Hamilton: Setting The Stage

That’s right. All of that above was setting the table to actually talk about Hamilton. This is what happens when I set out to write a nice little thing about a play…

Out of context quote (4400 words into this piece)

You Have No Control. Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.

On July 3rd, 2020, Disney released Hamilton to a wide audience via a live recording concert film which had taken place toward the end of the original Broadway cast’s run in 2016.

Like many people, I was curious about this show I had only heard about or experienced through snippets of it’s soundtrack or chatter about it online. I had even held off on getting the soundtrack for fear of only getting the partial story experience. Little did I know it was a show comprised of exclusively musical numbers, and the soundtrack basically contains the whole story (just without the visuals).

I experienced the “discourse” about the show long before ever having seen it. I saw the early buzz on social media raving about it. Then I saw the think pieces taking it to task for it’s historical inaccuracy. Then the conversation became about “they filmed this in 2016, why haven’t they released it yet?” Then radical leftys decided it wasn’t woke enough and decided to tear it down because it didn’t do everything just right (aka “The Obama Effect”). The cycle was basically complete.

The answer to the why hadn’t they released it is: money. Hamilton was still absurdly profitable in the exclusive world of Broadway theater. 4 years after it’s debut it was still breaking box office records in most new markets it hit. It was finally due to begin a tour of Canada in March until Covid-19 scuttled those plans. I’ll get into the systemic problems of Broadway’s insular and exclusive system more down the road. For now, let’s just say that if the internet represents the democratization of media access, Broadway theater very much resemble the aristocracy. It’s a system where value is bolstered by being exclusive to small numbers of (usually) wealthy, white, patrons only available at certain locations through official productions. I’m not looking to get too far into the weeds here on the economics of live prestige theater, more just to point out that the medium influences the product. When the show went from the more accessible “off broadway” stages to the big time there was some…sanitizing that happened.

The cancelled international tours likely contributed to Disney’s decision to put the show out on their subscription service. Once you put out a filmed adaptation, that exclusivity is diminished as the draw of a hot Broadway show is to be able to see a show live you’ve only heard other people describing and people will pay a month’s salary just to get in the door. With theaters (both film and live) being shut down, the plans for a theatrical distribution also got scuttled, leading us to here. Hamilton dropped five years later while we were all in lockdown (or supposed to be) and in need of something to keep us busy. And since my social interaction is limited these days where I would normally talk through these things, you’re going to get all of it here.

Lucky you.

As talk about Hamilton came and went, I sort of checked out and resigned myself to it being another cultural blind spot for me that I would maybe see down the line, long after it’s cultural buzz had worn off.

Hamilton’s long road to a filmed release echoes that of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s musical The Book of Mormon, which in it’s history as smash Broadway hit that never got a filmed release has basically existed through a similar cycle (though to a much more extreme degree). In the case of Mormon, the play began at the height of my fandom of South Park, continued through my eventual disillusionment with South Park and libertarian nonsense in general (that’s another piece entirely), and came out through the other side where I no longer have any desire to see anything made by Stone and Parker. Sometimes holding onto that exclusivity can make that window of public interest pass if you do it for too long. Judging by Disney Plus subscriptions seeing a massive spike due to the show being dropped on the platform, that doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

(Sidenote: As I was in the process of writing this piece, J.K. Rowling reminded the world that she’s a transphobic asshole and understandably a lot of her fans are feeling pretty disillusioned at her choosing to double down on this. To all of the Potter fans out there feeling betrayed I just want to say that nobody can ever take away what the art meant to you. I went through it to different degrees with Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Aaron Sorkin, Dennis Miller, Terry Gilliam and many others I had to walk away from as part of outgrowing them. It sucks, but it’s also a sign that your moral compass is worth more than your attachment to any particular artist.)

