The first clear indication that President Trump’s nontraditional style had forced this year’s Inner Circle Show to adapt accordingly came at the start of the second act April 1 in the Sheraton New York Times Square, which was set in Grand Kremlin Palace.
Cast members playing the Red Army Choir offered a parody of one of its classics, “Katyusha,” singing, “Donald Trump respects President Putin/In return, we honor him tonight/He don’t care if we fix U.S. election/Agent Orange thinks like a Muscovite.”
By that point, the motley crew of past and present City Hall reporters involved in the charity show had offered a more-typical roasting of Mr. de Blasio that began with, to the tune of “YMCA,” “Enjoy your day at the YMCA/Now that you bought off the damn PBA/Win yourself a new term, your support will be firm/All your critics will crash and burn.”
When one of his campaign advisers expressed concern about how to energize the voters, the Mayor, played by WCBS-radio’s Rich Lamb, replied, “We could give them Red Bull.” To which another aide countered, “You’ve been giving them progressive Red bull for three years. It ain’t working.”
Venturing over to Trump Tower, Mr. de Blasio discovered that the doorman was Chris Christie (WPIX’s Dan Mannarino), who said that he had hoped for something better for supporting the President, but “thanks to Local 32BJ, I’ll get a better pension than I had as Governor of New Jersey.”
Alicia Glen, played by Daily News City Hall bureau chief Jillian Jorgensen, noted the irony that in contrast to the Mayor, her job as his Deputy Mayor for Economic Development left her too busy to get to the gym and sang an ode to Spanx to the tune of “Baby Got Back.”
Mr. de Blasio asked his wife Chirlane, played by former WPIX anchor Brenda Blackmon, to psychoanalyze Mr. Trump, and after some scientific jargon, she translated: “He’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal…I’d treat him now, but we’re blowing our entire mental-health budget on curing the City Council.”
With body cameras for cops on the way, Police Commissioner James O’Neill (veteran news director Phil O’Brien) and PBA President Pat Lynch (NY1 political director Bob Hardt) performed a duet to the tune of “I Feel Pretty,” with Mr. Lynch singing, “We’ll be charming, not alarming/Won’t be harming the perps and the thugs/ ’Stead of handcuffs, we’ll arrest you with a kiss and hugs.”
Hillary Clinton, played by Juliet Papa of WINS, to the tune of “I Will Survive,” set her sights on cracking the glass ceiling in the city by running for Mayor. And two of those who held the job, Rudy Giuliani (with NY1’s Courtney Gross as a woman playing a man in drag) and Michael Bloomberg (WNBC-TV’s Andrew Siff, once again) declared that they had audited the mayoral election and discovered that because of disenchantment with both Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump, voters selected two other New York politicos—themselves—to serve as co-Presidents. They sang, to the tune of “The Fools Who Dream,” “Here’s to our White House dream/Foolish as it may seem/Here’s to the mess we make/Here’s to the balls we break.”
In Act 2, Governor Cuomo (played by this newspaper’s Richard Steier) and longtime girlfriend Sandra Lee (Hazel Sanchez of WCBS-TV) sang of their conflict between her desire to tie the knot and his obsession with career advancement, to the tune of “You’ll Be Back,” with the Governor insisting, “But I’ll save us from Trumpster/I’ll leave him in the Dumpster” and Sandra countering, “Don’t play me for a chump, sir/Or you will take your lumps, sir.”
Playing the “real President,” Steve Bannon, Inner Circle Producer Larry Sutton as a Darth Vader-like character, to the tune of “Highway to Hell” sang, “Screw convention, screw the facts/Tell Australia: we’ll attack/Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme/That’s gonna be my paradigm.”
Mr. de Blasio’s rebuttal was aided by Trump imitator Anthony Atamanuik.