Tonight gives us a chance to revisit Lin-Manuel Miranda. That’s because the original Aaron Burr--Leslie Odom, Jr.--will be on PBS, 9 PM. Tune in.
Some thoughts. “In the Heights” was a big deal for me. That’s because Nina’s culture-shock issues resonated with me. Nina is groomed to be an academic star. She recalls spending her childhood studying; others would gather, “rapping with buddies, volume high,” but Nina would “walk on by.” (“In the Heights” really thrives on local color, in a way “Hamilton” cannot. In his first big musical, LMM is writing about his own childhood, and that makes the lyrics special.) Nina gets maybe the most poetic line LMM has ever written; she recalls girlhood, thinking that “the world was just a subway map, and the 1/9 climbed a dotted line to my place.” That image is so powerful because, of course, children do think the world is small and easily navigable. (For many years--too many--I thought the Upper West Side was the entirety of Manhattan.) The verb “climb” also echoes earlier thoughts from Nina; in girlhood, “I’d climb to the highest place on every fire escape--restless to climb.” Clearly, this is a character who spends a good deal of time thinking about vertical ascent.
(A sidenote on the element of surprise in LMM’s writing. Nina has that lovely line about the “one-dash-nine,” and then Benny punctures it; tenderly, he observes, “There’s no nine train now...” And you laugh, because you’re not expecting the quotidian interjection. You see a similar trick in “Hamilton” when a pretentious pamphleteer gets tangled up in lofty talk about “this [insubordinate] Congress”; Hamilton jumps in and says, “Don’t modulate the key and not debate with me!”)
Anyway, Nina’s story is about someone encountering pain and adversity--and deciding to continue, anyway. It’s about a flawed person pulling her shit together. That was inspirational to me, in my twenties, as a flawed person struggling to pull his shit together. Nina’s great deus-ex-machina moment is the death of her pseudo-grandmother, Abuela Claudia. Nina recalls Claudia’s devotion: “Every afternoon I came; she made sure I did my homework. She would sit at the table and say, Bueno. Let’s review. Why don’t you tell me everything you know?” A similar trick is put to use in “Hamilton.” Toward the end of the show, Eliza is embittered and paralyzed. Her husband is sort of a dirtbag; her kid is dead. But the sudden slaying of Alexander unleashes something. Eliza trains her thoughts on the positive aspects of Alex’s legacy. And she gets herself together. This is an Abuela Claudia moment--all over again. “I stop wasting time on tears. I live another fifty years. It’s not enough. I interview every soldier who fought by your side. I collect your thousands of pages of writings; you really do write like you’re running out of time....”
It’s also striking to me that the heroes of both of LMM’s big shows are intellectual laborers. In childhood, LMM has said, “I loved ‘Phantom’ because it’s about an ugly guy who wins power with his writing.” We celebrate Nina because she has a brain; “I got every scholarship, saved every dollar, the first to go to college.” Hamilton’s story of ascent-through-intellect is similar: “He put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain, and he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain.” Over and over, throughout “Hamilton,” LMM is at pains to show us that Hamilton’s big achievements are cerebral: “I wrote my way out.” “Why do you write like it’s going out of style?” “The worlds you keep creating and erasing in your mind.” The climax of Act One is not a physical victory but a tally-of-words: “John Jay wrote just a few Federalist Papers; James Madison wrote several. Hamilton wrote the other 51!” (My husband and I make fun of Leslie Odom’s hammy, irritating delivery of this line--I’m not wild about Odom, generally--but I appreciate what LMM is doing here. It’s an iconoclastic moment. Writing a pamphlet can be as powerful as--maybe more powerful than--storming a barricade.)
I also see in both big LMM shows a Shakespearean interest in groundlings. In Shakespeare, you often have an earthy character providing low comedy, to keep things humming along. In “In the Heights,” you have the ladies of the hair salon, providing running commentary on “who’s doing who, and why.” “No me diga!” In “Hamilton,” we get interludes about “the ladies--there are so many to deflower!” And: “[I’m so horny that] Martha Washington named her feral tomcat after me.” Like any other good writer, LMM understands that gossip makes the world go 'round.
LMM has praised Howard Ashman for revealing character through word-choice. (The famous "Little Mermaid" moment when Ariel struggles to remember the proper term for a fork.) At his best, LMM replicates this behavior. Among my favorite moments in “Hamilton” is “Your Obedient Servant,” when the two bitchy antagonists semi-bury their rage in stilted, formal prose. The suppressed fury behind the recurring line--“I have the honor to be your obedient servant”--is surely among the theater’s great gifts to the world. And I love that these men abbreviated their names in a chatty way--“A Dot Ham!”--and that LMM picked up on this proto-text-message bit and stuck it in his musical. I love, also, that Washington politely dismisses Burr: “Close your door on the way out!” (There’s a story under the story there.) And the nervousness in the Hamilton/Washington courtship: Washington doesn’t want to tear Hamilton away from his family, but Hamilton couldn’t care less, and so he eagerly repeats: “Treasury or State? Treasury or State? Treasury or State?” God is in the details. It’s these tiny moments--as much as anything else--that make “Hamilton” special. And Burr’s dismissal of Hamilton’s wordy, self-serving legal style: “Ladies and gentlemen, my client is innocent. Call your first witness. That’s all you need to say.” Priceless.
I share all this as context for the concert we will see tonight. LMM has a recurring message: “Be tough and don’t get mopey when you fuck up.” There are worse legacies to leave to the world. Tune in. PBS. 9 PM.