Anyway, back to Hamilton…

After 5 years, I finally saw the play/film and I’m not exactly breaking any news here, but it’s good! For all the other criticisms about it, on the balance of things Hamilton makes for an engaging piece of theater. The artistry and talent is all up there on stage. The songs are well written, the writing is sharp and dense, with so many references and throwaway lines that a geek like me had to watch many times with subtitles on just to catch everything (this is a show that rewards multiple viewings, another reason I’m glad it dropped on a subscription platform). The cast are all top notch. Yes I even think Lin-Manuel Miranda – who seems to be a polarizing choice for his portrayal of Alexander Hamilton – brings something unique to the production, which I’ll get to in more detail when I get into specifics about the play. If you judge it purely on what happens on stage for that two and a half hours, Hamilton works…mostly.

Off stage, it bears emphasizing that Hamilton is very much a product of a different age: a pre-Trump age. The closest corollary I can think of when looking at Hamilton through modern eyes is like watching The West Wing today. The West Wing occupies a permanent slot in my top 5 favourite TV shows, even though watching it today there are certainly things that have not aged well. When looking at the show today, it’s portrayal of American politics as being full of morally righteous, crusading, public servants and a system where right makes might comes off as pretty naive in a time when the GOP have fully embraced twitchy conspiracy weirdos, are backed by religious zealots cheerleading the apocalypse, and Russian oligarchs trying to turn America into a satellite state, all of whom who are totally ok with enabling a fascist autocrat as long as it hurts the right people and fills the right pockets. The West Wing didn’t account for the possibility that one Senate Majority Leader can fuck over a whole country out of pure bumpkin, dixie, racist, spite because America elected a Black POTUS. The West Wing’s portrayal of a government based on sensible compromise, with sensible people is borderline mocking parody in a world where Mitch McConnell exists.

Still, it doesn’t diminish the quality of the show itself or it’s place in history. The performances and the sharpness of the writing – it’s all still there. It just plays a bit differently, now. It nudges the show from the realm of “an inside baseball look at politics” it was initially presented as, into the realm of political fantasy, depicting a government as we would like it to be, rather than as it is. The West Wing delivered the setup that Veep would eventually yank the rug out from under years later by depicting government as full of crude, backstabbing, opportunists more concerned with polling data and photo ops than making policy or governance. Two different shows covering similar subject matter in two different eras however, all part of the same conversation regarding what government is, and what it could be.

I think, just as a general observation, anytime there is a competition between an earnest (if imperfect) depiction and a cynical one, earnestness will always age better in the long run. In my experience people are generally more forgiving of flawed optimism than naked cynicism, retrospectively. There’s a reason that Christian Bale’s growling, gritty, militaristic Batman became a tired punchline less than decade on, meanwhile Adam West hamming it up in a lycra jumpsuit is always a treat just waiting to be discovered by any generation.

Here’s another example of how time can change perceptions of a work: last year I started watching The Sopranos for the first time. I missed it almost completely (saw a few episodes, but not enough to get into it) during it’s HBO run. Watching the show in 2019, it became instantly clear that the show was about examining toxic masculinity, but at a time when we didn’t yet have the cultural vocabulary to put a name on the central theme (perhaps in academic circles, but certainly not mainstream).

Jumping into Hamilton now after five years of hype and chatter naturally feels a bit disjointed for first timers. It is like someone started telling a joke 5 years ago and then just trailed off and abruptly left the room and you never saw them again. That excitement and tension lingered a bit but eventually you moved on with your life. You moved to another country, got married, got divorced, your house was carried off by a tornado, you lost an eye in a fight over a pastrami sandwich with a particularly insistent seagull; only to have that person you haven’t thought about in years suddenly kick your bathroom door open half a decade later while you’re on the toilet at 3 am and bellow “And then the owl says, “No sir, that’s a pineapple!”

A lot happened on the way from setup to delivery of that experience that changed how it was going to be received. I’m gonna need a minute to adjust, and to wash my hands (evergreen circumstances all around, these days).

