"Hamilton" Addiction and Seeing it First

My son has gotten me a new addiction--worse than Lego!--and I have it worse than him, I think. I have found a new minor obsession: Hamilton.

I am big fan of live theater and musical theater. When I was a kid, I was in the children's choir for a local production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Weber. We did the show back in 1980 before he wrote Cats and Phantom of the Opera. I saw Chorus Line when I was a tween. I loved the dancing and music, but most of the plot was above my head. Jack and I saw Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables when we were college students living in Chicago. Jack got me tickets as a Christmas present when we started dating.

For those three shows, I didn't know much of the music before I saw the show. It was all fresh, new and surprising. Sometimes it goes the other way with a musical. I took my daughter to see Les Miserables one summer when it was touring in Seattle, and she was unimpressed. After listening to the soundtrack on my iPod when we took on car trips, both kids loved it. When we saw it live last year, they were fairly familiar with the music and enjoyed the show. Now she is a diehard fan, playing and studying the music on the piano. We just saw Billy Elliot cold a few weeks ago. Aside from the family drama on our end, the show was good.

I am worried about Hamilton. My son is memorizing the lyrics to his favorite songs "My Shot" and "You'll Be Back." I am listening to the music, reading about it, and watching every interview of Lin-Manuel Miranda ever recorded. (Damn you, YouTube!) I watched videos of him performing at the White House in 2009 and then this year. I've seen the little selfies videos behind the stage. I saw the CBS Sunday Morning video before the show made it to Broadway. I ordered a copy of the book by Ron Chernow that Miranda based the musical on. I am addicted. This is a problem. (I'll spare you the links. If you get addicted to Hamilton, you can blame yourself, not me.)

I am jealous of Stephen Colbert. He saw Hamilton in previews. He said the first fifteen minutes were interesting, and he wondered if they could keep it up for a whole show. In the middle, he was thinking, yes, this works. At the end, he was crying.

I want that. I wish I could have that fresh, unexpected experience of seeing Hamilton unknown like Steven Colbert did. What if I scrape together to get tickets and fly to New York and by then I've heard it all a thousand times and then I am bored or unimpressed or disappointed, thinking the whole thing is overhyped? That would be hell. That is one of the beautiful things about seeing plays when you don't know much about them: they are a surprise, and surprises can be wonderful.

I remember the first time I saw Mamma Mia. Jack and I were in St. Louis and we went with his boss. I was a massive ABBA fan growing up in the 1970s, and I own almost everything they recored on vinyl, plus the CD ABBA Gold, which had a primary slot in the CD player in my car a few years ago. I thought the plot of "Guess who the dad is?" was stupid and a little absurd. And then as it the story unfolded, I loved it. I took my daughter, Claire Adele, to see the movie with Meryl Streep when it came out, and she loved it too. She had a Mamma Mia birthday party when she was ten, and the girls got the karaoke version of the DVD and sang along. One of my favorite memories of her childhood would be Jack and I talking in the front yard, hearing the ten girls singing at the top of their lungs. (In my childhood, we would sing and dance to Barry Manilow's "Copacabana.") Later that summer, Claire Adele and I went to London where we got first row seats to Mamma Mia in the West End. Claire Adele sat mesmerized, glued to her seat, unable to move, she was so in awe. I was so jealous of the performers who got to go on stage every day and sing and dance and party. What a life!

While Claire Adele had the magical feeling of seeing her beloved show live, I still dream of the fresh experience. Jack, the Boy and I saw Come From Away when it was playing in Seattle last winter. Come From Away is a musical about the town of Gander in Newfoundland, Canada when seventy transatlantic flights were diverted there after 9/11. A few friends highly recommended it, so we got tickets, and it was amazing. The show is scheduled to go to Broadway this fall, and I feel personally invested in seeing it do well. I hope Hamilton's star may cast a light on Come From Away, not overpower it and block it out. Hamilton is different with hiphop, while Come From Away has more of a folk music feel, the music that would be played in small towns in faraway places, not in the center of New York. Come From Away isn't about oppression and gaining freedom, it is about how a small town in the middle of nowhere helped thousands of people in the largest crisis in recent times.

The scary thing about seeing something first and loving it is that I hope other people love it as much as I do. The people who saw Hamilton first were lucky.