TONIGHT!

After (intermittently) loitering like crazy people outside the Richard Rogers the last few days, tonight is the night!

Best Wedding Toast Ever

A couple years ago I fell in love with the video of a father and son-in-law surprising the bride with a terrific rendition of To Life from Fiddler on the Roof. The whole thing tickled me: the idea, the execution, the vibrancy, the sheer fun of a great creative collaboration! 

"He's in theater" I was told by whoever had shared the video. I didn't know who he was. I shared that video with a lot of people.

A couple months ago I put two and two together. That's Lin-Manuel Miranda!

I have a feeling you'll love to too.

(Oh and keep your eye out for Chris Jackson, the tall, bald African-American man who plays George Washington in Hamilton. He's in the ensemble here...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgZ4ZTTfKO8 

Fraunces Tavern

Recently, hearing we were off on a sort of Hamilton pilgrimage, a friend mentioned that we should go to Fraunces Tavern, which I had never heard of. A working tavern dating back to the American Revolution it was the site where Washington bid farewell to his officers in 1783.

We went to Fraunces Tavern yesterday 

as part of our outing to Trinity Church where Hamilton is buried.

Miles reading the Federalist Papers on his phone (ha ha).

Pub fare: stout and fish and chips with smashed peas.

This morning, reading some of Hamilton, The Revolution, about how the stage show came to be, I saw a stage direction at the bottom of the song Aaron Burr, Sir. It said "They enter Fraunces Tavern..."(!!!)

See below in the second photo, as well as the footnote at bottom right on the page.

Cheers to that.

In The Greatest City In The World, Wherein We Become Groupies (or Stalkers), Part 1

After the first night in front of the stage door where only two main actors came out, we loitered near the main theater doors last night.  After a series of limos/ black livery cars left, a single black car remained in front and I assumed it was for Lin. WIth only a few people in front (and over 100 near the stage door) nearly every actor exited from the main and immediately adjacent doors. Lin-Manuel Miranda literally ran out the theater doors and leapt into the car.  We got looks and waves from him as if to say "I'm sorry I have to do this.  I would have no life if I didn't do this!"

 

Daveed Diggs arriving for Friday night's performance.

Alex Lacamoire, the musical director, diving for the open door.

Leslie Odom Jr, who plays Aaron Burr. Odom is nominated for Best Actor in a Musical against Lin-Manuel Miranda, and may well win. 

Okieriete Onaidowan (Oak) who plays Mulligan the revolutionary in Act I and James Madison in Act II.

The incredibly handsome Christopher Jackson who plays George Washington.  He is signing Miles' one dollar bill here. It is very hard for me not to think of Washington as looking like this now.

Phillippa Soo who plays Hamilton's wife, Eliza. She has a chance to win the best actress in a musical Tony Award because her part has so much breadth (life, love, loss.)

Wait For It - In Which Miles Learns We'll See Hamilton In NYC

I was very excited to tell Miles I had bought the tickets for us to see Hamilton in New York. At 7:30 the next morning, I sat on his bed to wake him up. 

"Miles. Wake up now," I murmured exactly as I had when he was a wee laddie. As he began to stir, he suddenly sat up and told me, "I had two dreams last night that I saw Hamilton!" 

(Wow.)

"In both dreams I was with Dad, and we were sitting close to the stage. In the second one, Ari and Darius were in the show, in the ensemble. At one point they motioned to me to come on stage, so I put my top hat on the empty chair beside me. Like there would be an empty chair beside me!" he said laughing. "And I joined in with the ensemble."

"I bought tickets." I said.

He let this register for a minute and then said in a measured tone, "You bought tickets?"

"Yeah."

"We're going to New York?"

"Yeah."

Miles is not a jump up and down, scream and run through the house kind of kid. So he didn't jump up and down, scream and run through the house. His fixed brow and darting eyes told me his mind was at work...we were going to New York, we were going to see Hamilton, we were going to see (nearly) the entire original cast.

"When?" he asked.

"Right after graduation," I said. "You graduate on Tuesday, May 24th, and we'll fly that Thursday and see it on the 31st."

"Cool," he said.

Super Cool.

Lin at the White House, and Making the Decision To Go to New York

For any non initiates, I think the following video, shot at a Spoken Word performance at the White House in 2009, is an excellent place to start. This clip shows an early version of Hamilton, the opening song, an early version of the vision - at this point just planned to be a set of songs making up a "mixtape".

Just like the Obamas and others in the audience watching, you can witness for yourself that there is something incredibly unique and bizarre and compelling going on here. it is evident that Lin-Manuel Miranda is a force to be reckoned with. Like Alexander Hamilton himself apparently was.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs at the White House 2009.

http://youtu.be/WNFf7nMIGnE

When Miles and I returned home from my niece's birthday party in April, we once again sat side by side at the computer. Miles held his iPhone playing the soundtrack while we looked for articles or videos we hadn't yet seen. 

Suddenly he paused the playing song and said "It makes me really sad to think that next year when Hamilton comes to San Francisco, Lin-Manuel won't be with them. None of them will." His head was bent looking down at the iPhone in his hand, his voice sounded as if he might begin to cry.