Which leads me to the big orange elephant in the room…

Oceans Rise, Empires Fall

A lot changed on November 8th 2016. I remember that election night feeling of dismay and despair. Even though it was only 5 years ago, Hamilton was created and gained acclaim in a time which now seems so alien to the one it got a wide release in. A time when people were able to let down their guard for a single minute without worrying what horrible abusive things a government was actively trying to do to it’s people. A time where many of us (especially those of us living in the swaddling wrap of privilege) were ignorant and/or complacent to just how widespread bigotry still is, how much progress there still is to be made, and how the sins of our collective past still cast long shadows today.

Sidenote: Canada does not have clean hands when it comes to the issues of slavery, anti-Black racism, Indigenous genocide and broken treaties, Antisemitism that turned away Jewish refugees back into the clutches of the Nazis, post 9/11 xenophobia that led to Muslims being racially profiled, anti-Asian Covid fear mongering and scapegoating today, or any of the other social evils we like to pat ourselves on the back and pretend America has the sole patent on. Hence my use of the collective “we” above. We could do with some self examination too. Hamilton may be an American story, but it’s themes of the need to “rise up” are universal.

Trump’s election and the resulting emboldening of white supremacy forced many to take stock of just how many people around them thought the same ugly things Trump says out loud and decided to just pull the masks off. We found out how many people would happily ignore or cheer on atrocity as long as it happened to the right people. How many people met news of immigrants and refugees being rounded up into concentration camps by either denying it or with a shrug? It was a wake up call for many that what we thought were long buried ghosts of a bygone era were actually just in hiding. We saw the still lingering toxic forces that could cause real harm when given power and validation suddenly given power and validation.

That change in mindset has also been reflected in the pop culture landscape Hamilton has existed along side. The world Hamilton became widely accessible to the public in, is a world in which Jordan Peele’s Get Out exists. A world where the seemingly pleasant – but deeply racist – suburban white dad (hello The West Wing‘s Bradley Whitford) telling his daughter’s new Black boyfriend he would have voted for Obama a third time became a shorthand meme for the smiling performative facades racism can hide behind.

Hamilton itself became used as this kind of shorthand when Don Johnson’s character in Knives Out evokes Hamilton’s crowd pleasing line “immigrants – we get the job done” while being questioned by Detectives, eventually revealing his true feelings when engaging in a Trumpy xenophobic rant about illegal immigration without realizing (or caring) that the woman he’s talking to would see her mother deported under such a threat. Beyond that, the scene also carries the additional subtext that a wealthy white man (with more resources to buy Broadway show tickets) would be quoting a play as a means of demonstrating how “not racist” this totally racist creep is.

Correction: I had incorrectly remembered this sequence of events. Don Johnson’s character uses the Hamilton line when being questioned by the detectives, not in the scene with Marta. The overall effect is still the same: to illustrate how racism can hide behind performative activities.

I don’t look at either of these examples as indicative of the qualities of Barack Obama or Hamilton. They are more commentaries on the way cultural milestones eventually become historical artifacts after things move on and grow more nuanced. The idea that culture is one big conversation constantly being added to, refined and re-contextualized. A tapestry that builds upon what came before and changes as our understanding of the world gets more refined. As the cultural understanding of systemic racism became more nuanced and targeted over the past 4 years, earlier efforts like Hamilton which were earnest but perhaps less nuanced and/or more restricted sometimes take some dings as a result.

It is worth pointing out that, to his credit, Lin-Manuel Miranda has been nothing if not welcoming of critiques of his work, having said multiple times that all criticisms of his work are valid. While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m going to choose to understand it as all good faith criticisms being valid. The criticism: “Not enough tiddies!” for example, I think is invalid and have no issue if he were to say so.

For all of the reasons mentioned above, evaluating Hamilton as a piece of art in 2020 feels…weird. When it comes to critiquing any form of art, context is important. If you see the same movie 20 years apart and don’t notice something that sticks out as being not the same as you remember, it would mean you haven’t changed in those 20 years.

