Hamilton

When my parents and I are in the car going away for holidays I am going to play the entire Hamilton soundtrack on bluetooth and nobody is going to stop me. I'll also sing/rap along to everything, including the end of Non-Stop

That sounds like a fantastic idea. And, depending on how long the trip is, you'll probably be able to get in a few encores. ^_^

Remember that call for a boycott of this show started by the Trumpenfuhrer after Mike Pence was informed exactly what the cast of Hamilton were afraid of in his coming administration? Guess how successful it was?

3.3 million in one week. One of the best results for the show. Thanks Donald!

http://squeewentthefangirl.tumblr.com/post/153963340714/sagequeen-if-you-were-wondering-how-that-boycott

edited 3rd Dec '16 3:59:48 PM by TamH70

Incredible. What a great boycott.

So played the soundtrack on shuffle. Here are some moments wherein the shuffle algorithm Did A Thing:

• Aaron Burr Sir directly after Your Obedient Servant...
• Say No To This directly after Helpless (fun fact: james reynolds is played by the same actor as philip schuyler. ham disregarded the "be true", and is now getting blackmailed by the same actor. dammit ham.)
• The Adams Administration, We Know and Hurricane all in direct order. Unfortunately The Reynolds Pamphlet was not included in this sequence
• However, a few songs later, The Reynolds Pamphlet and Burn were put together, so that all balances out
• Stay Alive Reprise and Blow Us All Away were next to each other, but in the wrong order, so...
• My Shot and The World Was Wide Enough right next to each other. The dramatic irony is killing me

edited 5th Dec '16 3:30:54 PM by SmartGirl333

The play is dripping with the other kind of irony and Alternate Character Interpretation.

edited 5th Dec '16 6:28:57 AM by TheHandle

Once, when I put the album on shuffle, I got "Helpless" and "Burn", in that order. That was fun.

So I found out one of my cousins is into Hamilton. I basically spent the rest of the family gathering intensely using every reference I've never had a chance to use because none of my other real-life friends have listened to it.

This play is so fucking quotable, though. I've never seen anything like this since The Big Lebowski.

Does anyone in this thread play Doodle Or Die? I didn't start this room but it's not going to be a fun game without more players

So dad got a new iphone and it synced all music that is on our family itunes account. He decided to listen to Hamilton because I can't stop talking about it... except he left his phone on shuffle and got super confused. I got him to fix that, so now he's listening to it on non-shuffle. He is blasting My Shot in the hallway right outside my room. I want to loudly sing along, but I also want to listen to gaming videos :/

Update: he went downstairs, so I followed him and kept lip-syncing/singing along. He went to the garage to put a thing on the car, so I followed him out and put the music on Bluetooth, pacing, singing, and intermittently pausing to talk about things (including telling him about the Laurens Interlude after Dear Theodosia faded out). I was basically running up and down the driveway during Non-Stop, and I'm pretty sure the entire block heard me yell "HOW DO YOU WRITE LIKE— HISTORY HAS ITS EEEEEEYES OOOOOOON YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU". Intermission currently; grabbed a glass of water. Let's see how act 2 goes.

edited 9th Dec '16 11:07:46 PM by SmartGirl333

There'll be lots of nos shouted.

Final update: I was super worn out from the INTENSE PACING and yelling I did in Non-Stop, so I didn't sing half as much in act 2. We had to go on a walk at about Burn (so the arc of death and tears was basically broadcast to everyone within 50 meters of us), and I cried during It's Quiet Uptown, but he didn't. He overall liked the musical, and I showed him pictures of the cast

Death and tears also describes Alexander Hamilton and Wait for it, and Right Hand Man, and Stay Alive.

Yes death, but not of characters with lines and emotional significance to the audience and therefore not as many tears

True, they're just blood and shit spraying, and eaten horses.

And, right after "You'll be back", someone's friends and family.

edited 10th Dec '16 3:01:56 PM by TheHandle

Reading the biography, fucking Christ, if anything Alexander Hamilton didn't emphasize what a Crapsack World it was living in Nevis.

The mortality rate among slaves was extremely high. Three out of five slaves died every five years, requiring a steady supply of imports. Slaves were punished so harshly even some of the governers and traders from the United States and England thought it was extreme. One record writes that a man and woman were lashed to death, the first receiving 325 lashes, the woman 295.

