Review: How Trump’s dark speech channeled Ethel Merman

Thursday night Donald J. Trump delivered the angriest 11 o’clock number in the history of American show business. If you don’t know that phrase, it’s a useful one. In the old days Broadway musicals began at 8:30 and wrapped up at 11:15 or 11:30. The 11 o’clock number was the biggie near the end, usually reserved for a major character on the threshold of a revelation or a breakdown.

Think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy.” Last night, as he accepted the Republication presidential nomination in Cleveland, it was “Donald’s Turn,” this time for him! For him! For him!

“I alone can fix it,” he said. “It” meant America and all its problems, the “humiliations” it has suffered, the “horrible” trade deals, Obama’s divisive and racist rhetoric (really?), the rampant “crime and violence” that afflicts us. He will fire it all.

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“Dark” was the word much of Twitter couldn’t get away from last night, characterizing Trump’s tone and content. It seems like a weak descriptor for what was actually being sold. Business Insider and LA radio host Josh Barro tweeted: “Normally, Trump has a magnetic personality that lets him get away with things. He disarms you by transparently having fun. Not tonight.”

Come November, the speech we heard Thursday night will be reassessed either as a success or a failure. Come November, it may well prove the naysayers wrong in retrospect, as they’ve been wrong all along when it comes to the global branding whiz, bankruptcy-prone developer and famous star of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”

Breaking it down, the speech was a methodical, monomaniacally intense rant, delivered by a human repository of angry-mob discontent. Early on, when Trump uttered words such as “humbly” (as in “humbly” accepting the nomination) or “peace” or “warmth,” he took no audible cue from the meaning of those words. He looked and sounded like he was ready to pop.

When he promised that nobody in favor of “violence,” “hatred” or “oppression” would be allowed to enter his United States, if he was elected, it was not easy to tune out his own campaign’s tendency over the past 12 months to stoke the most violent, hate-filled and oppressive instincts in his base.

When he screamed “I love you all!” at the end, he sounded as if he were saying “I can barely contain my bile!” Only when Trump went off-teleprompter for a few ad-libbed fills (“BUH-lieve me,” or “horrible … just horrible”) did he sound like his disarming self, the Trump who has proven so politically effective thus far.

Campaigning on a stern “law and order” platform did the trick for Richard Nixon in 1968. Trump’s speech referenced “law and order” more than once, telling the people, the marginalized, laid-off, passed-over populace: “I am your voice.” By speech’s end Thursday, that voice sounded like a vengeful growl. But then, as convention speaker Tom Barrack said earlier in the evening: “An animal in the jungle … that is Donald.”

In “Rose’s Turn,” the greatest 11 o’clock number Broadway ever wrote (Jule Styne, music; Stephen Sondheim, lyrics), the ferocious stage mother originated by Ethel Merman busts loose, her resentments and regrets and grievances pouring forth in a catharsis combining elements of striptease, revenge and breakdown. It’s an angry number. Conspicuously lacking music, though weirdly Trump’s choice of outro music was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Donald’s turn turned the spotlight on a one-man, 76-minute show performed by the emblem, and beneficiary, of this casually brutal American moment.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

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