Whatever other quibbles may be had with the off-Broadway musical
Walmartopia, at $60 a ticket no one can reasonably accuse the show’s producers of engaging in what documentarian Robert Greenwald memorably decried in as “The High Cost of Low Price” in the subtitle of his 2005 Wal-Mart documentary.
The “high cost” of
Walmartopia, however, serves a purpose greater than simply establishing attendees’ ability to afford a keenly developed social consciousness along with their trips to the all-organic grocer. It also prices out anyone frugal or poor enough to actually shop at Wal-Mart, thereby ensuring a house filled with only those who harbor the same irrational, epicene fears as the show’s creators. There is no need, then, to ask the audience to suspend disbelief when Wal-Mart shoppers are depicted in
Walmartopia as ill-mannered rednecks looking to buy ammo, Spam, and duct-tape. “We’re getting ready for the Rapture,” a wife coos as her husband spits on the floor. The audience giggles. This is conventional wisdom in these circles.
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A too-easy jibe, to be sure, though, really, who has more of an apocalypse-infatuation? Is it working class religious Midwesterners looking to get more for less? Or is it a team of musical theater enthusiasts who prefer to envision an enormously popular
department store degrading most of humanity to a drooling supplicant state in the near-future? Are the rubes who view shopping at a store as a utilitarian rather than political act, the real caricatures? Or is it those prophesizing a day when Wal-Mart Security Forces lay siege to a secessionist Vermont run by flinty Green Mountain rebels who just want the Sons of Sam (Walton) to let them build their own not-McMansion cabins and fuel cars with compost from sustainable farms?
The answer might seem simple until you read, say, Jeremy Thal’s
Indypendent review. “Musical theater is disarming and audience friendly, but the message in
Walmartopia rings through as serious and urgent,” he raves. “The finale” — when Wal-Mart is defeated by Vermonter guile, a positive message and a
forcefield of love — “is an almost Brechtian invocation to the audience to get out of their seats and do something, and while doing it, to keep singing.”
How even a diehard theoretical Marxist like Bertolt Brecht would feel about having his “epic theater” placed in league with a too-cute-by-half bourgeoisie musical is anyone’s guess, but the rest of the review is almost unassailable. George Washington, I believe, gave a similar speech during the “serious and urgent” times at Valley Forge, encouraging his typhoid and dysentery-addled troops to do…
something and “while doing it, keep singing.”
***
Walmartopia begins with Vicki Latrell, a present day single mom, working at Wal-Mart with her sassy teenage daughter, waiting on that ever-elusive promotion. Whether Vicki fails to climb the management ladder as a result of Wal-Mart’s patriarchal power structure, or because whenever her manager leaves the sales floor she stops working to belt out songs Aretha Franklin-style while her chronically tardy teenage daughter idly complains their boss is a “creepy Christian crypto-fascist,” isn’t clear. After she is denied again during an employee evaluation meeting held at
Hooters, however, it becomes a moot point as an angry Vicki catches the radical bug from a philosopher janitor. “He’s hot,” Vicki’s daughter gushes approvingly, “like…Che Guevara!”
Soon after Vicki’s inner Murphy Brown is loosed she and her daughter are recruited to help “neutralize the vast feminist conspiracy” by performing a song entitled, “A Woman’s Place (Is at Wal-Mart).” Along with Mr. Hotty Cleanerupper, the Latrell girls hatch a plan to instead shame Wal-Mart with a revolutionary protest song to be heard ‘round the world. Alas, the gang that couldn’t sweep straight stumbles into a presentation by an evil scientist who has found a hole in the time-space continuum allowing Wal-Mart execs to see future consumer trends. Sam Walton’s reanimated, discombobulated head—don’t ask—orders the Latrells thrown into the time warp.
The Latrells land in a neon future dystopia that makes
Blade Runner and THX 1138 look like
The Adventures of Milo and Otis. The aforementioned mindless automaton population marches in lockstep singing refrains such as “We were born to consume/from the cradle to the tomb.” Wal-Art puts on pro-consumer productions like
The Phantom of the Mart School-Mart teaches kids to “shop, stock and mop.” Walton’s head, not Rupert Murdoch, provides the daily propaganda now, while Security-Mart runs the police state and Prison-Mart. Given the milieu, it’s a safe bet to say Social Security has also been privatized.
The Wal-Mart cabal’s total control is challenged only by Vermont, and, thus, a “final surge” is needed to “liberate” the independent state. (Why is Vermont fan fiction being produced in fancy pants Manhattan rather than crunchily heroic Burlington?) “They’ll welcome us with open arms!” one exec exclaims. A holographic Walton, beamed above the consumers, crows, “Remember, the best way to defeat the enemy is to keep shopping!” Did Brecht ever pen such clever social allusions?
The Green Mountain boys’ odds seem hopeless until the Lattrells encourage the people of
Walmartopia to remember their dreams. Almost immediately a Wal-Art actor admits he’s always wanted to open his own “puppy therapy” establishment where people who “feel bad” can get their frowns licked backed to smiles by a roomful of puppies. Another wants to “build playgrounds, especially for adults.” A plant in the audience storms the stage to say she’d like to make ice cream in “all sorts of crazy flavors.” Yet another simply wants people to learn to be “happy without buying stuff.”
H.L. Mencken defined a Puritan as someone harboring the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.”
Walmartopia’s producers and audience seem to have a haunting fear someone, somewhere, might be getting a bargain.
— Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class War.