Most whites were idealistic nobles thinking they could get rich quick and bring home mountains of sugar, coco, tobacco, and cotton, or criminals, rapists, and thieves who all took out their rage at being stuck on an extremely hot, disease-ridden tropical paradise to give themselves a semblance of class.

His mother Rachel had a moddest fortune after her father, sister, and mother died of disease. Her mother who was on her own second husband had already lost two children to again, disease.

Johann Michael Lavien married Rachel for pure profit and there was little lost between them. In what has to be an instance of Black Comedy, they named their plantation Contentment.

Not six months later, he spent nearly their entire fortune on a venture to get more slaves and order more land and plants than he could expect to harvest, and nearly all 50 slaves he'd imported died in the span of the next two years.

When Rachel moved herself and her two children away, Johann had her imprisoned for three months as he slandered her as a whore and a woman without morals, locked up in a cramp sell full of filth and pirates. She moved herself and her children away from him to St. Kitts where she met James, who like her was also a noble on hard luck as he had no formal education and had been in an apprenticeship that lasted seven years without a job.

She couldn't get a legal separation from Johann without his approval, shaming Alexander out of any legal acknowledgement by any families that might've helped him. Thus where the "orphan, bastard, son of a whore" line comes from. There's also the suggestion they had several children, who all died save Alex and his brother.

Also goes without saying Johann kept all her money, leaving her and her sons completely broke.

But it wasn't good enough for Johann, who nine years later demanded a legal divorce. He spent most of the money on more impractical ventures, leaving him berried in debt. He seems to have married a washer woman, and wanted a clean slate. As the book puts it:

"In a document seething with outrage, Lavien branded Rachel a scarlet woman, given to a sinful life. Having failed to mend her ways after imprisonment, the decree stated, Rachel had “absented herself from [Lavien] for nine years and gone elsewhere, where she has begotten several illegitimate children, so that such action is believed to be more than sufficient for him to obtain a divorce from her.” Lavien noted bitterly that he himself “had taken care of Rachel’s legitimate child from what little he has been able to earn,” whereas she had “completely forgotten her duty and let husband and child alone and instead given herself up to whoring with everyone, which things the plaintiff says are so well known that her own family and friends must hate her for it.” After this vicious indictment, Lavien demanded that Rachel be denied all legal rights to his property. He warned that if he died before her, Rachel “as a widow would possibly seek to take possession of the estate and therefore not only acquire what she ought not to have but also take this away from his child and give it to her whore-children.”"

Then of course, two years later she and Alexander caught the sickness that killed her, leaving her to die in a pool of snot, vomit, pus, blood, and shit over a period of a few weeks.

"After Rachel died, her sons were placed under the legal guardianship of their thirty-two-year-old first cousin Peter Lytton. Already a widower, Peter had stumbled through a string of botched business dealings, including failed grocery stores in Christiansted. His brother later insisted that Peter was “insane.”"

"Life as a ward of Peter Lytton proved yet another merciless education in the tawdry side of life for Alexander Hamilton. Lytton had a black mistress, Ledja, who had given birth to a mulatto boy with the impressive name of Don Alvarez de Valesco. On July 16, 1769, just when the Hamilton boys must have imagined that fate couldn’t dole out more horrors, Peter Lytton was found dead in his bed, soaked in a pool of blood. According to court records, he had committed suicide and either “stabbed or shot himself to death.”For the Hamilton boys, the sequel was equally mortifying. Peter had drafted a will that provided for Ledja and their mulatto child but didn’t bother to acknowledge Alexander or James with even a token bequest. When a crestfallen James Lytton appeared to claim his son’s estate, he tried to aid the orphaned boys but was stymied by legal obstacles resulting from the suicide. On August 12, 1769, less than one month after Peter’s death, the heartbroken James Lytton died as well. Five days earlier, he had drafted a new will, which also made no provision for his nephews Alexander and James, who must have felt jinxed."

