By Sandi Masori
SAN DIEGO – At this point I think everyone has heard of the musical Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda. If you haven’t seen it in person, you may have seen the video version of the performance. If you haven’t seen either, you’ve probably heard about it all the same. In spite of being on the road pretty much continuously over the last few years, they still perform to sold-out audiences every night. For those unfamiliar, it’s the story of Alexander Hamilton through the Revolutionary War and the founding of our country. What makes it so special is that the entire cast is made up of people of color. All the leads, in spite of the actual historical characters being white men, are played by actors of color. There may be a few paler faces in the ensemble cast, but the main characters are very specifically people of color. The music takes a lot of inspiration from hip hop and rap music, to the point that the arguments of congress are done as rap battles. The play has widely been credited with reviving theatre and making a whole new generation take an interest in musicals.
It’s a great show, with a very catchy soundtrack. I’ve seen it three times, and the first two times I was not there as a reviewer, but as a full-paying audience member. This is the second time that it’s been at the Civic Theatre and is always a fan favorite. One of the things that they do that’s really special is that there is a lottery for every performance for discounted tickets. When the producers set it up, keeping with the theme of giving representation to actors that don’t normally get to play the lead, in spite of massive talent, they also wanted to make sure that people who wouldn’t normally be able to go to the theatre got a chance for extremely discounted tickets.
One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed having seen it three times is seeing which characters jump out at me because of their actors’ performances. At every show it’s been different. For this performance at the civic theatre, the standouts were Alex Larson who played the King of England (always an audience favorite), Morgan Anita Wood who played Hamilton’s wife Eliza (wow! What a powerful voice she has) and Andy Tofa who played John Laurens/ Philip Hamilton. Some of the cast for the performance I saw were understudies, but there was nothing in the performance that would lead one to believe they were seeing anything less than the “A” cast. The only reason I knew there were understudies was because of a sign posted in the lobby and the insert in the program.
Besides a catchy soundtrack, I’m always amazed at the efficiency with which the actors and ensemble members take scenery on and off stage, doing it in a way that is so fluid and congruent with their characters and the choreography that it’s really a thing of beauty to behold. In fact, that’s one of the limitations of seeing the show in video form, while the camera is doing a tight close-up of the person singing, you’re missing the mastery of what’s happening in the background.
I think that the biggest Jewish angle here is that there’s no Jewish story here. No bageling, no Yiddishkeit, nothing. My unnamed companion did a little digging and found through a Wikipedia rabbit trail search that the book that inspired Lin Manuel Miranda to write the play may have been written by a Jew (Ron Chernow), but that’s a pretty tenuous connection. I have to admit though, on the way home, I let my imagination wander a bit to imagine what it would look like if someone had taken the same story of Hamilton and instead of writing it for people of color, it was written in Ashkenazi Jewish dialect. Would Hamilton have said that Aaron Burr had bupkis when it came to forming an opinion? Would he have bemoaned the trouble he got into when he shtupped the other woman and was blackmailed by her farkakta husband? What would the soundtrack be like if it were klezmer rather than hip-hop? When they went to set up the dual would it have been “Oy, you vant to duel, ech, my sciatica is acting up, can we do it tomorrow?” I don’t know, my imagination my have been running away with me a bit. When I asked my companion about it, he said that it would have been wildly inaccurate and probably looked like Fiddler on the Roof. Hmmmm Fiddler meets Hamilton… that just might be a show idea for someone … or not.
Wild imaginings aside, the show is playing at the Civic Theatre through Nov. 20, and if you can get tickets, I highly recommend that you do so. Lin Manuel Miranda’s imagination is far better than mine, and he manages to pull off the historical inaccuracies in such a way that you barely have to stretch to accept them.
*
Sandi Masori is a theatre reviewer for San Diego Jewish World, in addition to being a Self-publishing strategist, a single mom, and a sushi snob.