"That's right," I said softly. "The original cast does not tour with the show." 

We sat there for a minute, in silence, as Miles got used to this newly realized reality, and I began to create a different one.  It was this cast Miles knew, this cast that was making history on Broadway. It was this cast that drove Miles to choose "singing" as his first choice elective next year ("These guys have so much range. When I sing along I can't reach the same notes.  I want to be a better singer.")

We had to go to New York.

One can rationalize a lot of different things. This was a moment in time, I told myself, a musical captivating my musical son, a moment on the cusp of Miles becoming a surly teenager where he might not want to go on vacation with his mom. Miles was about to graduate from 8th grade so the trip and the show could be a graduation present. It could be a pat on the back for getting into the fine High School he was selected to for the Fall. A neighbor family had just started having Miles babysit so he could earn some of the money to contribute. He and Frank were planning a sidewalk sale where he could sell old toys and games. He might get some money for graduating as well. Could Miles be talked into a crowd funding plea to friends and family?! (The answer there was no. When the question was posed to him he said "why would anyone want to give me money to see Hamilton?") 

I had been trying to get back to New York for six years - this would be a great reason to do it!

Question: If one blows nearly the whole vacation budget on theater tickets, how cheaply can one "do" New York? We'd have to see.

After Miles went to bed I looked again at the date I had considered, Tuesday May 31st, 2016. Miles would graduate on May 24th and we could fly to New York on the 26th. I had an airline credit that had to be used by August - that would help.

I selected the least expensive (ha!) tickets that weren't all the way in the nosebleed section, in the last row in the mezzanine, stage right (equivalent to about row Q, but up a level.) Feeling a moment of panic at this extremely extravagant move, I bought two tickets. 

One can rationalize a lot of different things.

And Just Like That, Hamilton the Musical Came Into Our Lives

"What's he doing?" My sister asked. 

With earbuds in place, my son Miles was wandering her house, roaming in and out of rooms in a trance, in his own world. Was he muttering? Rapping? Singing? 

I look over at him, hoodie up, head and shoulders bobbing, his hand holding an iPhone 6. 

"It's Hamilton." I tell her.

"Hamilton?" Asks my other sister scooping one of her twin one year olds up and wiping her nose. 

I know that mine is not the only teenager taken over by the new musical Hamilton, which opened on Broadway last August after a several month run at New York's Public Theater, but taken over he is.

We had listened to the musical's soundtrack on the hour drive from San Francisco to Novato for my niece Savannah's birthday party, with Miles' iPhone perched on the armrest between us. He paused the songs at moments while shouting to his grandmother in the back seat about what is going on in the show, in the story, at that moment. Mom is hearing impaired, and the lyrics are rapid-fire, clever - hard to understand on the first go, even when not in a car, and when not hard of hearing. My mom wants to relate, and connect with her grandson on his new love but now is not the right time. We all agree he will show her the lyrics while they listen together another time.

Miles' obsession had started a month before when at the tail run of an original school musical he was in, a friend had turned him onto a couple songs from Hamilton. He came home and introduced me, via YouTube, to King George singing about the American revolutionaries breaking free of England. Styled like an old British pop song, You'll Be Back is a breakup song with tinges of possessiveness, control, despair. With some monarchical twists: "I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love..."

Miles moved on to the opening song, Hamilton, memorizing those lyrics (as did I soon afterwards. One can't really help oneself.)

"How does a bastard orphan, son of a whore 

and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot 

in the Caribbean, by providence, impoverished and squalor 

grow up to be a hero and a scholar...?"

A few days later Miles told me he had downloaded the entire cast album - 46 songs.

During non-school hours, Miles carried his iPhone around with him, listening, steeping in the words, the rhymes, the infectious energy. He followed me around as I washed dishes, put things away, folded laundry, the iPhone playing in his upright palm. Stopping the song periodically he would keep me up to speed, "this is when Thomas Jefferson has just gotten back from France," he tells me, hitting play again. Thomas Jefferson in France? Obviously, I am not up on my American history.

The immersion in All-Things-Hamilton continued as Miles sought out YouTube videos, cast appearances on late night talk shows, articles, and Wikipedia entries about the American Revolution. (I have been amazed and delighted about this new obsession, now nearly three months old. Music, musical theater, American history. It's gotten him off the XBox! Mostly.)

Like any good album propels its listeners to do, Miles has moved from song to song, getting hooked for days on a given track, developing new favorites, doubling back. King George was his entree to the show, but each and every song is captivating, intricate, compelling (I am hooked now as well, and his father is too. Picking me up one day to go collect Miles, Frank had the soundtrack playing in his car. We both own a copy of the double CD on Miles' insistence. When Miles got in the car he was surprised to find that his parents were listening to it on our own!)

We began to look for tickets to see the show in New York. What would it take to do it? What would it cost? Seeing the prices, I would back off. it's impossible, I would think. The show is long sold out and tickets, while available via a secondary market still sold through Ticketmaster, are insanely priced. We'll wait for its run in San Francisco, we say, and I begin to figure out how we'll even get tickets then. We didn't get to see Book of Mormon until its third visit to San Francisco. 

How patient can we be?