Seeing Hamilton? Go in blind
One year and six days ago, my wife and I sat in the second row for a performance of Hamilton in Louisville. It was the culmination of a lot of effort on my part, trying desperately (and failing) to get tickets to the Cincinnati shows, considering (but opting against) a road trip to Chicago to see it there, and ultimately decided to do my damnedest to get tickets in Louisville.
Also, I failed. My buddy Kevin was actually the one who managed to score me the tickets to the show. He had seen it, he knew I was dying to see it, and he was the lucky one to get the right number in the online queue — my spot in line was like 5,000 slots later.
Kevin is better at music than I am, and better at musicals than I am. He sees a lot of them (or did before his own kid was born, because parenthood is wonderful but also really stupid). And his advice, when we knew I had Hamilton tickets and was going to see Hamilton and wanted to see Hamilton and yay Hamilton, was to get acquainted with the music beforehand. Listen to the soundtrack, know what it is you’re going to hear. You’ll never keep up otherwise, he said. Others said the same.
Laurie and I decided not to.
I went back and forth on the decision a dozen times, to the point that Laurie yelled at me over the wishy-washiness. But in the end, I decided I wanted to experience it fresh.
Hamilton will be on Disney+ a week from today. Odds are, most of the people who reading this who are excited for the release are people who have seen the musical already, or at least know the soundtrack. But there are undoubtedly at least a few people who are approaching July 3 blind to Hamilton and trying to decide the same thing Laurie and I were trying to decide. And if that’s you, then I have some advice:
Go in blind.
Hamilton is dense. There is very little in the form of downtime or room to breathe throughout the musical. You have to be “on” the whole time. In a sense, it’s like seeing Shakespeare. But it is oh, so worth it.
The musical is packed with cleverness. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a miracle worker with the language, and he layers so much into it that your first time seeing/listening to/appreciating Hamilton will almost certainly not be your last. But … okay, a metaphor. You’re at the fanciest restaurant of your life. Michelin Star. One of the chefs who was on a TV show. You haven’t had the stuff on the menu before, but it sounds awesome. A bunch of fancy words you don’t know scattered in with some you do. It’s like five courses. You’ve been promised that it’s a progressive meal, everything building on itself to make a mouth symphony. Five minutes before the meal starts, though, the busboy comes out and tells you you can try three bites of the second course.
Listen, those three bites are probably great. But the entire point of this experience is, you know, the experience. Beating the system, trying it out of order, getting some but not all, that’s breaking the rules. That’s jumping ahead in the book, reading the spoilers ahead of time.
If you see Hamilton without having listened to the soundtrack first, you will probably miss a few of the intricacies of the language, a few of the clever historical references, some of the stuff. If you eat a complicated progressive meal, you probably won’t pick up on every spice the chef added to the meal. But you have gotten the experience. Maybe the next time you go, you try just a few bites of that second course first, because hey, it was your favorite part, and you can really take the time to absorb it. But the first time? The first time, you have to do it right.