Post 119 - July 8, 2020

Day 119…

Hamilton is a kind of a miracle.

I took my own suggestion from yesterday’s post, and we watched it last night on Disney+. No popcorn, but we had some wine. While Michael was corona-cleaning out the kitchen cabinets recently, he discovered a bottle of passito which is a northern Italian dessert wine made out of raisins. We had gotten it at a vineyard on one of our trips to Italy and had forgotten all about it. We had some of that.

I’ve seen Hamilton live twice. Once with most of the original company a couple of months after it opened on Broadway, and then once again in Chicago when I was there doing some casting for Jersey Boys.

Sometimes, when a show is as hyped as Hamilton is, when you finally get in to see it, there is a kind of let down. You sit there and think, I just spent a fortune for this? That is not the case with Hamilton.

There is an alchemy that happens when the right combination of people, get into a room together, at the right time, with the right story that is, truly like a miracle. That is what happened on Jersey Boys. With zero expectations, a bunch of us - many of whom, including me, were second or third choices - showed up in a rehearsal room in La Jolla. After the first read through of the script, we KNEW that we were all on board for a kind of a once in a lifetime journey.

A similar thing happened on Titanic, the Musical. In the face of enormous public derision, a small group of us did a workshop production of it. It really worked. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just thinking about how exciting it was to be in that room where we started to put it all together. A year or two later when we went into rehearsal for the Broadway production of it, that feeling carried over. The additional cast and crew that joined us just added to that sense that we had something in our hands that really and truly worked. 

Titanic almost didn’t make it. When we got into the theatre, the technical challenges were enormous. Plans that were envisioned in the bare rehearsal studio had to be completely scrapped and rethought once we were on the actual gigantic set. Transition scenes had to be rewritten and made longer to cover up set changes. Whole scenes were tossed out because we couldn’t make the physical aspects of them work.

Regardless, the show worked.

We KNEW that it worked even after the invited dress rehearsal before our first public performance where we lost count of how many times we were forced to stop because the scenery had ground to a halt.

We KNEW that it worked while every single newspaper in the country, and even some in far off places around the globe gleefully reported that the Titanic couldn’t sink.

Ultimately, the show really did work. The original ideas had taken somewhat of a beating, but Titanic went on to win the Tony award for best musical that year.

Many, on the Jersey Boys creative team, again including me, have gone on to work on other projects together, but none of those have exploded in quite that way - not creatively and certainly not in terms of the response. It’s not that the work on those projects was bad per say, it’s just that while in many cases everything that we needed was there to potentially make an explosion, the fuse just wouldn’t light.

It is a far more common experience to start rehearsals for a show and realize that there is a lot of work to do. The biggest flop I worked on was a Broadway show that closed after 51 previews and only five performances. It was six months of the most difficult and grueling work I have ever had to do. The agony of it all was that, in our hearts, we all knew it wasn’t going to work from almost the first day of rehearsal.

Hamilton is truly inspired. Like many of the greatest Broadway musicals, it comes from a story that seems utterly unlikely to translate well to the stage. Hamilton’s portrait is on our $10 bill but if you asked people why, I doubt that many could tell you.

Alexander Hamilton was one of the founding fathers of the United States. He was our first Secretary of the Treasury. He is the man who laid the foundations for much of the economic system that we are living with today.

Watching the show on TV is not the same as watching it live in a theatre, but they managed to film it in such a way that it truly captures much of the magic in the piece. It also has the advantage that you can go back and watch it again. And again.

Is Hamilton historically accurate? Well, not entirely, no.

Alexander Hamilton was not quite the abolitionist that he is purported to be in the musical. The truth is more complex than that. While it is true that he was one of the few Founding Fathers that did not own slaves, himself, he didn’t do much to stop the practice.

He was born in Nevis in the Caribbean out of wedlock. His mother owned a boy that Hamilton and his brother couldn’t inherit when she died because they were illegitimate. As a teenager, he ran the operations for an import-export company that traded in sugar and in slaves. His wife’s family, the Schuylers, owned slaves and Alexander Hamilton helped them to buy and sell them. While Hamilton founded an anti-slavery group called the Manumission Society, he also supported several slave-holding Federalists when they ran for office.

Much is made of the fact in the show that Hamilton was an immigrant, when in fact as soon as the Constitution went into effect, people born in Nevis were considered US citizens.

Like Hamilton, Jersey Boys is a musical BASED on real people. There are some liberties taken with the actual facts. The chronology of the show does not always follow the chronology of the actual events.