Yeah. And that's before the story even starts!

edited 18th Dec '16 11:49:20 AM by darkabomination

Holy fucking shit.

well, that fully explained "i never thought i'd live past 20"

And then of course, the hurricane came, one of the most brutal in his time that flung houses from the ground for miles, flattened acres and acres of farm land, killed an estimated 300 whites and we don't know how many slaves as they weren't tallied after being sold and many had children, shook three neighboring islands, and created tidal waves fifteen feet high. Also the ship that got him to New York caught fire halfway there and nearly burned down and killed a third of the crew. It's like the universe actively wanted him dead.

Continuing the biography, General Lee really was an idiot. As the book puts it:

Washington had survived the Conway Cabal only to have his authority challenged by General Charles Lee, an experienced officer who had been captured by the British in a tavern in late 1776 and had only recently been released after a fifteen-month captivity. Lee was a thin, quarrelsome, eccentric bachelor who spoke four foreign languages, had lost two fingers in an Italian duel, and traveled everywhere with his pack of dogs at his heels. He had briefly married an Indian woman, leading the Mohawks to nickname him, with good reason, Boiling Water.

He was a talented but impossibly temperamental man who believed devoutly in his own military genius. Arrogant and indiscreet, he told Elias Boudinot that “General Washington was not fit to command a sergeant’s guard.” He also ridiculed efforts made by Steuben and Hamilton to bring professional order to the army.

On June 24, 1778, Washington convened a council of war to debate whether to pounce on the retreating British Army. Hamilton took minutes. The opinionated Lee immediately poured scorn on Washington’s plan, saying the Americans would be trounced by the superior Europeans and that it was foolhardy to court trouble when the French were soon to arrive. Hamilton—who dismissed Lee as “a driveler in the business of soldiership or something much worse”—writhed quietly.

To his astonishment, the officers agreed with Lee’s views and in a manner, scoffed Hamilton, that “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives.”

Washington preferred to operate by consensus, but he decided to override this vote and give orders to strike at the enemy “if fair opportunity offered.”

Lee refused to serve as second in command for what he deemed a misguided maneuver. Only after Washington called his bluff and assigned the position to Lafayette did Lee back down and consent to ride out and take command of the advancing forces.

For the next few days, Hamilton, as a liaison officer to Lafayette, was constantly in motion, riding through muggy nights to reconnoiter enemy lines and convey intelligence among the officers. By the night of June 27, the British were encamped near Monmouth Court House in Freehold, New Jersey, with Lee and his soldiers lying only six miles away. Washington ordered Lee to attack in the early morning “unless there should be very powerful reasons to the contrary.”

Washington, three miles farther back, would then bring up the rear with the army’s main contingent. Hamilton drafted Washington’s directive to Lee that night, telling the latter to “skirmish with [the enemy] so as to produce some delay and give time for the rest of the troops to come up.”

June 28, 1778, was to be an unforgettable day because of, among other things, the stifling heat. The thermometer reached the high nineties, and some soldiers rode naked from the waist up. During this day, horses and riders alike expired from heat prostration. The battle was supposed to start with Lee taking on the British rear guard. After hearing small-arms fire that morning, Hamilton was sent ahead by Washington to scout Lee’s movements, and he was stunned by the tumult he found: far from engaging the enemy, as directed, Lee’s men were in a full-blown retreat. Not a word of this had been communicated to Washington. Hamilton rode up to Lee and shouted, “I will stay here with you, my dear general, and die with you! Let us all die rather than retreat!”

Once again the young aide did not hesitate to talk to a general as a peer. Hamilton also spotted a threatening movement by a British cavalry unit and prevailed upon Lee to order Lafayette to charge them.

When Washington got wind of the chaotic flight of his troops, he galloped up to Lee, glowered at him, and demanded, “What is the meaning of this, sir? I desire to know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”

Lee took umbrage at the peremptory tone. “The American troops would not stand the British bayonets,” he replied.

To which Washington retorted, “You damned poltroon, you never tried them!” Washington did not ordinarily use profanities, but, faced with Lee’s insubordination that morning, he swore “till the leaves shook on the trees,” said one general.

MY COPY OF THE HAMILTOME ARRIVED TODAY

Awesome! The Hamiltome is excellent reading.

Yesterday I got grandma to listen to the soundtrack, performed along for some of it, let her borrow my Hamiltome for lyrics, and on an unrelated note I need to read my copy of the Chernow biography already and ask a family friend in the USA to mail me a $10