In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet (Lin-Manuel Miranda)
Author’s Note:
This may focus slightly more on Hamilton than other pieces of media that Lin-Manuel Miranda has produced. This is not because Hamilton is better than any of the other pieces (I honestly don’t think In the Heights can ever be topped) but because of the absolute cult phenomenon that Hamilton became and its enduring popularity, which makes it easier to find information for.
(Pictured: a meme from Tumblr about Hamilton - 1)
The Man and the Music:
Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American actor, composer, singer, and a bunch of other titles that I’m not going to focus on right at this moment. Basically, the man does anything and everything within the musical world and a little bit beyond that. Miranda has numerous works to his name in acting, playwriting, directing, composing, and just about everything. The most notable of these is Hamilton, the Broadway musical that skyrocketed to fame in 2015 upon its release. Hamilton was originally meant to be a hip-hop concept album about the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers and the first Secretary of the Treasury.
Hamilton took on a life of its own and evolved to become the cultural phenomenon that we know today, especially since the 2020 release of the proshot (professionally shot stage show) on the streaming service Disney Plus. According to an article published by Next TV, in the ten days after Hamilton was released on Disney Plus, about 2.7 million households tuned in to watch it. This exceeded the number of individual people who have seen the show live on Broadway, which is around 2.6 million (Frankel citation - 2).
In the movie adaptation of In the Heights, the main character Usnavi is played by Anthony Ramos, who also had major roles in the original run of In the Heights and Hamilton, plus the starring role in a mini-musical titled 21 Chump Street by Miranda. This is a theme with Miranda, who tends to bring back people that he has worked well with in the past for his new projects. Christopher Jackson, for one, has participated in In the Heights, Hamilton, and Moana, for which Miranda helped compose the soundtrack (3).
(Pictured: Sonny and Usnavi fanart from In the Heights - 4)
The Fandom (An Introduction):
Because of the sheer amount of work that Lin-Manuel Miranda has contributed to the musical world in the past couple of decades, it is nearly impossible to pin down a specific type of fan and how they participate in fandom. It is wildly variant depending on the piece of media as well as the fan. In the case of Hamilton, it is impossible to say who is in the fandom. Nearly everyone and their mother has at least heard of the show, and many have seen it either live or through the proshot on Disney Plus.
Some of the constants of the fandom, however, are the fan blogs on Tumblr and other such sites. These host all types of fans from all of Miranda’s works, as well as a few people who are just a fan of the man himself (his Twitter is apparently hilarious).
As with all fandoms, the main link between individual members is a love of their chosen media and/or Lin-Manuel Miranda himself. They express this love through the fanworks discussed below.
The Fanworks:
The blogging social media site Tumblr is one of the staples of fandom. It’s also the home to a lot of text-based fanwork and quite a bit of art. Musical theatre is unique because it is simultaneously easier and more difficult than literary works to create fanworks for. The look of the characters is more definitive when they’re right there on stage, but it is also difficult to portray them when you cannot just flip back a few pages to reread the description of a character. There is also the issue with written works of having to transpose them into the “spoken” written word instead of sung.
(Pictured: fanart of Hamilton and Eliza from Hamilton - 5)
Another thing that is very common in musical theatre fandoms is reworking the songs in one way or another. These are uploaded to social media or other fandom sites as well as YouTube. The following few sentences are each a description of a video with a hyperlink embedded to the referenced video.
This is an animation done of a reworked song from Hamilton.
This is a side-by-side video of two songs in Hamilton that tell the same event from different perspectives, highlighting the similarities between the two and the gorgeous choreography.
I hesitated about including this, but it does show the fandom at its finest. Another type of fanwork, or rather just a fan expressing their enthusiasm for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work, came in the form of bootleg copies. These were copies of the recorded shows that were illegally distributed (because of copyright laws) that many fans watched because going to see the show was out of their reach. This ties into a note about the accessibility of Broadway that I’m not going to get into here, but it is certainly something to think about.
Researching about the scholarly aspects of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work was fascinating. Because of his drive to include people of color in his musicals, there is a lot of discourse about race that surrounds the fandom spaces. There’s not a lot of formal scholarly work, as in peer-reviewed articles and the like, but there are plenty of articles on the internet at large which generate good discussions of race in history and race in the arts (6). Specifically with Hamilton, we can discuss the lack of inclusion of black history in mainstream curricula and the steps that we can take to change that, while also exposing students to a piece of media in which an overwhelming majority of its cast is not white.
As a future educator and an unreformed musical theatre nerd, I love the idea of a pop culture sensation like Hamilton being brought into the classroom to affect change in outdated curricula (7). Of course Hamilton is not 100% accurate to the facts of American history, but it is certainly a good jumping-off point for conversations about the American Revolution as well as important conversations about slavery and the role of African Americans in the formation of the United States. This can lead to lots of other discussions about race that need to be had in schools. It’s astonishing and scary to think about how little many schools discuss things like the Civil Rights Movement and slavery.
Works Cited:
1) Oldestwittiestnycityisinsideous. “Laurens: Strong words from Lee, someone oughta hold him to it...” im Jisoo. im ok, 04 July 2020, oldestwittiestnycityisinsideous.tumblr.com/post/622748884056293376/laurens-strong-words-from-lee-someone-oughta
2) Frankel, Daniel. “Disney Plus ‘Hamilton’ Viewership Exceeds Those Who’ve Seen It Live, Research Company Says.” Next TV. 20 July 2020, www.nexttv.com/news/disney-plus-hamilton-viewership-exceeds-those-whove-seen-it-live-research-company-says#:~:text=News-,Disney%20Plus%20'Hamilton'%20Viewership%20Exceeds%20Those%20Who've%20Seen,It%20Live%2C%20Research%20Company%20Says&text=Around%202.7%20million%20households%20streamed,analytics%20company%20Samba%20TV%20said.
3) Kojic, Yvette. “The Hamilton-Heights Connection, and the Actors Who Have Done Both.” Playbill. 06 October 2016. www.playbill.com/article/the-hamilton-heights-connection-and-the-actors-who-have-done-both
4) lackadaisycal-art. “this is something i made months and months ago...” Pea-Geese and Lumoxen, 7 August 2017, lackadaisycal-art.tumblr.com/post/163903480541/this-is-something-i-made-months-and-months-ago
5) demigodsavvy. “I really love that Eliza and Alexander parallel each other...” SAV, 23 April 2017, demigodsavvy.tumblr.com/post/159918310282/i-really-love-that-eliza-and-alexander-parallel
6) Young, William H. “Hamilton: An American Musical - Its National Influence as Art.” National Association of Scholars. 17 October 2018. www.nas.org/blogs/article/hamilton_an_american_musical_its_national_influence_as_art
7) Fuglei, Monica. “Can Hamilton: The Musical Change History Education?” Resilient Educator. resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/hamilton-history-education/
Comments
Post a Comment