The concept of “living rent-free” in someone else’s imagination gets a lot of use online, a brag about how obsessed someone else is with you while you don’t think about them at all. Yet like all jokes of the “I know you are, but what am I?” type, the line easily falls into the realm of playground humor, especially if you’re the one bragging about having moved into someone else’s mind — you care enough, at least, to be dragging yourself into the back-and-forth in the first place. The concept and all its contradictions get a thuddingly literal interpretation in The Ghost of John McCain , a musical that imagines the late senator expecting to end up in heaven after his death in 2018 and instead finding himself trapped in a crumbling, gold-encrusted three-star hotel that is the mind of Donald Trump.
Suffice it to say, McCain may be the title of this thing, but it’s really all about going after the other guy, and it does it with all the bottom-of-the-barrel #resistance humor tropes you might have seen or heard in late-night TV monologues, on Saturday Night Live , or in Facebook reposts from MSNBC-obsessed relatives. (I was surprised that no one says “Drumpf.”) McCain, played by Jason Tam, is presented as an aw-shucks straight man who can’t believe what his party has come to.
Tam’s a capable performer, and he’s wisely not doing an impression here, but he’s at sea trying to figure out how to play a blank part. As he stumbles his way through the hotel, .