Fall Arts Preview: Theater
A new Valentine exhibition offers perspective on HIV/AIDs in Richmond
By Don Harrison
—
Originally posted on Richmond Magazine
Patricia Herrera first saw “Hamilton” in 2015 when the musical was playing off Broadway at New York’s Public Theater. “The same night I was there, they announced it was going to Broadway, and so I got a ticket and saw it again,” she says. Herrera, an associate professor of theater at the University of Richmond, has now seen the production, based on the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, three times. “I was enamored by it, I am still enamored by it,” she says.
Yet she cautions that the musical — a show so big it produced an unlikely hit song about Yorktown — should not be taken as history.
“It is a great vehicle to begin a conversation about history,” she says. “It’s theater, so the artists can imagine other things and other possibilities. I think it’s a great starting point. But you should go deeper.”
Actors Austin Scott (left) and Carvens Lissaint of the national tour of “Hamilton.” Photo by Joan Marcus courtesy Broadway in Richmond.
In a recent book, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restating America’s Past (Rutgers University Press), Herrera is one of 16 scholars who offer pointed thoughts on the historical, artistic and educational impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-, Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning spectacle, coming to Richmond for the first time Nov. 19-Dec. 8. The book of essays examines everything from the ongoing revisionist revival of “founder’s chic” — a few great men did everything — to the play’s often fast-and-loose depiction of its hero, a Revolutionary War veteran who co-wrote the U.S. Constitution and helped build the nation’s financial system.
Herrera is delighted by the musical’s use of hip-hop, and how it immediately captured the attention of young people — no mean feat for a contemporary musical. “I was struck by how much my children connected to it and how they identified with some of the lyrics. I was really proud as a parent that they were responding so favorably to these themes of immigration and valuing them.”
But then she listened harder. “What makes the musical so incredible is that there’s this multiracial cast that is representational of what we want America to be, and then it uses a hip-hop vocabulary that you don’t often see in theater,” she says. “Because you are bombarded and saturated with all of these possibilities, however, you begin to lose sight of other things.” Like, she says, the very real institution of slavery. “The audience gets to imagine the possibilities of America, but it becomes a problem when you stop there. What an opportunity it would’ve been to include the narratives of the slave people.”