessed by Donald Trump to the extent that he inhabits your every waking thought as well as your dreams.
...even though A Bronx Tale is trying its best to adhere to Broadway’s current mantra of injecting rosy platitudes into every potentially barbed political statement, it still manages to be an indictment of its mainly white audience — and everybody else. As we enter a Trumpian America, the overt displays of bigotry and hate that have swept the country in the wake of his election have removed whatever comforting nostalgic distance A Bronx Tale might have had from America’s racialized, xenophobic past. To look back now is to look forward.
Wow! One guy ruined your musical play? And if Trump messed this up for you, the possibilities are endless. Did you enjoy your bucket of KFC? Not any more, due to Trump. A day at the beach will be nice no longer thanks to You Know Who. Yes, it will be a long four years (probably eight) of absolute misery for Ms Romano and her fellow obsessed liberals.
The careless optimism that once characterized A Bronx Tale has been soured by a renewed awareness that the overt racism it explores is not a safely conquered injustice of yesteryear. Had it premiered any other time, it might have been a nostalgic story about a young man learning to make the right choices; but now there’s no getting around the glaring parallels to the historic choice America just made.
Cheer up, Aja! Only 2950 more days of Trumpian America.
Our charming narrator, Calogero, is the one who flings the show’s horrifying racial slur, which landed on an unsettled audience at a moment when many of us were confronting family and friends who voted for an overtly fascist presidential candidate.
Cheer up, Aja! Only 70,800 more hours of Trumpian America.
A Bronx Tale isn’t trying to draw a direct parallel between its mob boss and the new president-elect, but it doesn’t have to try for the parallel to be glaring anyway. Sonny’s mantra that “fear is cash in the bank, kid” works just as well as an unofficial slogan for the Trump campaign. Sonny built his empire by bullying his way to success, and now is surrounded by sycophants too afraid of him to challenge him. Like fascist leader Mussolini, Sonny reveres Machiavelli’s dictator handbook The Prince (a book Trump recommends in his 2007 book Trump 101), and teaches his impressionable young protégé that it’s better to “choose fear, not love.”
Cheer up, Aja! Only 4,248,000 more minutes of Trumpian America. Oh, and The Prince "dictator handbook" which is the most widely translated book from Italian to English is also recommended by many scholars for any serious student of political science.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo’s hold on his son’s loyalty and integrity slips away as Calogero’s fascination with Sonny and his lifestyle deepens. Lorenzo characterizes his job as one requiring patience, hard work, and responsibility, rather than shortcuts to easy money. It’s boring and unglamorous, much like Hillary Clinton’s presentation of her own candidacy was often accused of being. And Calogero reacts to his dad’s attempt to teach him the value of hard work and remind him of his ethics exactly the way large swaths of America reacted to Clinton: with scorn and dismissal.
Cheer up, Aja! Only 254,880,000 seconds of Trumpian America. Were you among those melting special snowflakes crying at the Javits center on election night?
If A Bronx Tale had debuted on Broadway last season — back when we still lived in a world where Nazis didn’t feel emboldened to heil one another in broad daylight — its characters’ overt prejudice would have seemed quaint; the easy nostalgia surrounding its themes would have signaled to audiences that this era of overt prejudice was comfortably in the past. Before the election of Donald Trump, its passionate dictum to choose between love and fear would have been a mild, feel-good platitude meant to politely jostle, but never deeply disquiet, a mainstream white Broadway audience.
BT and AT. Before Trump and After Trump. That is now the crazed liberals now look at almost everything. Oh, that sunset was so beautiful BT but now it is just plain depressing in our dystopian AT world.
Although Aja Romano and her fellow liberals will be unable to enjoy much of anything for the next 4 (probably 8) years, normal people which most Americans are should find A Bronx Tale musical quite enjoyable. Here are a few scenes.
Remember, please do not feed the liberals, growling inside their self-imposed fantasies, on the way out the exit door after the play is over.
