We’re heading back to Australia now. Walking through security checks at the airport is always great fun—the best form of people-watching. How people fail to follow the most basic instructions from customs staff is beyond me.
@Bruce It was fantastic and the weather was very kind to us. We crammed every day with as much stuff as we could and made a point of visiting a few museums and catching two Broadway shows. The subway made it a breeze to get around.
@martinfeld Which shows did you see?
The subway made it easy to get around.
Oh, how lucky you were! 😱
@Bruce We saw Mean Girls and Hamilton! Both were really fun and technically impressive. Have you seen either of them?
Haha well, there was one day when there were some delays due to a ‘customer disturbance’ but the directions and announcements were quite good.
@martinfeld I've seen Hamilton and that show is amazingly crafted*. I especially liked the old fashioned Par Cans** on the downstage torms***—they referenced the classic musical tradition as so much of the book does. 🤓💡
I also was extremely fortunate—my mother had an "in" with the executive producer and was able to purchase Lin-Manuel's house seats. Needless to say, we had just about the best view in the theater! 🤯
* I do have some substantive problems with the show—it's somewhat sexist. They already cast across race, why not gender too? How about a black woman playing George Washington?
And, while Hercules Mulligan is perhaps the most awesome name possible, James Armistead was an African American spy who played a major role in the victory at Yorktown. While casting all the historical figures (apart from George III) as POC is amazing, I think have a non-white historical figure would have been powerful as well.
All that said, it was still amazing. And the Hamilton Mixtape is definitely worth a listen. It's closer to the original idea of a song cycle and less "Broadway-fied".
** Basically a car headlamp from the 1950s stuck into a tube.
*** The pipes right next to the proscenium arch.
@Bruce You’re right that the Hamilton is amazingly crafted; I couldn’t believe some of the sets and staging effects that they were using, particularly the concentric, circular sections of the stage that rotated to alter the perception of time/movement.
It’s cool that you and your mother had that connection with the executive producer!
I agree with your sentiment about diversity in the casting of the show. I made the comment (to my wife Natasha after the show) that it seemed that all main characters who were secondary to Hamilton were African-American and yet Hamilton himself was still more or less white... more of an effort with women, as you said, would have lifted it again.
Thank you for explaining the Par Cans and downstage torms!
Finally, I appreciate the link to James Armistead. As Australians, Natasha and I really enjoyed the show but we naturally didn’t have the same detailed knowledge of American history as a lot of people in the audience. On the one hand, this could be an advantage to simply enjoying the show as a production, however it is much more likely that we missed a bunch of historical references.
As a side note to all of this, something that I found really interesting during our travels was just how foreign I felt. In addition to our own Australian media, we grew up (and continue to live) with A LOT of American media and culture. Of course, we also share English as a language. I expected that a lot of the country would feel familiar but I noticed myself feeling and appearing to be quite different.