WARNING: Seeing this show was a really big deal for me, and I had lots of thoughts. I’m going to go into as much detail as I would like to have heard from anyone else who had seen the show. It may be too much for you. Feel free to skip/skim as you so desire.
I was trying to keep it together as I rode the A train toward 42nd Street– the train Lin Manuel Miranda tells you to take to get to his favorite spot in the world in In the Heights. Tears would bubble over when I thought about the magnitude of this evening. From the moment I started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack, I had to have more. I wanted to see the story unfold. I spent hours on youtube clicking on every related video, every interview, every performance. I read the book by Ron Chernow (which was fascinating. I made my mom read it too. They were debating the same issues in the 18th Century that they were in 2016!). I memorized Hamilton the Revolution- the book written about the show. At work I had to put together a training to inspire my admissions team to want to work with high school students. I was burned out and tired of saying the same thing every year until I started reading about Hamilton’s story. In a weekend I had the training– no more pictures of staff when they were in high school and how to insert the latest slang into conversation. I would tell the team about this musical – How a brilliant, hard working son of an immigrant, Lin Manuel Miranda, told a story about a brilliant, arrogant, hard working immigrant who lived 230 years ago using today’s music. He took an archaic subject and made it interesting. He spoke to everyone, but especially poor teenagers who may not have believed they could do something with their lives. He told them how Alexander Hamilton, the least likely person to become so powerful, created things we still use today. I wrote a rap song about college admissions. I associated the qualities of Alexander’s character with the best practices of working with high school students.
The Hamilton Soundtrack was the only music I listened to for about 9 months. I listened to every podcast I could find with anyone associated with the show (there are quite a few fan sights out there). When I ran out of media, I started watching/rewatching anything else the cast was in– Renee Elise Goldsberry on The Good Wife, Leslie Odom Jr. in Smash, In the Heights, 21 Chump Street (alright, I already knew about that– that was how Lin Manuel Miranda first rocked my world. But I watched it again).
I’d been trying to manifest a lottery win every day that I was in New York and Philadelphia since July 2016 (mostly by entering the lottery online). The night before I won I changed my alarm song from Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” to Hamilton‘s opening number. I had put “Hamilton” on my list of things I wanted to do in New York next to doing laundry and visiting the 9/11 memorial. A few days before I had taken it off, trusting that I would see the show someday. Then Tuesday morning I turned off the podcast I was listening to, took a deep breath and imagined what it would feel like to win the lottery. About an hour later the email came in.
It felt so momentous. I was worried it would go by too fast (sometimes I zone out listening to the soundtrack and realize I wasn’t paying attention to my favorite parts). It felt like I was going to something as significant as my wedding- how could I possibly be more excited about something? The email was very clear– only I could pick up the tickets. I would need a current ID (what if they didn’t accept my driver’s license? was it expired? no. good). I arrived 30 minutes before I would meet Ryan and pick up the tickets.
Enough time for a celebratory glass of bubbly!
Here I am at the theatre!
I’d heard they reserved the first two rows for lottery winners, but I didn’t believe it until we were escorted right down to the stage
The people in front of us asked for booster seats so they could see over the ledge.
There’s everyone else behind us!
There’s a guy in the pit!
We’re ready! Ryan hadn’t seen the show yet. He had played the lottery everyday for a while… until he gave up.
Duh! duh na na Nah Duh Duh! Doo doo doo— How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore…
Nik Walker strode on stage as Aaron Burr asking the question that introduces the show. His inflection was different from Leslie Odom Jr. in a way that really worked. Like when you go to a concert and the singer sings the song just a little differently than the way you’ve heard it so many times on the album…
I was jumping out of my skin. When I was little my sister and I listened to Les Miserables a bit obsessively. My parents got tickets to see the show in San Francisco and my sister and I were pissed. Why couldn’t we go too? They were like, you’re 5! When it came back a year later they got us tickets so we FINALLY could go. We had to lie about my sister’s age because she was just a couple of months shy of 6 years old– the minimum age to see a show. My mom told us we could ‘mouth’ the words, but we couldn’t sing along like we did with the album. I had to remind myself of this rule in the Richard Rogers Theatre almost 30 years later– it was so hard not to sing along.
