Hamilton
In the Heights
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812
Amelie
Ghost Quartet
Hadestown
RENT
Have a nice week. -M
I love theater and I'm bored and needed something happy on the blog for once. HamiltonHip Hop Founding of America- it lives up to the hype. Do a little research. In the HeightsLatino people needed a musical that was just about living life. It's relatable and fun. Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812Electropop "War and Peace" Opera. Weird? Yes. Incredible? No short of it. AmelieThe movie is great too, this musical is sweet, feel good and fun. Ghost QuartetSame guy as "Natasha, Pierre". Even weirder and involving ubersouls. Love it. HadestownAnais Mitchell 1930's Greek mythology. It's a great combo. RENTIt's a classic, okay? Such real stuff. Look 'em up if you want, they're all cool.
Have a nice week. -M
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It's been a while since I posted any of my poetry on here. This was written a few months ago but I thought I would share anyway.
Enjoy. Lost in the pages of your history textbook are the people who are picked and chosen for the “good shooters” and the “bad shooters”, The forgotten abusers, the been bruised and the users, The mischief makers and history fakers Picked and chosen by memory takers, There’s a lot we forget to remember. We forget to remember that what has been will be again. 216 years ago a 27 year old man used one hand to pull the trigger of a gun and end the life of a 19 year old with two hands good for doing a lot that he never got to do. As of this morning, 2, 150 children or teenagers have been shot or killed in the U.S. this year. And those are the ones we know of. Centuries ago a young woman was being abused and abandoned by a husband and if you look her up, it says she “claimed” to be abused, Because we don’t know, Because there’s no way to sign a name on the colorful work of bruises and scars, saying this is where they came from. Right now there’s a young person somewhere being told “they were asking for it”, Or a young person trying to figure out if “I love you” is worth the verbal hurt and trying to “make it work”, In the 1700s one of history’s few southern revolutionary abolitionists was born, He didn’t agree with his family’s ways, And he didn’t spend his days on women, he didn’t do more than fit in when it came to family, Today, tomorrow or the next day a boy was born to parents who he won’t agree with, A boy was born who will have to hide who he’s in love with, And a decade or two from now one of those boys could feel so worthless that he gets involved in guns, or that he gets done with getting involved in anything, Or that he wants to be done with everything and end all the bad feelings Right now there’s someone wallowing, grieving in the mistake of the Hamilton, or the Lee or the Philip who they killed, There’s a heart being filled with regret for a trigger that went off when a basic human moral didn’t, And they live in fear of that, they live in fear of getting by, Right now there’s a parent or friend or coworker living in shock because it’s apparent how worthless lives are to some people whether it’s their own or not, This is why we don’t forget, We forgive but forge moments of death into our “remembered” set, We forgive but forge moments of pain into our rain check, Our do-over, But there’s no “over” and there’s no redo, There’s only look back, see where we’ve been, Bounce back, check that, Live in moments of fear but go back to the daily track, The lives that are now and not passed. “History obliterates” “It paints us in all our mistakes” The good shooters painted in a fresh coat of fame and glory, And the bad shooters painted in a yellow caution tape of “bad guy” Painted as their worst moments. And sometimes we get too into history’s mistakes, And sometimes our heads are too full, If we try to stay level-headed, We move up a level and tell ourselves to always be cognizant. It’s a difficult balance because there’s no direction to memory, We can’t carry everything but we feel empty with nothing. Lost in the pages of your history textbook are the people who are picked and chosen for the “good shooters” and the “bad shooters”, There’s a lot we forget to remember. But remember, if nothing else, that you are always forgetting. There are lost faces and stories in every time and place. Look for them. And if you cannot find them, Know that they’re still there. Author's Note: This alludes to points in history told through the same lens as they are in the musical Hamilton. In case you're wondering what the specific examples are referring to, I'll give an explanation. I suppose there is some kind of spoiler warning, but it's a historical spoiler. In the third stanza, I am referring to Philip Hamilton, son of Alexander Hamilton. At 19 he was fatally shot in a duel by a 27 year old named George Eacker. In the fourth stanza I refer to Maria Reynolds, who is a character in the musical, but is also representative of many women of that time who were abused. In the fifth stanza, I am referring to John Laurens, an early abolitionist who also died young at the hand of gun violence. Evidence supports that Laurens was a closeted gay man. As referenced in stanza six, Lee, Hamilton and Philip are all characters who die in duels in the show (and historically). Note on the quotes “History obliterates” “It paints us in all our mistakes”- these are directly from Hamilton, and they are sung