RUTHFULLY YOURS

But reaching a wider audience also brought a deluge of criticism amid the praise—including concerns about how the work lionized the United States’ slave-owning founding fathers and didn’t accurately portray history.

Hamilton supported the manumission of slaves but did not press for abolition. Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, argues in an op-ed for CNN that times have changed since the play’s 2015 debut:

“Hamilton” is a minefield of mixed messages: Is our takeaway about its main character that he is a revolutionary hero or flawed philanderer? Is its strategy of non-traditional casting a triumph that allows people of color to “rise up” or are they undermined by the irony of how their embodiment as founding fathers ignores the fact that most of the characters they play were slave owners?

“Hamilton” was the perfect play for the Obama era because it fed into Democratic liberalism’s shift away from heroes like Thomas Jefferson — who represented a figure of rugged pastoral individualism — to Hamilton, the master banker/whiz kid financial planner. Miranda crafts “Hamilton” as an immigrant “who gets the job done,” an outsider. But Hamilton in reality faced none of the discrimination wielded against immigrants that he is drawn as a model for…

Joshua Nelson at Fox News notes:

New York Post Columnist Miranda Devine said on Tuesday that the new backlash against the “Hamilton” musical proves that “you can never be woke enough.”

“Lin-Manuel Miranda bent over backward to be as inclusive as he could be. He cast non-White actors to play historically White figures. He celebrated Hamilton as being an immigrant,” Devine told “Fox & Friends.”

“But, now it’s just not good enough; which goes to prove that you just cannot appease these cultural revolutionaries.”

Perhaps the Broadway cast is familiar with the terrain. In 2017 Terry Gross of National Public Radio interviewed Mr. Miranda about a show performed just after the 2016 election and attended by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Here’s the transcript:

GROSS: …when the show was over, Brandon Victor Dixon, who now plays Aaron Burr, came out and read, like, a little speech directed to Mike Pence… This is what he said: “Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you, and we truly thank you for joining us here at ‘Hamilton: An American Musical.’ We really do. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us – all of us. Thank you truly for seeing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds and orientations.”

So you co-wrote this. That’s my understanding. You co-wrote it with the director and the producer. Do I have that right?

MIRANDA: Yes… We got the heads-up that he was coming that afternoon and sort of put that together before his arrival.

GROSS: OK, so what was the conversation like between you and whoever else was involved about whether you should say something or not?

MIRANDA: Well, the conversation was, this has been an incredibly divisive election with a lot of hurt feelings and disappointment and anger on both sides. And the overwhelming sort of statement within that statement is, we truly hope you lead all of us. We’re a play that tells the story of our founders with a very diverse company that we feel, you know, reflects what our country looks like now. And so it was really intended as an olive branch. You know, please lead all of us. And I was – what I was really grateful for was that Sunday, Mike Pence really was grateful for that and I think got it in the sentiment in which it was intended. He said, I wasn’t offended. I assure you that we are trying to lead all of you. And so I was grateful for his statements and for him stopping to listen…

Mr. Pence certainly was gracious in his response, but as for the speech from the stage, not everyone viewed it as an “olive branch.” E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt tweeted:

Hamilton made a mistake. Audiences shouldn’t have to worry about being blindsided like that. Theater should be sanctuary for Art to speak…

Nobody on this planet disagrees more with everything Pence represents. But I don’t tolerate bullying in any form. Even the respectful kind.

Full disclosure, this column has not seen “Hamilton,” largely due to a longstanding opposition to musicals. Here’s hoping readers can respect honest differences of opinion on this and other questions.

***