As the characters swirled around the stage, suddenly I lost track of who was who (like that magicians game where you put something under one of 3 cups and you have to keep an eye on it to see if you can remember which cup has the thing under it). By the time they were in Fraunces Tavern I figured it out– the guy playing Lafayette had the physicality of the Genie in Aladdin, and Hercules Mulligan was a little guy– very different from the guys who were in the original cast.
THE CAST:
I was really looking forward to seeing Javier Munoz play Hamilton. He was the understudy while LMM was the lead and he took his job very seriously. Unfortunately, I wasn’t impressed. He seemed to be ‘showing’ rather than doing (what I was taught not to do in acting school). I thought maybe it was because we were so close– maybe he was overacting to play to such a big theatre and it seemed over the top because I was so close I could literally see the sweat on his face? But I was really impressed with some of the other actors and they weren’t doing that. I thought maybe he would get better as his character got older, but he didn’t. I mean, he had big shoes to fill. On the internet, someone meme’d “Someday, I wish a man would look at me the way Lin Manuel Miranda looks at everyone.” He is so smitten with life that it’s contagious- I would totally believe he was in love with every character in the show. I didn’t see any chemistry between Javier and Eliza or Angelica, which made their love triangle a little icky.
I LOVED Aaron Burr and the King. The show I saw should have been called Burr and King George rather than Hamilton– in my opinion they were the stars of the show. Burr had a gross beard but he brought so much more life and interpretation to a character I had fleshed out in my imagination. This was especially impressive because people who saw Leslie Odom Jr. in the original cast said that he brought so much depth to the character that it was unlikely anyone else would be able to play the part as well. King George had such great facial expressions and physicality that I was cracking up at lines I knew were coming. Anthony Lee Medina who played Laurens and Philip Hamilton looked so much like Anthony Ramos that I hardly noticed that he wasn’t the real thing.
I fell in love with Daveed Diggs when I watched him listening along with the music as the cast performed at the White House (it’s on youtube with a great introduction by Barack Obama). The beats pulsed through him as he danced through the camera through youtube through the screen of my computer until I could feel the music. I was even more smitten with him than I was with Marius. Amanda and I send each other pictures of Lafayette signs we come across in various cities because she knows how much I love him. James Monroe Iglehart was having fun on stage, but I wasn’t buying his french accent and he couldn’t own the fast raps that were written for Daveed’s talent. I loved watching him move through the blocking and imagining Daveed do those things with more stage presence. George Washington was good. He didn’t command a stage like Chris Jackson, but he didn’t disappoint.
Eliza and Angelica weren’t great. Eliza looked like she really enjoyed singing. I didn’t really see anything else from her. Mandy Gonzalez played the martyr as Angelica before I had a chance to fall in love with her enough to have compassion for her position. Her character has a complexity that is difficult to portray in such a short period of time.
SOUVENIERS:
Before the show started Ryan asked if I wanted a drink. I don’t usually buy those expensive drinks at shows, but this was a special occasion! I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu- a light beer for $9. I was thrilled when it came in a HAMILTON reusable TRAVEL MUG!!!
At intermission I had to go back to get the shorter wine cup. The wine turned out to be Hamilton themed as well!
SURPRISES:
Leading up to this night, I would interview anyone I knew who got tickets to the show– what was different from what you saw in your head? What surprised you? Here are my answers to those questions.
We were so close I could see the wig netting on Elisa and Hamilton’s foreheads.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I think I missed some things being so close. Now I want to see it sitting further back. That’s the nice thing about this show being so popular– it should run for a while. Maybe I’ll try to see Hamilton in all the cities the way my mom goes to every Disneyland.
Earlier in the day I was scanning through my memoirs of my time in Italy looking for a funny story to use for a job interview (it’s hard to be funny under pressure) and I came across this sentence: “Strangely enough, when I came to Italy to be an actor all day every day, it was just like REAL LIFE! Who knew?!” I thought that if I were living my dream circumstances, my life would be like constant fireworks. It turned out to be part spectacular, part mundane and part challenging. I spent my time practicing shifting my perspective away from grimaces and toward gratitude. Strangely enough, I put the same expectations on Hamilton that I put on living in Italy and it turned out to be a show. A GREAT show, but it wasn’t more excitement than I could handle. I was momentarily disappointed with what it lacked until I remembered that I LOVE picking apart shows, figuring out what wasn’t working and why. And also, I have loved getting to know this story over the last year and a half. I thought seeing the show would be the climax and the conclusion, but it’s just another chapter, which makes the journey feel more important.