Hamilton (2020)

I am still, four years after first listening to the soundtrack, mindlessly singing "Helpless" and "One Last Time" to myself while washing dishes. It's just become part of the music in my soul -- like The Sound of Music and West Side Story -- and I will always be a fan.

Though Gary and I were lucky enough to see this in front-row balcony seats in Chicago -- what we both remember most vividly about that show is, unfortunately, the punishingly small amount of legroom for the seats. The show was fantastic, but out pain was real and intrusive. Another issue I experienced at the live show was that there was, at times, so much happening on stage that it was impossible to know what to focus on. So seeing the show again, with the original cast, in our much more comfortable living room, with a director pointing our eyes at the most important action was perfection. Sure, there's nothing like being alongside other spectators, feeling the life-force of the performers in the same room, but I really hope that this is the future. We don't all live in New York, so getting to see an original cast production without any "Hollywoodizing" is a service for which I -- and I'm sure many others in the midwest -- are starving.

One complaint: the Maria Reynolds storyline. Miranda seems to want to have it both ways: that Hamilton was a womanizer who had a feral tomcat named after him by Martha Washington ("that's true!") AND that this affair was one he fought and, seemingly, the only one in which he engaged. It's far more likely that he had several affairs but he got blackmailed for this one, which made it become THE one. It just really bothered me that we weren't trusted to understand that humans are capable of both greatness and egregiousness -- that we could admire a man who was both a product of his time AND who pushed the country forward in positive ways.

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