There are always forces and trends that go into creating a cultural phenomenon, many of them based on happenstance and pure luck. The right talent having the right idea for an audience who are there for it. The entertainment industry spends billions on trial and error (and yes theater productions included) trying to get just ahead enough of that cultural curve to meet the audience where they are at just the right time to become a white hot sensation. Too soon and you become a cult classic: an idea too weird or radical that the audience wasn’t there for yet. Too late and you’re DC rushing out Justice League to get in on that super team up movie money and tripping over your own feet while doing it. So much of creating a big hit feels impossible based on the amount of stuff that comes and goes without much impact. Like threading a needle blindfolded, in the dark, with your toes.

Nobody could have predicted a hip hop musical about American civics would catch on the way it did. Trying to make sense of it after the fact is guesswork at best. However, looking at it in historical context once you have some distance, trends reveal themselves where they may not have been apparent at the time. In the years following Hamilton, we began to see other surprising success stories punch above their weight at the box office and with critics. Like the aforementioned Jordan Peele with 2017’s Get Out and Ryan Coogler with Black Panther (2018) , both of which over-performed what they were projected to, going on to be record breakers in their respective genres. On a smaller scale, Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You (2018) became a hit on the indie film level grossing five times it’s more modest budget. Taika Waititi’s Thor Ragnarok (2917) managed to take a hammer to colonialist mythologizing within an established multi-billion dollar franchise. Hamilton’s place in history becomes a bit more clear when one steps back and look at what came after it. Socially conscious popcorn entertainment challenging traditional systemic power structures and proving it could do big business in the process.

As a Broadway show, created and performed primarily by people of colour that became a huge phenomenon, Hamilton was one of the early wake up calls that there are audiences who are grossly under-served by centering the entertainment industry around the sensibilities of cis, straight, white, men and that when you give them something different, they will turn out for it. Hamilton became a case study for the idea that more diverse creative forces telling their own stories with the backing of larger media platforms, not only breathes new life into a stagnant entertainment landscape but also makes for good business. People turned out for these projects. I remember sitting in the audience for Black Panther the second week of release, and the audience was there…for…it.

It’s so easy to take for granted that I see people who look like me up on screen, on tv or on stage all the time. You become numb to it and lose sight of how much representation matters to people who don’t have it. How often people of colour have had to make due by watching white people tell stories that don’t speak to their own experiences. Part of Hamilton great subversion is flipping that script. Telling the story of a group of white people, re-casting them with more diverse faces, re-framing it and when necessary giving the finger to the ugly parts…all with a wink and a smile. Hamilton’s cast of characters is ultimately just as fictional as the historical figures they are playing.

That’s why for all the criticisms I may bring up, I think Hamilton, perhaps without planning to, had hit upon something that was necessary in that moment. As flawed as it can be and as poorly as some of it has aged, it put new faces in front of a predominantly white Broadway audience and got them on board. It put a hip hop twist on the old song and dance musicals. It launched new talent into the entertainment world that continued telling their own stories. It helped normalize a cast more representative of the diverse makeup of America today than the founding white men and women they were playing. It gave POC a chance to play roles they would otherwise be locked out of in more straightforward historical re-tellings. Most importantly it normalized immigrants and minorities as a crucial parts of the cultural fabric of America in a time when oppressive forces of white, xenophobic, patriarchy are keen to exclude them as being not representative of the “real” America. Hamilton is presented as an immigrant story and a reminder that for most of us, our ancestors faced the same distrust and xenophobia, but eventually became part of the fabric of society because…immigrants get the job done.

All of the conversations we’re having now about systemic racism and how to push back against oppressive odds, Hamilton played a role in opening the door by making the lessons of the American Revolution relevant to a young, passionate generation eager for change. There is something familiar feeling about the times of revolution depicted and the feeling now among the “young, scrappy and hungry” post Millennial generations, frustrated at a lack of movement on major systemic problems in our lifetime.