Early in the show a character mentions the movie The Blob. If you do a little research and figure out what year the scene is really taking place in, you will discover that The Blob had not been released yet. So why was The Blob used?

Because it was funny.

The clothes in those early scenes reference styles that actually came a bit later as well. Why was that allowed to happen?

Because everybody thought that the later style looked better.

For a whole variety of reasons, some character’s names were changed. There are a couple of characters that never even existed, but they were created in order to make the story make sense to an audience watching a 2 ½ hour long show. Actual events that were extremely complicated, were simplified and streamlined so as to seem less confusing.

The same kind of historical cherry-picking happened with the musical of Titanic.

Hamilton, Jersey Boys and Titanic are all entertainments. Yes, they are BASED on history, but their stories are being told primarily to entertain. There is always the hope that a larger point might be conveyed that shines a light on who we are and perhaps asks us to look within, but all three are really there simply to tell a good story.

When a sculptor or a painter attempts to pay tribute to a historical event or a historical figure, they have to do the same thing that people who create theatre have to do.  They have to streamline facts and condense a general sense of actual history into a single static image to convey the story.

Cathedrals are often adorned with sculptures of saints. You can tell who each one is by what they are holding. Saint Bartholomew was skinned alive for spreading the faith, so you look for the guy holding his skin like a coat and you’ve found him. In classical paintings, you can tell which figure is a saint, and which ones aren’t by the addition of a halo around the heads of the beatified. Their entire lives are conveyed in symbols that the artist trusts we will pick up on and understand.

When James Earle Fraser was commissioned to create the statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stands out in front of the American Museum of Natural History, he was tasked with figuring out how to encapsulate, in one image, the connection between the man and the institution.

He used a traditional triangular shape (think Michelangelo’s Pieta) and put Roosevelt at the apex atop a horse. He placed two figures to his left and right - their heads are much lower to conform to the overall structure - that to Fraser, represented the two continents that Roosevelt had led expeditions of discovery through. On the right of Roosevelt stands a Native American man representing the Americas and, on his left, stands an African man representing Africa. When originally erected, this statue conveyed the spirit of the man who was partially responsible for helping to create the institution that is housed in the building behind it. Viewers at the time got it.

This isn’t the story that we receive from this statue now. The imagery that Fraser used broadcasts a much different story to us here in 2020 - one that he may not have consciously intended to send.

History happens out of the sight of historians. Monumental decisions are made by a small group of people together or sometimes by one person in isolation and it is then left to historians to imagine what MIGHT have happened at the time.

I was actually in the “room where it happened” during the creation of Jersey Boys and Titanic but even that does not necessarily make me a reliable witness. Even inside the room, there were private discussions that happened between actors and between creatives that I wasn’t included in. When I tell stories from that time, I leave out things that I think are too complex to get into or that I have simply forgotten.

During this pandemic and its shutdown, we have begun re-examining our entire history.

Historians who wrote a generation ago, were writing with different filters in their heads. They had different stories to tell than we do now.

If somebody was going to sculpt a monument with Theodore Roosevelt in it to stand in front of the American Museum of Natural History today, it wouldn’t look like the one that is there now. The parts of his history that were glossed over or ignored 90 years ago when it was created are very much in evidence today. If an artist was commissioned to portray Theodore Roosevelt today, it would likely end up being a far less flattering but perhaps more balanced depiction.

I do believe that it is time to take down that sculpture.

It is also, I think, time to take down the sculpture of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle. And all of the Confederate monuments throughout the South. They reflected a different cultural sensibility than the one that we have evolved into now.

I do not think that it all should be destroyed, however. Not at all.

All of these sculptures and monuments, like the people they represent, are themselves a part of our history. We cannot pretend that that history hasn’t happened.

Some of it is unbearably shameful to confront. Truth be told, a lot of the history of humankind on this planet is unbearably shameful. If we hide it and forget that it’s there, we stand the very real risk of repeating it again.

We should not be erasing our past, but we should be re-examining it in light of what we, as a people, have become.

Who are we?

How did we get here?

Where are we going?

Science asks those questions. Religion asks those questions. Art asks those questions. If we are going to answer any of those questions truthfully, we need to be brutally honest with ourselves and face up to all of it.

Is the musical Hamilton a factual representation of history? No, it is just a Broadway musical. It represents a group of theatre artists at the absolute top of their games telling a story based on history but relentlessly about the future. It is a breathtaking achievement. Watch it. Then, at the end of it, ask yourself:

Who are we?

How did we get here?

Where are we going?

It’s not about the answers. It’s rarely about the answers.

It’s about the asking.