by Aaron Burr, who is remembered for fatally shooting Alexander Hamilton. Thank you for taking the time to read this poem and my explanation if you felt so inclined. There's an adoption advocacy site called Rainbowkids. It isn't an adoption agency but rather an organization trying to help children who are often overlooked from being adopted, which includes toddlers and children over three years old, and most of all, children with special needs of any kind. *For a link to the Rainbowkids site go to the links page of this site* It is important to understand that the privacy of these children should be protected. Rainbowkids does post bits of the profiles of their waiting children on social media, and that's all I am trying to do here. To view the profiles of the children I post on my blog you will have to create an account and do email verification. The reason I have chosen to feature children who have profiles on Rainbowkids is not only because I want people to consider adoption/international adoption, but also, maybe even more so, because I want people to consider the adoption of a child who has a special need. These children are overlooked so much, and need families. These children may not have the medical care they need in their current living situation. Many of these children need advocating, and if I can spread the word by posting about these kids on my insignificant little website, then at least I'm doing something! This cause is just so close to my heart knowing that other kids/teens don't have what I have. Today's featured Rainbowkid is Levi. Link to full profile here. Levi is seven and waits in Asia. He is diagnosed with Epilepsy. The following is from his profile: Levi came into care when he was about two months old. He has been diagnosed with epilepsy and takes daily medication. He also has some weakness in his right hand and can only hold light objects in that hand. His left hand and his legs are normal, and he can run and jump. Levi attends school where he is learning the Chinese alphabet, writing and counting. He gets along very well with the other children and he has a favorite teacher at school. Miguel Cervantes of Hamilton Chicago has started a campaign called "My Shot at Epilepsy" to help kids like Levi and his own daughter Adelaide. You should support it! link here Miguel and Adelaide ^
You can win some amazing prizes by entering the raffle! Very very desirable Hamilton prizes like backstage passes! And the best part is that money goes to epilepsy! I hope you consider Hope you had a nice day. And if you didn't, tomorrow is a new one. -M Hi everyone, I was meaning to get out a post about the election (it’s a poem) but I haven’t gotten there yet. I still want to get that out so look for it in the future, sorry for being kind of absent. Today’s post is also political. And it involves Hamilton. This was in the news, so you may have heard about it. Mike Pence attended Hamilton on Broadway last night. I’ll be telling you what happened, what people are saying about it, and my own opinion. What happened
Here are the actual words he said: 5. Donald Trump tweeted this: 6. Brandon, who said the message, tweeted this back: 7. And Lin, who wrote the show, tweeted this: We’ve got comments like this from YouTube, saying that the theater is not a place to discuss politics: “this sickens me....this is getting out of hand, they are performers...we went to see a show!!! their job is to perform!!! using the stage as their personal platform is to speak their personal views is unacceptable....this is not their living room and most don’t agree with them....!” I actually applaud Hamilton for using their platform for their personal values. The show is built around values of celebrating diversity, and going out and saying to our vice-president elect that 'hey, we don’t think your administration is going to protect us, as in all of us' was a brave move. And it’s a brave move that I think should be celebrated! Free speech and lifting your voice is an important thing, especially during difficult times. Brandon approached it with love. He didn’t project hate at Pence. He was very polite about it, and that is very inspiring to me. I really can't see what part of the message was rude, or what part people are disagreeing with. Reading all the comments makes Brandon's message out to be something completely different, and something that is hateful to anyone who's not liberal or a democrat. And I don't understand why people are boycotting the show because of this. More tickets for us. And also, “Hamilton” is a political show. I definitely agree with this comment, which was in reply to the comment above:
“The show itself is political in nature, so I don't quite see why you're upset. Sure it's entertainment, but everything from the cast to the plot itself is relevant to Trump's and Pence's policies. The message at the end is a continuation of what's been established during the play, it's just directed to one audience member instead of the crowd.” And then we have these kind of comments, which scare me: “It's time for the militias to rise. It's time for us to beat them at their own game and set America right again, or these commie morons are gonna take over. No more can we be silent. You see these morons acting up... YOU DO SOMETHING! DO NOT BE SILENT, DO NOT STAND STILL!” We need to come together as a nation. Love over hate. Stay tuned for my next posts, I have an adoption one coming too. -M Hamilton Musical post again.
