“We want to fuck you! Also, we hate the tariff!” With that pithy summation of American presidential politics, a crowd of rapt admirers greets President-cum-rock-star Andrew Jackson in Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, a brief and raucous rock-’n’-roll musical chronicling the rise and subsequent frustration of our seventh president, who promised to be the voice of the people only to learn that the little folks are just as feckless, vain, and greedy as the swaggering potentates he railed against. George Will was more insightful and less obscene when he described Americans’ attitude toward the chief executive as caesaro-papism, but, as anybody who has ever seen Bill Clinton or George W. Bush work a room—to say nothing of savoring the now-faded glory of Barack Obama, back when they were chanting his name in the choruses of bespoke campaign songs—there is something to this president-as-rock-star business, and Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, trifling as it is at times, makes a sincere effort to get to the heart of it.

Did that opening quotation offend you? Then skip the rest of this paragraph, and the play; it is set in the early nineteenth century—Age of Jackson and all that—but has no turn-of-the-century delicateness about it. In fact, the play probably does not contain more than three consecutive lines of dialogue that one would care to repeat in front of one’s children or one’s mother. Effete Washington insiders? They’re “croquet-playing cock-gobblers,” to Benjamin Walker’s kohl-eyed Andrew Jackson, who dismisses a fur-clad