#like this movie has a detailed explanation of the virtue of poverty that could have come from st. francis himself

[fictionadventurer]

It turns out that Meet John Doe is the same story as Mockingjay. If Mockingjay were about Gale recruiting Katniss to be mockingjay using a dead Peeta's speeches to inspire people.

In related news, I now really wish I could discuss Capra movies with Suzanne Collins.

[english102-1059-blog]

Hamilton isn't just looking for Tony awards or good reviews, it's looking for a mind at work.

Fangirls really don’t know how easy they have it, or really fans of anything for that matter. Fangirls all over the world say things like “One Direction is the absolute greatest band ever!” and no one really challenges them on it. They don’t need evidence or supporting facts to back up their claim. They’re just speaking casually in an informal setting expressing how much they love something. But what if you are a fan of something different than a boy band or dreamy actor? Say, something like a hip-hop musical about a dead founding father who became the first U.S. Treasury Secretary. What if beyond just being a big fan of this brilliant thing, you saw it had dynamic potential to impact the American conscious forever? What then? 

Then you write an 8-10 page research paper expounding on why everybody, not just teenage, musical theater nerds, should recognize Hamilton: An American Musical and think about the work it’s doing every night as it sells out another show on Broadway.  

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes the word phenomenon as, something that can be observed and studied and that is typically unusual or difficult to understand or explain fully. This might be one of the better words to describe Hamilton, and particularly the reactions people have had to it. It genuinely is hard for me to explain but I do think it is worth an explanation. 

Let’s start with the music. In a CBS interview, the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda said that he couldn’t imagine a better genre of music to tell the story of our nation’s founding than rap. That sounds like a heavy claim to make but that idea in itself is the foundation in which genius is found and however strange it might seem at first, Miranda has a point. You don’t have to listen to albums and albums of rap songs to know that there is often a theme of “rising to success” or “going from a peasant to a prince”. Rappers talk about working and writing and rapping their way out of an impoverished life to the top and that is exactly what Alexander Hamilton’s life was. 

For a country that now has a growing sentiment against immigrants it’s funny to learn the origin of Alexander Hamilton, born in on the Caribbean island of Nevis, miles away and completely unaffiliated from the American colonies. He was born in poverty to a father in debt who left when he was young and a mother who died shortly after succumbing to an illness. Hamilton is in this complete destitute state without much hope of ever becoming a man of wealth or power and is probably the farthest thing from the elite title of “founding father” at this point. In fact part of the reason he was even able to make it out of poverty was because of another tragedy he suffered. His island of Nevis was struck by a devastating hurricane. Hamilton survived and write this insanely detailed account describing the horror left after the storm. The other survivors in the small town found the writing and started the collection for Hamilton’s passage to America and tuition there. Hamilton literally wrote his way of a seemingly inescapable circumstance at the age of 17 and that is only the beginning of his story. We arrive at this intersection of colonial history and modern music that no one has ever seriously thought of before. Upon first hearing there was a new musical showing-casing rap to tell a revolutionary war story, I didn’t like the idea. It sounded like it could never work. Maybe that’s something a lot of people feel. However upon hearing it you kind of join Miranda’s on this concept. When it comes to rap there is often a sense that the listener can’t keep up with the music. Rappers spit a word a second and have lyrics are carried by strong, energetic music. Even in the lyrics themselves sometimes rapper talk about “how you can’t keep up with this flow” or kind of poke fun at how audiences can’t handle them. Rap is new, rap is progressive, rap is revolutionary. Just like the idea of American independence and thus the birth of our nation. 

It doesn’t stop here though. Musicals aren’t frozen in this vacuum of time when they first surfaced in America in the early 1900s. They evolve with the times, show tunes might always be categorized as show tunes but what a song from a musical might sound like is fluid and as people continue to compose them it’s often a cumulative progress. Keeping this in mind it makes me wonder of Hamilton will be the last of it’s kind or if other composers will turn to rap or even other modern genres of music to tell stories from history and what, not only the future of musicals but the future of telling history will look like. As I write this, I can figuratively hear imaginary people asking “Why does this matter? Hamilton did it, who cares if anyone else does?” It matters because, people now have this really cool choice set by the precedent of Hamilton. Wether they want to read about history and take notes on things like the Italian Renaissance or if they want actually see and hear Michelangelo throw down about how no other chick can compare to his girl Mona Lisa. Hamilton is a space in which art and history equally coexist. 

This leads me straight to another question worth exploring which is, what are then rules when recounting history? If any, and how do these rules differ from person to person, from artists to historians, the unchallenged keepers of the historical narrative. It might seem like a dry question but it’s something that has to come up, considering Hamilton is literally, entirely based of of American history. Though there are a lot go things I think have to come up of I want this thesis of Hamilton’s importance to be taken seriously. This is a concept I thought about when reading an article titled “Alexander Hamilton: The Wrong Hero for Our Age” by Billy G. Smith. It’s aligns with this idea of art and history being brought together because this author recognizes that artists should be allowed at least a little bit of artistic license so long as they are completely rewriting history. They deserve this license because its essentially they’re job as artists. He unapologetically points out his opinion that Hamilton wasn’t quite the man the musical sells him as but despite that he still can recognize this musical as a work of artistic genius. 

One of the reasons I think this musical is important is because there is literally a whole song, the finale actually, titled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”. The song asks almost in a rhetorical sense for the audience but within the context of the actual musical you get and answer. “Who tells your story?” the ensemble asks? For Alexander Hamilton it was his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. After his death many other prominent men at the time including other founding fathers tried to slander Hamilton’s name for his wildly passionate, unstoppable vigor when it came to his Federalist ideas, abolitionism and plans for a strong federal form of government as well as for the affair he had with Maria Reynolds. Though his wife Eliza had been the victim of an unfaithful husband, lost her eldest son in a duel partly through Hamilton’s doing and became a premature widow she still lived the rest of her life trying to preserve Hamilton’s legacy. She had been wronged by Hamilton herself but still saw the raw determination and goodness in Hamilton past his faults. She was the one who saved many of his letters and writings and worked to make sure, despite his very real flaws, that the goodness in Hamilton was also remembered. That act in itself, the work of Hamilton’s wife Eliza is why we have Hamilton today.

This song’s message is exactly what the title is, there will be people that you outlive and people who will outlive you and you have no control over who tells your story when you leave this earth. However in another respect its message is more specifically talking about this idea of legacy, what it means for these people who have had instrumental roles in history, wether someone will be forgotten or remembered and if they’re remembered will they be heroes or villains and lastly if they actually deserve those titles or not. It is a lot to unpack but it’s the first time in my life something has made me think more critically about the history I’ve learned. History is important not just by virtue of being the past but because of they way the past is interpreted, the people who get tell the narrative win no matter what side they are on.The most common response people will give when asked why learning history is important is that “if you don’t learn history, you’ll repeat it.” and if that is the case than isn’t in immensely important to make sure these historians are getting the facts right? Who will put historians in their place if they don’t get the facts right? Who is here to make sure that doesn’t happen? Who tells the story?  Hamilton asks this question more seriously than any other history class, historical documentary, historical fiction book or movie I’ve ever seen.This song from Hamilton asks this question over and over again until the ensemble’s voices fade and show ends leaving audiences in a darkened to think about it, who tells the story.

-Isabel V.