Hamilton Chicago opened yesterday, YAAAAAAAY! I can't wait for the Hamilton Documentary to come out tomorrow AH! Ooh I'm listening to One Last Time and I'm so into it. So here I'm going to talk about WHY HAMILTON AND BURR ARE A STUPID JERK-FACES BUT YOU LOVE THEM ANYWAY Hamilton cheated on Eliza. He also kind of ditched Lafayette in the French Revolution? And he wasn't really afraid to talk bad about people. But you care about him. Because he's the main character and he embodies starting off with nothing and getting somewhere, to me he embodies America, you know? Everyone is still mad about Burr shooting Hamilton. Even though it happened centuries ago. But was Aaron Burr a bad dude? I dunno. Wait for it and Dear Theodosia make you care more about him, right? Because it shows the soft side of him. I wouldn't consider Aaron Burr the villain. Hamilton the Musical actually kind of makes you look at (almost) anybody you'd see as a "bad person" in a different light. Sorry if this post didn't really get anywhere, but have a brilliant day! -M Fun facts is a series of me telling you facts about cast members, former cast members, and other creatives involved with Hamilton. If you are a big Hamilton fan you might know some of these. Today's fun facts are about Leslie Odom Jr., who played Aaron Burr and left the show July 9th with Lin and Pippa. 1. He has really good pitch! Leslie says "If I know a song, any song, I can start it a capella in the key it was originally written or performed in. Most of the time." (source: newyork.com interview) 2. Leslie was the youngest person ever cast in the musical Rent! He was only 17 and a senior in high school at the time. “The time I spent in New York when I was 17 gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams with my whole heart.” says Leslie (source: pbs.org Broadway or Bust: Meet the Pros biography) 3. Leslie doesn't think Aaron Burr was a bad dude. “None of us wants to be judged by our worst act on our worst day, and we consistently judge Burr for that,” he said. “He was not a perfect man, but he’s not a villain. He’s a dude, just a guy.” (source: nytimes.com article) This is from Episode 1 of "Aaron Burr Sir: Backstage with Leslie Odom Jr."
4. Leslie produced some really good video content while he was a part of Hamilton. He produced a video called "Opening Night: Cast's Perspective" in which he got a small camera crew to go around filming the cast on their opening night on Broadway. I love that video. He also did an eight-part vlog series called "Aaron Burr Sir: Backstage with Leslie Odom Jr." for Broadway.com and it's so much fun. 5. Leslie has a self-titled solo album now! You should check it out. If you'd like to listen to little previews of each song or buy it click here. It's jazz and beautiful and really amazing. Leslie doesn't have an AOL build interview, but he was on Side by Side with Susan Blackwell in January. Click here for that. And stay tuned for more of these Fun Facts posts, I hope you enjoyed! -M Hamilton things to look forward to if you're sad the original cast left and Ham Ensemble Day!8/25/2016 1. The Hamilton mixtape comes out in November! 2. The Hamilton documentary comes out October 21! 3. The original cast recorded one of their performances! I think this is going to be released eventually but Lin wants as many people as possible to see the show live first. I tell myself to be patient for this when I see iPhone-filmed versions on YouTube (tell me how to say no to this 😂) 4. Stay tuned for the casts future work! For example, Lin wrote the music for Disney's Moana and Pippa is making a cameo in it as a villager, Daveed is still in clipping., Leslie has solo music now, and Pippa is also going to star in the musical Amelie. All the new cast members are exceptional. ALL of them! Anyway, I've been working on drafts for posts about the individual actors/former actors of Hamilton, I just haven't gotten around to finishing them. Other news about the blog: - I just got 500 page views (total). Thanks for that. - This is maybe my 70th post (yee that's an accomplishment) - I've been blogging for almost a year. There will be special posts for that. (I know I'm usually late...) Finally, TOADY IS HAMILTON ENSEMBLE DAY! WE APPRECIATE YOU! YOU ARE EACH AMAZING!!!That's all! Stay tuned.
-M Disclaimer: For this tutorial I'm going to be using my Mac computer on Word, sorry if this isn't helpful to you if you aren't using a Mac. The first thing you're going to need to do is open up a new Word document and make a rectangle that fills the whole page. I actually left a little white border. Then you're going to want to change the color of your rectangle. You can choose any color you want, but if you'd like to use a color close to the actual color of the Hamilton album, select more colors and then use the pipette to select the color of an open image. I'm going to be using the color of Eliza's dress. The next thing you're going to do is find a silhouette star image with no background. I searched Google for "Hamilton silhouettes". You get results like this: The Lafayette silhouette is super cool, but it's got a white background. You want one with a checkered background like the Angelica below because that means it doesn't have a backdrop, it's just the star image. I chose a silhouette of Eliza. After that you drag the image onto the Word document and make sure it's centered. Word has rulers for that. Make sure you DON'T drag the image into your rectangle. Move it out of the way and then move it back. It will probably be behind the backdrop. To fix that go to format picture, wrap text, in front of text. Adjust your rectangle to how it was and center your star image. Now you've got this, yay, doesn't it look awesome! If you like you can print this out and it'll look just like that. Or you can get the Hamilton fonts and put any text you like on it! For those who don't know how to download free fonts, go here. If you do, here are the links to get those fonts: 1. The Hamilton title font Trajunus is not a free font. But you can go on the website Dafont and get the font Trajunus Bricks, which, if you type in all lowercase letters, looks just like the Hamilton font. 2. The Hamilton subtitle is called Gotham Condensed. I went here to download it. It didn't actually work for me. So maybe you can't get that font, I'll try again later. Once your fonts are in Font Book, you can make something like this: Hope you liked, stay tuned for more!
