2/30 I'm not throwing away my shot!
Here we are, day two of this posting thing I'm doing. I had a plan for a post when I was falling asleep last night, but then my brain got scrambled by the late snow day announcement phone call that so helpfully woke me up just as I was drifting off and messed up my sleep for the rest of the night, and I've no idea what the plan was. I'm sure it'll come back to me.
So let me talk about Hamilton!
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
As you may have heard me say a million times here, I'm a huge fan of transformative works. I always have been, since well before I knew that phrase. I love taking source material and reimagining it. I love mash-ups and parodies of songs. I love re-tellings of fairy tales. I love using lines from one show on a userpic or a gifset from another show. From Weird Al to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to fanfiction, it's been a part of my life for decades.
It's a theme that was prominent in my academic life, as well, the way people take an older story/myth/understanding and reinterpret it to suit their current needs/world view. I find it exhilarating, honestly, to get a new view of the source material and of the people who are playing with it. You can learn so much about how they are looking at the world by seeing what they change and what they keep, what they stress and what they ignore.
So when you add that interest to my love for musical theater and my already existing adoration of Lin-Manual Miranda, Hamilton is kind of a no-brainer for me in terms of a passion. Yadda yadda, genius, yadda yadda complicated themes both in terms of emotion and music, yadda yadda history then told by history now, yadda yadda the use of contemporary musical genres and a cast of people of color to highlight class differences and origins of white guys that all read as privileged to us in our current view of the world but weren't then, yadda yadda. There's a whole level of transformative musical references that I just don't get, since I'm not a fan of hip-hop and rap (but mr. muse is, so I'm familiar with the genres and respect them), and that lack of appreciation for those layers on my part makes me sad, but overall the whole musical just makes me kick my feet with delight over the transformative work-i-ness of it.
I love it, you guys. I really love it. I love it so much sometimes I almost can't bear to listen to it, and I definitely can't have the cast recording on repeat the way so many fans do, because I want to pull it apart and hold it in my heart and figure it out and see the choreography and all of the added pieces the performance itself would give me... and that's not a feeling I can hold onto day in and day out and feel capable of living my life.
I've been trying to get tickets for the show since it was off Broadway. I've been trying and trying and trying, every time I knew we'd be in New York. But, you know, it's sold out until Armageddon. So I'd given up on the thought of seeing the show with the original cast, and then things happened both good and bad, and in the interest of self care I am going next month. I almost can't believe it. It seems impossible. And yet... I am not throwing away my shot. :D
Now I just have to figure out if we're going to see any other shows while we're there and what they might be.
ZOMG, Hamilton.
ZOMG transformative works!
It's funny to me how I find these themes in my life that I didn't even realize were there. I just love what I love, and often I don't realize how it's all connected until I can look back on it a bit.
So let me talk about Hamilton!
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
As you may have heard me say a million times here, I'm a huge fan of transformative works. I always have been, since well before I knew that phrase. I love taking source material and reimagining it. I love mash-ups and parodies of songs. I love re-tellings of fairy tales. I love using lines from one show on a userpic or a gifset from another show. From Weird Al to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to fanfiction, it's been a part of my life for decades.
It's a theme that was prominent in my academic life, as well, the way people take an older story/myth/understanding and reinterpret it to suit their current needs/world view. I find it exhilarating, honestly, to get a new view of the source material and of the people who are playing with it. You can learn so much about how they are looking at the world by seeing what they change and what they keep, what they stress and what they ignore.
So when you add that interest to my love for musical theater and my already existing adoration of Lin-Manual Miranda, Hamilton is kind of a no-brainer for me in terms of a passion. Yadda yadda, genius, yadda yadda complicated themes both in terms of emotion and music, yadda yadda history then told by history now, yadda yadda the use of contemporary musical genres and a cast of people of color to highlight class differences and origins of white guys that all read as privileged to us in our current view of the world but weren't then, yadda yadda. There's a whole level of transformative musical references that I just don't get, since I'm not a fan of hip-hop and rap (but mr. muse is, so I'm familiar with the genres and respect them), and that lack of appreciation for those layers on my part makes me sad, but overall the whole musical just makes me kick my feet with delight over the transformative work-i-ness of it.
I love it, you guys. I really love it. I love it so much sometimes I almost can't bear to listen to it, and I definitely can't have the cast recording on repeat the way so many fans do, because I want to pull it apart and hold it in my heart and figure it out and see the choreography and all of the added pieces the performance itself would give me... and that's not a feeling I can hold onto day in and day out and feel capable of living my life.
I've been trying to get tickets for the show since it was off Broadway. I've been trying and trying and trying, every time I knew we'd be in New York. But, you know, it's sold out until Armageddon. So I'd given up on the thought of seeing the show with the original cast, and then things happened both good and bad, and in the interest of self care I am going next month. I almost can't believe it. It seems impossible. And yet... I am not throwing away my shot. :D
Now I just have to figure out if we're going to see any other shows while we're there and what they might be.
ZOMG, Hamilton.
ZOMG transformative works!
It's funny to me how I find these themes in my life that I didn't even realize were there. I just love what I love, and often I don't realize how it's all connected until I can look back on it a bit.