Oddly this is one of those comments that gave me a proper “Why didn’t I think of that” moments.
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Cheap seats started at $170 and tickets “selling out” essentially the moment they went on sale because of their horrendous lottery system (coming from a bitter person that logged in an hour ahead and still ended up in the 100,000’s in line. That’s one way of keeping out the rabble. (For the 10%ers they add more tickets daily, but those are like $300+ a pop.)
Rabble, rabble, rabble… enjoy your Denver Hamilton you SOBs… 
Did I mention I’m bitter?
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I’m in the same camp. I do have slightly more odds to go see it as they have Hamilton in both Austin and Houston. Currently i’m hoping to score tickets in Austin but i’m on a waitlist for Houston just in case. I’m afraid i might end up having to buy a ticket from a reseller at a markup… ugh… it’s bullshit.
Hey, look, it’s another asshole who doesn’t understand white privilege.
"That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler! His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I’m convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn’t find enough whores to absorb!” –John Adams, on Alexander Hamilton
“White privilege” doesn’t mean that every white person starts at third base.
It simply means that being nonwhite in a white society isn’t one of the hurdles you have to jump. Now, it’s also true that after he had lost his family, he was taken in and then sent off to school by his aunts, and had opportunities that would have been unavailable to all but the most fortunate nonwhite families of the time. But to diminish it as “but he was white and smart” is more than a little insulting, don’t you think?
Having said all that, where I live, the poorest areas are predominantly black. Here’s a picture of the downtown of Christopher Jackson’s hometown, Cairo, IL. (He played Washington in the original Broadway cast)
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One also has to consider that the play does not try to paint Hamilton as a saint. While they might not show all of his failings it does not shirk away from the scandals in his life and how his decisions affected his family in a very direct way. If anything Hamilton comes off poorly and his rival Aaron Burr is painted in the best of light to make him likeable when in real life the guy was a traitorous asshole. He tried to raise an army against the US government later in life.
If we want to discuss Hamilton’s privilege that conversation can totally happen, no one is hiding those parts of history. Seems weird to criticize the play for it, considering that the play is about The American Dream and the individual struggle it takes to make that happen. I discuss it in a post above and why the play even has hip-hop in it. But really the play could’ve been about any guy, real or imagined, it’s just a vehicle to explore and celebrate black culture… and i hesitate to say it’s about what it means to be American but that might not be fair to people outside of the US. Perhaps it’s about ambition and it’s price.
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When Mike Pence saw that musical he was the least popular Vice President in the theater.
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I don’t think you read my entire comment. Not only was he taken in by the white gentry of his town and supported, instead of being sold to the plantations on the other side of the island as his slaves probably were, Hamilton directly participated in the triangle trade. His good fortune was built entirely on the suffering and death of the slave population of St. Croix. Sure, he also worked hard. But the first part is what I mean by “white privilege”: his whiteness saved him from the suffering of the vast majority of people on his island.
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What’s your point in pointing that out?
In case it wasn’t obvious to the person I was addressing didn’t catch it, I was acknowledging that race does play a big part.
The town has been falling apart ever since the 60s, when the black folks demanded to be treated like they were humans. Plus, I guess this next part is relevant. Cairo is about a 100 mile drive from where I grew up. I’m sure there’s people in Cairo who can swap stories with me about growing up in Southern Illinois, and they’d be similar stories. But what’s weird and different about my story is that there were people in my little town who were every bit as poor as the folks in Cairo, but they saw themselves as better because they’re white. Somewhere around here, there’s some assclown with three teeth and a nasty meth habit who sees himself as being better than Christopher Jackson.
So white privilege played a big part regionally…but I can tell you from my time of applying to schools that being schooled nearly anywhere in southern Illinois meant that progressive admissions programs saw you as underprivileged, no matter how many or few POC there were in the school or even if you yourself was pasty white.
I could tell you stories about John Malkovich’s high school, too, but I digress.
But mostly, I get the feeling that some folks think of white-folk-getting-raised as a homogenized existence where things go more or less fine.
Also, my apologies for doing major edits on my comment, milliefink. I was rambling, I tried to make it better…meh, I’m sticking with it, feel free to tear me apart as I’m sure you will. I acknowledge that I’m not perfect but like a lot of people, I try to be a little better every day. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t. I also try to not self-flagellate too much because it fuels depression a little too well, but such is life I guess. shrug
Thanks for explaining.
What do you mean by saying they saw you as underprivileged? That being poor helped you get in?
Are you from Cairo? I saw a pretty good documentary awhile back about its sad decline.
Y’know…it’s weird. It’s more that the district was poor. I guess I was more middle-class or what would nationally be lower-middle-class, but the school district’s solution to being told it had to be more rigorous academically was to change the grading scale to make it harder to get an A. It was the academic equivalent to those pictures you see of school lunches where they serve half a cheese sandwich and a piece of broccoli because it meets the strict definition of a healthy lunch.
My school was, sadly, vastly better than Cairo. At least our school had the budget to patch the roof.
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