There’s the famous quote from Vladimir Lenin that comes to mind: “There are decades where nothing happens. Then there are weeks where decades happen.” It feels very much like we’re living through one of those periods of change. Similar to the civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests of the 1960’s a young, pissed off generation is bubbling up and is ready to grab the wheel.

As the first Broadway production of it’s kind, the usual pattern with trailblazers is that the first one through the door faces the most resistance. The good thing is that little nudge will allow some future person to be bolder and kick the fucker open. Barack Obama walked so the next non-old-white-guy POTUS (set your clocks for 2024) will be able to run. The same goes for Hamilton a show whose creation is directly tied to the Obama administration and mirrors many of the obstacles and constraints faced by the first Black President: Don’t be too provocative. Don’t be too radical. Be optimistic, not angry. Win them over with charm, wit and humanity.

I wish I could look at Hamilton through the eyes of the audiences who saw it the first time but now that’s just not possible. We’ve all been living in a 4 year anxiety attack and there’s no removing that. You bring whatever baggage you’ve gained since release with you. Now, it’s a piece of art created in what seems like an alternate reality not run by Fashy The Clown. It can still have relevance today. Just maybe not the relevance that was intended.

Take for instance when you look at Jonathan Groff’s portrayal of King George III as a spittle slinging, abusive, passive-aggressive, sarcastic, condescending, dictatorial, lunatic who basically functions as the Statler and Waldorf of the piece, heckling the colonists (and audience), watching with bemused glee and predicting disaster at every turn. In 2020, I watched thinking “Well, at least he speaks in coherent sentences.”

Christopher Jackson’s dignified and commanding portrayal of George Washington also feels different post Trump. His character may clash with the genuine article’s muddled history as a slave owner, with a Frankenmaw dental appliance of sheep teeth, who got horny at the sound of bullets whizzing by him in battle. However, in 2020, it provides a portrayal of what leadership is. It may not be historically accurate, but as an avatar of good leadership and responsible governance, Hamilton’s Washington is the one America actually needs right now, more so than the historical figure.

Try as I might, it’s impossible to remove the looming shadow of Trumpism from the equation of watching Hamilton in the modern day. He hovers over the play like a debate opponent. King George III repeatedly uses the refrain “oceans rise, empires fall” in his 3 songs and every time it give me chills because it’s a reminder that nothing lasts forever in history and the situation America finds itself in now, is not terribly different from previous empires that have crumbled and receded. America has been shown the rot that still remains on it’s history and it’s soul. And before it stands two paths. On one side, ruin, on the other, redemption. Once you’ve elected a fascist game show host whose only demonstrable skill is an extreme immunity to reality, that’s pretty much hitting rock bottom. No nation is immune from collapse and history has shown it will carry on without them if they don’t shore up the house. Arrogance and a false sense of invincibility have brought down more empires from within than all of the armies and wars combined.

When looking at the state America finds itself in, it’s understandable that the messages portrayed in the play may not resonate like they did in 2015. The themes of optimism regarding the “American Experiment” (weird how we refer to a 250 year old country like it’s a piece of tech still in a “working out the bugs” stage and not the most powerful empire in existence) played well when the first non-white POTUS represented a positive sense of growth. That same optimism may gather a weary groan in a time when fascist Reality TV host President ignores at will the checks and balances that were supposed to protect from tyranny and installs his equally kleptocratic family in government. Alexander Hamilton’s talk about America’s financial institutions and evocations of Wall Street may strike a sour note in a world of extreme wealth disparity where the absurdly rich hoard more money than they could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes while ordinary people are one medical problem or lost job away from financial ruin. The rot is in the house and the institutions of America have become King George III in all of his bloviating, delusional, abusive glory.

Ultimately, I think what Hamilton has to offer in the age of Trump tyranny are reminders that unrest is sometimes necessary for change, the power of ordinary people to rise up, and the need to fight for progress. Those themes are still prominent and evergreen in an era of grassroots activism taking charge and addressing long lingering issues like police brutality, gun control, LBGTQ rights (particularly Trans rights) and climate change to name a few areas where the quagmire of government inertia is being prodded along through activism and (when necessary) civil unrest. People have power to challenge institutions, and indeed that is often necessary because institutions grow complacent and aren’t in the habit of conceding power willingly.