Some thoughts. “In the Heights” was a big deal for me. That’s because Nina’s culture-shock issues resonated with me. Nina is groomed to be an academic star. She recalls spending her childhood studying; others would gather, “rapping with buddies, volume high,” but Nina would “walk on by.” (“In the Heights” really thrives on local color, in a way “Hamilton” cannot. In his first big musical, LMM is writing about his own childhood, and that makes the lyrics special.) Nina gets maybe the most poetic line LMM has ever written; she recalls girlhood, thinking that “the world was just a subway map, and the 1/9 climbed a dotted line to my place.” That image is so powerful because, of course, children do think the world is small and easily navigable. (For many years--too many--I thought the Upper West Side was the entirety of Manhattan.) The verb “climb” also echoes earlier thoughts from Nina; in girlhood, “I’d climb to the highest place on every fire escape--restless to climb.” Clearly, this is a character who spends a good deal of time thinking about vertical ascent.
(A sidenote on the element of surprise in LMM’s writing. Nina has that lovely line about the “one-dash-nine,” and then Benny punctures it; tenderly, he observes, “There’s no nine train now...” And you laugh, because you’re not expecting the quotidian interjection. You see a similar trick in “Hamilton” when a pretentious pamphleteer gets tangled up in lofty talk about “this [insubordinate] Congress”; Hamilton jumps in and says, “Don’t modulate the key and not debate with me!”)
Anyway, Nina’s story is about someone encountering pain and adversity--and deciding to continue, anyway. It’s about a flawed person pulling her shit together. That was inspirational to me, in my twenties, as a flawed person struggling to pull his shit together. Nina’s great deus-ex-machina moment is the death of her pseudo-grandmother, Abuela Claudia. Nina recalls Claudia’s devotion: “Every afternoon I came; she made sure I did my homework. She would sit at the table and say, Bueno. Let’s review. Why don’t you tell me everything you know?” A similar trick is put to use in “Hamilton.” Toward the end of the show, Eliza is embittered and paralyzed. Her husband is sort of a dirtbag; her kid is dead. But the sudden slaying of Alexander unleashes something. Eliza trains her thoughts on the positive aspects of Alex’s legacy. And she gets herself together. This is an Abuela Claudia moment--all over again. “I stop wasting time on tears. I live another fifty years. It’s not enough. I interview every soldier who fought by your side. I collect your thousands of pages of writings; you really do write like you’re running out of time....”
It’s also striking to me that the heroes of both of LMM’s big shows are intellectual laborers. In childhood, LMM has said, “I loved ‘Phantom’ because it’s about an ugly guy who wins power with his writing.” We celebrate Nina because she has a brain; “I got every scholarship, saved every dollar, the first to go to college.” Hamilton’s story of ascent-through-intellect is similar: “He put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain, and he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain.” Over and over, throughout “Hamilton,” LMM is at pains to show us that Hamilton’s big achievements are cerebral: “I wrote my way out.” “Why do you write like it’s going out of style?” “The worlds you keep creating and erasing in your mind.” The climax of Act One is not a physical victory but a tally-of-words: “John Jay wrote just a few Federalist Papers; James Madison wrote several. Hamilton wrote the other 51!” (My husband and I make fun of Leslie Odom’s hammy, irritating delivery of this line--I’m not wild about Odom, generally--but I appreciate what LMM is doing here. It’s an iconoclastic moment. Writing a pamphlet can be as powerful as--maybe more powerful than--storming a barricade.)
I also see in both big LMM shows a Shakespearean interest in groundlings. In Shakespeare, you often have an earthy character providing low comedy, to keep things humming along. In “In the Heights,” you have the ladies of the hair salon, providing running commentary on “who’s doing who, and why.” “No me diga!” In “Hamilton,” we get interludes about “the ladies--there are so many to deflower!” And: “[I’m so horny that] Martha Washington named her feral tomcat after me.” Like any other good writer, LMM understands that gossip makes the world go 'round.
LMM has praised Howard Ashman for revealing character through word-choice. (The famous "Little Mermaid" moment when Ariel struggles to remember the proper term for a fork.) At his best, LMM replicates this behavior. Among my favorite moments in “Hamilton” is “Your Obedient Servant,” when the two bitchy antagonists semi-bury their rage in stilted, formal prose. The suppressed fury behind the recurring line--“I have the honor to be your obedient servant”--is surely among the theater’s great gifts to the world. And I love that these men abbreviated their names in a chatty way--“A Dot Ham!”--and that LMM picked up on this proto-text-message bit and stuck it in his musical. I love, also, that Washington politely dismisses Burr: “Close your door on the way out!” (There’s a story under the story there.) And the nervousness in the Hamilton/Washington courtship: Washington doesn’t want to tear Hamilton away from his family, but Hamilton couldn’t care less, and so he eagerly repeats: “Treasury or State? Treasury or State? Treasury or State?” God is in the details. It’s these tiny moments--as much as anything else--that make “Hamilton” special. And Burr’s dismissal of Hamilton’s wordy, self-serving legal style: “Ladies and gentlemen, my client is innocent. Call your first witness. That’s all you need to say.” Priceless.
I share all this as context for the concert we will see tonight. LMM has a recurring message: “Be tough and don’t get mopey when you fuck up.” There are worse legacies to leave to the world. Tune in. PBS. 9 PM.
Comments
Post a Comment