-M I'd like to start this post off by saying THANK YOU for 35 page views this week. I was going to log on to Weebly and write a post saying thanks for 28 page views, which is much more than I've ever had in a week before and then- voila! 35 page views this week! I think it's because of the Hamilton posts but that's fine by me! Hamilton nerds, definitely comment below and stay tuned for more! THANKS A MILLION! So this post is to tell you what's to come: I'm going to be doing posts about the individual actors who are in/were in Hamilton! Some of the things I'll be doing are posting my favorite pictures, videos and little-known facts about these amazing people! Speaking of favorite videos, some of the original cast and other Hamilton creatives have been interviewed by a lady at AOL build named Laura Heywood who is on social media as Broadway Girl NYC. She is probably the best interviewer I've ever seen (and I've watched a LOT of Hamilton interviews). Laura is a theater need like the audience of the interviews. She is thoughtful, does her research, asks more unique and insightful questions and lets the interviewee steer the conversation. She's great and I'm not the only one who thinks so! People have commented the same opinion. (And Laura responds to those YouTube comments! She's at right in the picture below) Anyway, these interviews are 30-ish minutes long and on YouTube. They will be on the individual posts but I'm going to put links to them right here so they'll be all in one place! The links are below.
Chris Jackson's AOL Build interview Daveed Diggs's AOL Build interview (that's Daveed at the top if you don't know you should) Javier Muñoz's AOL Build interview Phillipa Soo's AOL Build interview (Pippa is the ray of sunshine at the left in the picture) Alex Lacamoire's AOL Build interview Renée Elise Goldsberry's AOL Build interview Thanks everybody! Stay tuned for more! -M The musical Hamilton is revolutionary (in more ways than one). First off, it's about the American Revolution, but it also makes the founding fathers (and the performers) seem closer to us with contemporary music.
It is a musical that is trying to make theater accessible to people. Now, you might think that this can't be true because the tickets are so expensive. I'll have you know that they're expensive because the show is amazing. In this post I'm going to be explaining how Hamilton reaches people in the community. 1. Number one on this list is simply the original cast recording. People who haven't seen a musical sometimes aren't into it. But many people in the Hamilton fandom have never seen the show and just worship the album with all their waking hours (myself included). This musical found its way to fans just by being available on iTunes. 2. The second thing is called "Ham4Ham", which is a raffle where you pay a Hamilton ($10 bill) to get a chance to win 2 front row seats to see Hamilton at the Richard Rogers Theater on Broadway. The raffle is every Saturday. You can enter starting at 12:00 and at 12:30 they PUT ON A LITTLE SHOW FOR YOU in front of the theater. Sometimes it has someone from Hamilton, or a special guest. ALWAYS it's an amazing show worth seeing. If you don't live in NY you can find the Ham4Ham shows on YouTube, pretty much all the Ham4Hams have been uploaded by the YouTube account of the musical or an amazing fan named Mr. Howard Sherman who's been nice enough to tape the show many times for those of us who can't see it in person. It should also be noted that there are 8 million Hamilton-related vids on YouTube and that it's not hard to feed your Hamilton obsession. 3. I don't know if this exactly counts as community outreach, but the last thing I would like to tell you about is called The Eliza Project. To those who aren't in the know, at the end of the musical Hamilton, and historically, Eliza Hamilton started NYC's first private orphanage. Her work is continued today as the organization Graham Windham, which helps foster children through adulthood. In 2015 Phillipa Soo, who was Hamilton's original Eliza, and some of her cast mates gave lessons to young up and coming actors, singers and performers who Graham Windham was providing assistance to. (Apologies if that was a grammatically incorrect sentence). I think that's pretty awesome. Phillipa (who's idea I think The Eliza Project was) got the idea from a program at Julliard that she was a part of where older students mentored newer students in a similar way. 4. The last thing on my list is student matinees. A ton of schools have gotten to see Hamilton for $10! It's a really great experience (so I've heard) because there is a whole curriculum that goes with it and YOU GET TO PERFORM YOUR PROJECT ON THEIR STAGE. I'm waiting for my school to do it but it's sad because it's probably never going to happen. I just think it's awesome that Lin has tried to make Hamilton an 'everyone' musical. He talks about making it a play for schools to do in the future. So yeah, this post is just to make clear some of the ways Hamilton reaches people that you might not have heard about. Like I said this is a Hamilton series, so stay tuned for more! -M |
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