HOME OF THE DAVE
Can a musical about a humane U.S. president make a nation feel better?
WASHINGTON Join me now in an enchanted world where a benevolent leader dwells in a manse painted white. Call this dashing man with a chiselled profile and lovely singing voice the president, and the people drawn into his humane, empathetic and thoroughly amiable orbit the citizens of his country — also known as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If you want to meet this exotic personage, you will have to do so via the box office of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where actor Drew Gehling is embodying him as the title character, in a musical that’s having its world debut July 18 (and runs through Aug. 19).
Dave is the contemporary storybook concoction through which its director, cast, designers and producers are hoping a psychically battered nation might rediscover its buoyant optimism. Based on a 1993 movie comedy starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, it tells the story of a sweet-tempered presidential impersonator who’s installed in the Oval Office after his sleazier, elected doppelgänger falls ill. Like the movie, this new stage adaptation taps into the subliminal yearning for a Capra-esque decency to be our guiding spirit. And what better place for such a musical to take its preliminary bows than in Washington?
The musical is undertaking an inaugural run in the nation’s capital. That the score is by composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) and lyricist Nell Benjamin (Mean Girls) gives the production an extra running start.
We are at a stage in the development of the Broadway musical where expenses run so high and the appeal to tourists such an imperative that producers are rummaging with ever more gusto through the archives of proven material as the foundation of new projects.
“Dave is a fable for our time,” says Lauren Shuler Donner, one of the musical’s producers, as well as a producer of the original film, directed by Ivan Reitman. “It’s a way to kind of hope again. Because Dave is Everyman.
“Dave is us.”
A musical Dave had been in discussions for years by Donner and Allison Thomas, another producer with Hollywood connections. Although plans are not yet firm, Broadway is what Dave is aiming for, says another producer, Mark Kaufman.
“We developed it before the (2016), election,” Donner says. “We had Obama then, and we wondered if this was a necessary story. And then it was, ‘Gee, if Hillary gets in, what else can we say?’”
Donner pauses, and adds: “We have a lot to say now!”
The rancorous presidency of Donald Trump can’t help but seem an antithesis to the tale of Dave. In this version, Dave is a history teacher plucked from obscurity, whose belief in the American way casts a spell over a beleaguered White House staff, as well as over a disillusioned first lady, played by Mamie Parris.
The show’s creators were not looking, though, to devise a Trump-bashing satire. “We are trying to find a way out of the divisiveness, and I believe that people on all sides are trying this,” Benjamin says.
“Our thought was, how do you fall in love with a president,” she says, “and not just fall in line behind them?”
Dave, director Tina Landau says of the title character, he “reconnects with what it means to be honest and open, both in his political relationships, and his personal ones.”
For an audience to go along, Landau and company had to locate a protean actor who could not only play a man capable of beguiling a nation, but also one who could play Bill Mitchell, the philandering president he replaces.
They’re certain they found their versatile lead in Gehling, a 35-year-old graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s acting program, who revealed a facility for charming audiences in Broadway’s Waitress, as Dr. Pomatter, the love interest for Jessie Mueller’s Jenna.
To portray Dave, Gehling looked for inspiration to other musicaltheatre characters of pure ideals who are thrust into unlikely situations, like the dewy Candide of the Leonard Bernstein show of that title, based on the Voltaire novel. “You can approach it from a place of wide-eyed honesty, and the idea that a person who has never asked for a job may be head-over-heels better prepared for it than someone who’s worked for it,” he says. “It’s refreshing to see an Everyman take on a role like this.”