Hamilton is complicated to fully unpack, just like the history it’s based on. There are no white hat good guys and black hat bad guys in history. Everyone is some form of a mixed bag, as all humans are born imperfect and have the capacity to change, grow and learn. Art isn’t history, it can’t replicate history because things always move on. It can help emphasize the good stuff. Sometimes it shows the world we live in and sometimes the world we want to live in. I’ve spent weeks thinking about Hamilton, researching the history behind it, listening to the soundtrack over and over (and over and over…it’s really good), and am still finding new things to learn and think about. That makes it a success in my book.

And so it is with the preamble out of the way, let’s get into the amble.

That’s right. All of that above was setting the table to actually talk about Hamilton. This is what happens when I set out to write a nice little thing about a play…

Hamilton In A Nutshell: “Help! I’m Alexander Hamilton and I’m stuck in this bloody nutshell!”

Let’s start with the basics. Hamilton: An American Musical is a Broadway musical retelling of the formative years of America’s founding, told through the eyes of one of it’s overlooked Founding Fathers: Alexander Hamilton (played in the early Broadway run and concert film by Lin-Manuel Miranda). Hamilton is a wall to wall musical, which utilizes a minimalist setup of just some movable balconies, a brick and wood background design, and an incredible company of dancers and stagehands, who fill out scenes by playing smaller roles, introducing/removing props and furniture as required, as well as creating the surreal, dreamlike feel of scenes such as simulating being stuck in the eye of a hurricane, rewinding Angelica Schuyler’s flashbacks in “Satisfied”, being in the middle of war, and tracing the paths of bullets during war and duel scenes. While, I’ll likely be discussing the more prominent cast members in more detail, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to the chorus, who do the lions share of the work to flesh out the the presentation of Hamilton and provide the backbone everything else exists on.

The other key part of the presentation that is crucial (but may otherwise go unmentioned) is a rotating stage design comprised of two circles: A stationary inner circle, and a rotating outer “donut” (could have said a turntable, but I’m hungry and donut won the metaphor-off). This gets a lot of use in simulating moments of chaos and action happening around the figures in the still inner circle.

Article: https://www.playbill.com/article/watch-the-actual-building-of-hamiltons-iconic-set

The seeds for what became Hamilton began after Miranda read a biography of Alexander Hamilton (called Alexander Hamilton) by Ron Chernow while on vacation and found the story to lend itself well to music. I don’t want to get too off-side here, but when people criticize Lin-Manuel Miranda for being nerdy…well yeah, the man reads historical biographies while on vacation. The shoe definitely fits on that one. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s major strengths as an artist are as a composer and musician (see his work doing the soundtrack to Moana) and he seems to find the humanity of the story within the music.

Miranda wrote the play’s opening rap track Alexander Hamilton and performed it at the White House for President Obama (the last POTUS…also perhaps the last POTUS depending on what happens in November) as a one off performance. It was in this performance, stripped of accompanying performers you can see where Miranda’s strengths are as a performer. He can’t belt out the soaring high notes of Broadway show tunes, but he nails the rapping and his way with words is impressive. I’ll get into it more when going through the play, but Miranda’s biggest asset is his likability and affable presence. He’s a cheeseball dork who wrote a musical about American history and I find I can relate to that.

Ron Chernow in an interview regarding Hamilton said that he was blown away by the song as Miranda had managed to condense Hamilton’s life so succinctly. In an interview with CSPAN he described hearing the first song as being like someone took his book, put it through the wash and it came out able to fit on a postage stamp. The project grew into a full length play, as Miranda continued to flesh out the story, then titled The Hamilton Mixtape, as the play took to the off Broadway stage in 2015 for further refining. By the late summer 2015 the play moved to Broadway and was re-named Hamilton: An American Musical in the process. In between, several numbers were cut (and I will get into greater detail on one particular number that didn’t make the transition when I talk about the play in more detail) and a few scenes were re-written.

