Hamilton: the musical that launched a thousand lip-biting memes. Almost a decade ago, Lin Manuel Miranda’s race-bending rap-sical took broadway by storm and rose to unprecedented levels of success, amassing a dedicated, almost fanatical global fanbase. Yet with ticket prices starting at $400 a pop, the vast majority of these fans had never actually seen the show. Even stranger, in 2016 you could throw a rock and hit about three Hamilton fans, but today it seems like a title no one wants to claim. In this episode, Hannah, Maia, and their friend and long-time collaborator Sara Harvey, go mask-off to discuss Hamilton as it relates to their love of theatre. Is Hamilton a transgressive emulation or veneration of the founding fathers? How much of the show’s backlash is about its real historical flaws, and how much is a symptom of our irony-poisoning? And how much does theatre lose when it’s spliced up and broadcasted on the internet? Tangents include: the “boys and girls can’t share a room law”, Hannah playing the lottery, and a never-before-seen look at the inception of The Crucible: The Musical.
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Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills:
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Sources:
Claire Bond Potter, “Safe in the Nation We’ve Made” Staging Hamilton on Social Media” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past, Rutgers (2018).
H. W. Brands, “Founders Chic” The Atlantic (2003).
EJ Dickson, “Why Gen Z Turned on Lin-Manuel Miranda” Rolling Stone (2020).
Elissa Harbert, “Hamilton and History Musicals” American Music, Vol. 36 (4) Hamilton (2018).
Andy Lavender, “The Internet, Theatre and Time: transmediating the theatron” Contemporary Theatre Review (2017).
Marvin McAllister, “Toward a More Perfect Hamilton” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 3 (2) (2017).
Erika Milvy, “Hamilton's teenage superfans: 'This is, like, crazy cool'” The Guardian (2016).
Aja Romano, “Hamilton is fanfic, and its historical critics are totally missing the point” Vox (2016).