Just over four years ago, a friend messaged me asking if I was free the next day. I hedged. They the

Just over four years ago, a friend messaged me asking if I was free the next day. I hedged. They then clarified that due to a travel scheduling mix-up, they had a spare ticket to Hamilton at the Public. I was then free as of an hour previous.I’d been excited about the show since I’d first heard about it, since Lin-Manuel Miranda was clearly an extremely talented creator and I’d grown up being interested in revolutionary history (both American and French) and also Alexander Hamilton in particular. On top of being drawn to the themes of both that period of time and Hamilton’s life, it was just part of being a New Yorker and having it be local history – hell, during my teen years, I spent one summer in an interactive murder mystery afternoon tea theatre (we couldn’t afford dinner) play performed in Schuyler Mansion.(I was an Anti-Federalist. Sorry, Alex.)(For what it’s worth, I was also the murder victim.)The Hamilton run at the Public had sold out far too far in advance for me to know what my schedule would be in order to purchase tickets, so I’d resigned myself to not seeing it. But then all of a sudden, there I was, halfway into previews. It turned out that Javi was on that night – his very first night performing the role for an audience. Lin was, by deductive reasoning, somewhere in the house with us. There were no reviews. There were no recordings. It was all completely new.Two days after walking out of the theater, I created a new tumblr because I feared that the commercial theatre scene might not understand this weird, whip-smart, heart-full show about things that I loved and I wanted to hype it the fuck up as much as I could. I’d been using tumblr for a whole three months (and it would take me about another year to figure out how to use the ask box), but I went full-on white man and acted based on what I wanted to be rather than what I had proof of already having accomplished, all so that I could shout this show to the rooftops and do my small part in getting ground support going.I honestly also didn’t want fans of the show to end up with some whack-ass cutesy fandom name and, well, to the founders go the spoils.It was clear within a matter of months that this weird musical didn’t need my help. But I wanted to keep shouting.Subject matter aside, it’s rare that I’ve seen a more tightly crafted piece of theatre, with every single note and word and tiny movement and detail of design telling a story with power and clarity, often on multiple levels. It spoiled me for a number of shows that I saw in the following months, with entire bars’ worth of wasted lyric space and messy dramaturgy and unrealized potential. The brilliance of all of the artists involved was inspiring to me as a professional.But as for the story itself: it was a legitimate turning point in my personal journey, accelerating my way around a curve toward my eventual first return to my birth country and the fullness of my own experience as someone from somewhere else. I entered the theater hoping for a good show, and I exited it with something reverberating inside of me in a new and powerful way, some shared frequency discovered.Hamilton isn’t the entirety of musical theatre or of “diverse theatre” (whatever the fuck that means), and nor should it be. I hope to hell that people keep pushing for the Hamilton effect to increase the size of the pie for everyone rather than for it to be a swirling vortex that attracts new resources but sucks them all into itself. I hope that space is held for those whom the show causes pain, whether by reason of inclusion or omission, and that a wider chorus of voices is amplified to sing out.For me, however, the energy of creation and questions of legacy resonated. And my mind was blown by how simultaneously traditionally inspirationally and yet slyly subversive the show was. The United States of America has none of the creation myths of older peoples or nations. What we have instead is relatively recent politically history that has been mythologized and enshrined as our national civic religion. Hamilton declared that the manifestations of these nationally worshipped figures, whom our streets and schools and cities are named after, are to be found in the faces of people of color and immigrants. Hamilton made it so that you can’t worship the flag, as so many like to do, without worshipping these people.Of course, people’s powers of compartmentalization are pretty strong, so there are those whose walls inside are so strong that a popular musical will never be enough to topple them. Or who put themselves in rageful opposition to the show for all of these very reasons. Hamilton isn’t going to save a country or the world. But the show has still turned out to be an amazing force, and I do believe that that force pushes for good.All of which is to say: it’s been a joy and privilege to be able to experience this phenomenon with so many of you. While I stay largely hands-off in my larger internet life for the sake of my sanity, it’s been amazing to have even just this glancing connection with more people than I ever would have imagined. If I had the time and energy to keep up this unpaid second job that I haven’t been able to spin onto my resume yet, I would. But as time has passed, I’ve been having less and less space for this, and I wanted to bring this leg of this wild ride to an end in a satisfying way.I’ll be working on cleaning up tags and otherwise making this a place that you can come back to get your fix of the first four years of this show’s history, through Lin’s returning as Hamilton in Puerto Rico. There will be a couple of summary posts as the waves of updates are completed. But the regular postings from MC Publius have reached the end of their run.So thank you for the past four years. And maybe see you on the other side. -- source link
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