Before carrying on, I should mention, I’m a relative newbie when it comes to enjoying musical theater. Obviously, I’ll be giving my thoughts on the play, but it comes from a perspective of someone very new to musicals. A theater critic I am not. It’s basically like asking your dog what they think of their kibble. I know what I like and will wag my tail accordingly, but I have only Wikipedia level technical knowledge of musical theater, terms, tropes and history.

While I’m on the subject, a little bit of an autobiographical detour here. Growing up, musicals were always derided as something unmasculine that straight men could only enjoy begrudgingly. Part of it was Alberta small town rejection of anything that didn’t abide by strict heteronormative gender roles. There is definitely a gendered element when it comes to young men being averse to musicals (or at least there was when I was young). With a few notable exceptions like The Blues Brothers, Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors remake or the counter culture Rocky Horror Picture Show which skewed a bit more masculine by swapping out the showtunes with rock and blues soundtracks, the area of Broadway musicals has always had feminine connotations. Part of the reluctance to engage with the genre was a lack of access, but most was due to small hick-town pressure to not flout the strict social norms or stand out too much. I was already a fat kid who liked pro wrestling (which is similar to musical theater in ways that become more apparent to me as I get older), and bullied for both, so I wasn’t exactly looking for any more ways to paint targets on myself.

The town I spent my formative years was mostly homogeneously white, straight (as far as public knowledge was concerned) and smack in the middle of oil and guns country. If a Black family moved into town they became THE Black family in town (and were treated as representative of their entire group). Boys were expected to put on the manly facade of doing manly things like trying to grow beards and spittin’ real far. Singing and dancing was off the menu. Growing up in a little clownshoe village in rural Alberta (population: about 500 clownshoes…or 250 pairs I guess), I left when I was 20 and never looked back. I carried so much of that small town baggage with me in life that until my late 20’s, my only engagement with musical theater was rolling my eyes at the class moron making armpit trumpet noises or the Christmas concert.

I’ll get into it in more detail as I talk about the play, but suffice to say, along with his drive to express himself through writing, I also strongly identified with Alexander Hamilton’s need to escape the stifling surroundings of his youth and never look back.

Aside: So I guess just a bit of a sidebar PSA here for the young fellas who may be reading this (and maybe some of the older fellas too). Free yourself to enjoy things that are fun. Enjoy things that are silly. Enjoy things that are considered feminine. Emotions are not the enemy. Toxic masculinity is trash and those who perpetuate it are terminally sad, angry, insecure people. Strict gender norms are bullshit constructs that keep people from exploring the full range of human emotions that make for a more healthy human being. Sing a little, dance a little. Give pop music a try. Have a good time. Don’t be like me and take 30 years to figure out that it’s much more freeing to just be who you are without worrying about living up to somebody else’s idea of what being a man is.

Ok, sidebar over. Let’s finally talk about Hamilton.

One last thing before I carry on beyond here. I’m gonna bring out the spoiler horn (HONK! HONK!) because from this point on I will not be holding back in talking about the plot of Hamilton. So last chance to turn back if you haven’t seen it.

And…We will get into the specifics of Hamilton in part 2 of this…thing. Sorry, didn’t intend for this to be a cliffhanger, but this went crazy long and based on the draft I have started for part 2, I’m just getting warmed up.

Next time, I’ll be talking about the nuts and bolts of Hamilton as a production, beginning to end because godammit I paid for that Disney Plus subscription and I’m getting my money’s worth. I’ll also be talking in more depth about some of the criticisms of it (chiefly it’s treatment of slavery), and some of the interesting historical side stories and supporting characters, I’ve discovered as a result of watching the play.

Thank you for reading. I hope wherever you are, you are staying safe and healthy and I’ll catch up with you further on up the road for Part 2.

You can follow me on Twitter @TheRogueTypist