"See, that's what happens when you up against the ruffians"
We needed Hamilton in 2016. Wow, do we need it now.
In February of 2016, when we booked the earliest available Hamilton tickets for a random fall day — November 16 — we couldn’t have imagined that New York, Broadway, and the entire theater-loving community, would be on our 7th consecutive day of mourning the results of the presidential election.
I don’t need to recount the shock and numbness we felt then. But you can imagine what a catharsis that performance was for us.
We had amazing orchestra seats in the glorious Richard Rogers theater, but the real splendor was finding ourselves in the company of 1,319 theater-goers just like us — people who didn’t feel threatened in the least by a modern, multicultural retelling of the founding of our democracy.
What we did feel threatened by was a wholly unqualified, uninformed, cruel, and vengeful leader; and those voters who chose to overlook (or embrace) his basest traits.
Surely none of them were there that night. Hillary Clinton had pulled a solid 79% of the NYC vote. And that includes Staten Island.
(I’ll yadda yadda through the part where newly elected VP Mike Pence came to the theater three days after we did. It was also about 36 months before his boss tried to have him murdered. For what that’s worth.)
There are two moment from that performance I still replay over and over in my mind.
The first is the crowd cheering wildly for the line Immigrants: We get the job done.
The second is Jonathan Groff singing You’ll Be Back as a rejected King George, and the crowd going absolutely crazy. A beloved actor comedically standing in for a hated villain. What a thing.
In Act II, he returned to sing the reprise, What Comes Next.
When your people come to hate you…
That’s when it all came out.
The applause! The thunderous, joyous, cathartic standing ovation! I’ve never heard anything like it. You would have though the ghosts of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton themselves had stepped out on that stage. The reaction forced an exceptionally long pause mid-lyric, and it may have been a full 30 seconds or longer before he could finish the line
…don’t come crawling back to me.
In that moment, I felt for the first time in a week that things might be okay. I was among my people: Those of us who, despite our differences, would come together to boo a king (or wannabe king) and stand up for the immigrants, the scrappy fighters, the foreign allies, the tellers of the stories, the protectors of our democracy.
The good guys.
We were the majority. No matter who would deign to wave some proverbial scepter at us — or parade some very real tanks — from DC
Last night, watching the Hamilton mixtape performance at the Tony’s (I said it was way too cool to be called a medley, and YES I know, pedantic people on Threads, that there is already a series of Hamilton Mixtapes, sheesh) all the best feelings of hope and empowerment that I had during the 2016 production came right back.
My daughter was up on her feet, singing right along with me, and her smile told me everything.
The wannabe despot is not going to win in the end.
He can’t and he won’t.
I shared last night’s full Hamilton 10-year anniversary performance on Threads and it seems I’m not alone in needing to devour every drop of it.
Watch it as many times as you need today. Or watch the entire show.
Feel all the good things.
A few more things:
Another theatrical epiphany this weekend plus more gratitude for the arts after my daughter’s high school production of The Visit — a play more people should know. You can read about it on my Instagram.
For more inspiration and joy, watch Cynthia Erivo’s entire Tonys opening number.
Thank you so much for all the kind comments about my big announcement! It got me even more excited for this next chapter, which I didn’t think was possible.
I’ll be back with Things I Love in the next day or two and I have so many cool things to share. Make sure you’re a subscriber so you don’t miss it!
Glorious writing. We need to be surrounded by our brothers and sisters so that we are seen, we are known, and we are protected.
The fact that we’re *here* 10 years later is a real gut punch though. 😔