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The email arrived on my second day as the theater reporter here at The New York Times. It was March 10, 2015, and a publicist from the Public Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit, was welcoming me to the beat. “I think one of the best ways to get to know the Public right now is to come see HAMILTON,” she wrote. (For reasons I have yet to understand, theater publicists generally put show titles in all caps.)
I went to a matinee five days later, and in the five years since, I’ve written more than 100 articles that prominently mention the show. It goes without saying that “Hamilton,” which explores America’s revolutionary origins through the life of Alexander Hamilton, has dominated my tenure — I’ve never known the theater beat without it, and until the coronavirus pandemic prompted an unimaginably long shutdown of Broadway, I thought it would be the biggest theater story I’d ever cover.
Now “Hamilton,” which transferred from the Public to Broadway in July 2015, won every conceivable award, and became a much-loved and much-quoted juggernaut, is back in the news, because a live-capture filming of the original cast is streaming on Disney Plus starting July 3. (Yes, I wrote about that too.)
So what’s it been like to spend five years on the Hamilbeat?
I sensed right from the start that this musical, with its cast made up mostly of actors of color and its score influenced by hip-hop and pop music, was going to be a huge story. I remember being determined, that summer, to land an article about the production on the front page, convinced that the paper needed to make a big early statement about the show as a game-changing reflection on our culture, our politics and our history. Ultimately, the Page 1 gods agreed. I was traveling in Spain when it happened; I felt so affirmed that I didn’t mind the time-zone-busting copy desk questions.
A feature that followed about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical upbringing was particularly fun to report — as we explored the Venn diagram in which show tunes and hip-hop overlap, he started playing random songs from his iTunes library and riffing about what each one meant to him. (He insisted I keep one track off the record: It was a Polynesian song, part of his secret research for “Moana.”)
But for me, the moment that really illustrated Miranda’s passion for the musical songbook came on the afternoon I joined him to watch “Hamilton” from a hidden bandstand at the Public (his alternate played the lead role while Miranda looked for weaknesses he could address before the Broadway transfer). He asked why I was wearing a tie — he was in a hoodie — and when I explained that after “Hamilton” I was going to the opening of “Fun Home,” he burst, from memory, into a passage from “Ring of Keys,” the show’s yearning anthem, beautiful but at that point little-known.
I’ve seen the show about eight times, and over the years I’ve taken deep dives into its finances and have written about its prices and its profits and its people. There’s been a persistent, although rarely discussed, tension over how much coverage is too much — the theater desk periodically experiences “Hamilton” fatigue, and producers of other shows occasionally criticize what they see as an overemphasis on the show. But readers seem to love “Hamilton” stories, and that means assigning editors — and not just those in the culture section — do too.
The story I waited longest for was about Miranda’s relationship to Puerto Rico, where his parents grew up and where he spent his childhood summers. The island’s influence on his art had always struck me as significant and underexplored. I knew the best way to tell that story would be to see Puerto Rico through his eyes, at least as much as a journalist can, and when he announced that he was bringing “Hamilton” to San Juan, I had my peg. I asked to meet him there, and in fall 2018 he agreed; a devastating hurricane and campus unrest made the story more complex than either he or I could have anticipated, and I’m glad we did it.
There were stories that got away. The one I most mourn was about the relationship between toddlers and “Hamilton” — I was intrigued by why the show’s lyrics and melodies are such a memorization magnet for small children — but I never could sell my editors on that one, and now I think the moment has passed.
And maybe it’s just as well that I never got to this idea: I wanted to do a story about the German translators tasked with adapting the show’s word-drunk and oh-so-American libretto for its first foreign-language production. But the subject of lyric translation is arcane, the Hamburg production is delayed, and now I think we’ll have to wait to hear “young, scrappy and hungry” auf Deutsch.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
