Post-Hamilton. As you can see, @NineDaves and I are feeling pretty good.
So here’s my current dilemma.
Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hip Hop musical about Alexander Hamilton) was so fucking good — yes, Dad, that f-bomb was extremely necessary — so utterly mindblowing that I feel really, really overmatched by the task of writing about it. Except. EXCEPT. I loved it so much that I feel compelled to talk about it. Like. I want to evangelize. Like. Hamilton may be my new religion? And maybe it should be yours too?
Okay. I’m hyperbolizing.
But really, only just a bit. I really just. By the time the first number was over, I knew something special was happening because my scalp was tingling. The last time that happened to me at a musical? Spring Awakening. And this is way better than Spring Awakening, which, no matter how much I loved it, sadly suffered from some moments of like, oh, old white men, that’s a very nice try but you only THINK the kids talk that way. Hamilton just really doesn’t have those moments.
Then, midway through the first act, as Leslie Odom Jr. was SLAYING a song called “Wait for It” I actually felt so overwhelmed that I got teary. Not because this was a sad or particularly emotional moment in the arc of the story (nope, those tearjerkers were all in the second act) but seriously just because like… I could not believe how much I was loving the show. How fucking GOOD it was.
Seriously. The people in the seats around me were basically physically incapable of sitting still, of being quiet. They were saying “oh shit” and “oh my god” and at one point I think I actually said — out loud — “I’m going to die.”
I left the theater and I wanted to sit down with Lin-Manuel Miranda and spend six hours talking about the history of Hip Hop and R&B. Then I wanted to watch him talk to Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell about musicals, and musical forms, and how you make music that’s completely credible to it’s form also fully functional in the context of a musical. Then I wanted to talk to Lin some more, about the whys and the hows. About the ways he was able to connect Hamilton’s story as an immigrant, and writer, and revolutionary, to the story of the hip hop movement itself, and the moment he realized this was the story he wanted to tell, and the moment he realized it was actually going to work. I wanted to hear it all.
But mostly. I just wanted to go back and see Hamilton again. Already. Every day, maybe. Like maybe I can just sleep under the seats in the Newman, or something? I don’t know.
I just think this is big. Like. I sat in the theater and thought… I’m witnessing something here. A movement of the form. Where we’re credibly using the idiom of hip hop and R&B to tell a story that is both specific and universal, historical and of this very second. Where someone proved — again, like Bloody Bloody did 5 years ago, and Spring Awakening and Hedwig before that — that musicals are alive and well, and that we really can stop trying to replicate some long dead ‘Golden Age’ where everything sounds like some attempt to put a synth to Rodgers and Hammerstein, or we regurgitate more Gershwin.
I can only hope for more of this. So much more. More of Hamilton and more of Lin-Manuel Miranda and more of people smart enough to find the right ways to be authentic to both the musical and the music, more producers brave enough to put their heft behind this kind of work.
Until then, just… come at me bro, I am so ready to talk about this all day erry day. 5eva. (No please, I have so much to say, let’s be friends and talk, okay? Okay. BRB I’m gonna go write like a hundred more things about this show now.)
PS. Some of Thomas Kail’s direction was so straight up amazing I stopped breathing (holy shit the staging of “Satisfied” as he replays the events of an evening and the stage picture when he freezes Hamilton in the eye of the hurricane in the second act). Leslie Odom Jr. will be nominated for a Tony in 2016 for his performance as Aaron Burr. In fact, if Tony nominations don’t rain down on this show like Hamiltons in a rap video set in a strip club, I am going to make good on my previous Alex-Timbers-inspired threats to burn the Tonys to the ground and dance in the incinerated rubble, flames licking at my feet.
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that gave me chills just reading it. I can’t wait to see it Sunday.
This is the only article I’ve read on the Internet that accurately sums up how I feel about this show– I didn’t want it to end, I just wanted to live inside the world that created for us and afterwards I felt like an absolute maniac- like, why, WHY, sweet Lord is there no soundtrack out yet!? What kind of fresh hell is this that I have to remember just dribs and drabs of songs, knowing that it will be months before I can listen to it on repeat!? What happens if Daveed Diggs or any of the crew of 4 doesn’t transfer to Broadway and I don’t get to see them all together again? I mean, did you catch the 7,435,762 references to Biggie, Tupac, Lauryn, Jason Robert Brown, Sondheim, Weber, Schwartz??? When Hamilton paid Reynolds and said “nobody needs to know” – a spoken line but somehow vaguely sung like Norbert Leo Butz in the most haunting song in “The Last Five Years”? I feel so deprived. I’ve listened to tracks from 21 Chump Street so many times now that I can’t go to sleep without hearing the songs, I’ve memorized the opening rap, but none of it is good enough. Seriously, when can we can we get coffee and obsess together?
I WISH so much I could see this!? I’m with Heather; I’m just eating up everything I can get my hands on and memorizing snippets of various songs and forcing my friends to watch the teaser video and following the cast and crew on Instagram and Twitter and googling poor sweet Anthony Ramos (I also found 21 Chump Street and I love that it exists and is beautiful) (it is like trying to google Andrew Rannells right when BOM opened) and I’m so glad people have the opportunity to see this and gush about it so I don’t feel so alone!
My favorite part was, “Like maybe I can just sleep under the seats in the Newman, or something? I don’t know.” And when you go sit and talk to Lin for 6 hrs and then he goes to sit with Stephen Trask and JCM, I am going with you.