Pop Culture Happy Hour: ‘Hamilton’ (NPR):
The first segment is about the show itself: we talk about influences both inside and outside the world of Broadway, we play some Sondheim and some Cole Porter, we talk about jazz hands and Bugs Bunny, and we break the news to you that yes, this particularly heavily hyped thing is just as good as the hype suggests it is. Here’s the listof references I talk about one point (there are many, many other similar pieces around), and here’s the episode of Another Round that Gene references.
The second segment is about the show as a phenomenon and what it’s doing to all of us. We talk about the tremendous social-media meme-ing of it, and how we feel about the overload that many of us have felt and are feeling, and Gene takes a moment to ponder what might have happened if he’d obeyed a different instinct than the one he did.
A couple of things you should know: I’m so sorry we didn’t have at the tip of our tongues the name of Alysha Deslorieux, the fantastic performer we saw as Angelica. We were falling all over ourselves to talk about how great she was and didn’t pause to Google her. I apologize; she was tremendous. That’s what we meant to get across. See also: Javier Munoz, whom we referred to (he generally does Alexander Hamilton one performance a week) but didn’t name. (And best thoughts, sir.)
It’s really important to recognize, I think, that this is not a series of concerts, where the live performances — these specific ones — are the only thing. Hamilton is a feat of authorship, just like Company or The Pirates Of Penzance or South Pacific or Rent orAnything Goes or whatever, and it’s going to exist in a zillion forms. It’s going to be performed and revived and re-revived and done in schools and done locally, and it’s going to be done well and done badly, and individual songs will be covered on people’s albums, and there will probably be a movie someday, which lots of people will hate. There will be disputes over who can play Hamilton, who can play Burr, who can play Angelica.
There will be intense conversations related to particular productions about rap experience and theater experience, many of which will carry problematic and gross undertones and teach people things and make them fight, and this show is going to keep vexing and challenging a certain subsection of theater people in this wonderful way. There will be boys (and girls too, but I’m going to guess especially boys) who have never done theater or even thought about doing theater who suddenly want to do it because of this, and one of them will write a show in 20 years that will draw its own crowds. God willing, Old Man Miranda is going to get his Kennedy Center Honors and his EGOT (that’s actually probably going to be, like, soonish) and his next show will put him and everybody else in the position of realizing it cannot be this again because nothing by anybody can be, quite, this again.
It’s not just this thing, like a production you go stare at and go home or else press your nose up against the glass wishing you could get into. It’s a really important piece of writing, and it’s going to be around a lot longer than these crazy lines and lotteries and YouTube videos and memes and hashtags. It’s a piece of theater by an enormously important American composer, and it’s out in the world, and I promise, if you’re open to it, it will get to you as a composition, whether or not it gets to you as a hot-ticket Broadway show.
gracieabrams
dailybridgerton
areudirty
2087
