Music I Liked – Hamilton

Right now the only music that matters is Hamilton. That’s right, I got to see Hamilton this weekend. Of course I’m going to tell you about it.

Dude, How’d you get tickets to Hamilton?

Last fall I signed up for the Ticketmaster lottery that would grant access to ticket sales when they opened for Hamilton. I didn’t win. But my opera buddy did. At the request of a coworker, she bought an extra pair of tickets. But the coworker had actually won the lottery, too, and already bought their own tickets.

My noble friend, who could have sold her extra tickets for roughly the price of four plane tickets to Hawaii, instead chose to offer them to me at cost. Naturally I assumed I’d bring my 8th-grader. She’s studying American history this year at Hamilton Middle School, and all of her friends are obsessed with the play. They’ve memorized all the songs from YouTube videos or something.

The plot thickened when we discovered that my daughter’s annual orchestra overnight camp was the same day as our Hamilton tickets. But she was not the only girl in the string section with that dilemma, and was able to catch an early ride home (skipping her own end-of-camp performance) in time for the matinee. (In a bizarre case of serendipity – I guess serendipity always is bizarre – we discovered on arrival at theater that her friends had the seats behind us.)

Only after announcing our good luck did I find out that Hamilton is also the toast of the third grade, and my younger daughter also really wanted to go. I considered sending both girls and sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the Paramount during the performance. But then I realized that would basically be asking my friend, who already gave up hundreds of dollars in profits, to babysit my kids since she would be sitting right next to them. So now I’m back with the rest of the world, entering the daily lottery for discounted tickets on the Hamilton app.

So about that Hamilton

I didn’t know that listening to Broadway plays on YouTube was a thing, so I came into Hamilton pretty cold. All I knew was that Lin-Manuel Miranda took one of the less-famous Founding Fathers and set his life story to much hipper music than Broadway usually uses. My only experience of his music was the Moana soundtrack, which honestly was pretty boring and repetitive. (Loved the movie overall, though.)

As soon as the lights dimmed, people started screaming. About thirty seconds in, I thought to myself, “Wow this audience really loves Hamilton.” About three minutes in I thought, “Holy shit! This is amazing.” About the same time I heard a teenage boy behind me say, “Oh my god this is amazing!” I spent most o the second act sobbing, not because of the tragic events of Hamilton’s last years, but because I was completely overwhelmed with the fact that I will never write anything that good in my life.