Washington Post drama critic Peter Marks made a splash in their Sunday Arts section touting how America's musical-theatre sector is taking on the "nativist wave" coming from Donald Trump. From a revival of West Side Story to the hip-hop Founding Father musical Hamilton, actors are taking to the stage to underscore how American the newest Americans are.
Hamilton, born and raised on the Caribbean island of Nevis for eight years and then another eight years on the Virgin Island of St. Croix, was an English speaker who entered King's College (now Columbia University) shortly after arriving:
"Immigrants!" Lafayette cries, with Hamilton joining in: "They get the job done!"
Sympathetic audience members at the Richard Rodgers Theatre swoon over the line, and not only because it's a potent rejoinder to the nativist wave washing over American politics....
The enthusiastic applause also is an appreciative acknowledgment of a Broadway musical's effort at full-throated advocacy, its unapologetic attempt to remind spectators of the country's legacy of openness, and how that's paid off, over the course of America's 239 Independence Days.
Many of today's conservatives love the idea of America as a nation of immigrants, with people coming to this country to enjoy the freedom to work hard and prosper and "get the job done." Today's liberals never have to answer for the immigrants who don't get the job done -- like welfare takers and criminal gang-bangers -- and immigrants who refuse to assimilate into the country's language and culture.
But Marks is just starting and ending with Trump, as liberals love to do:
This revival is consciously insinuating itself into a flammable national debate, stoked by the incendiary commentary of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, who have sought to portray immigrants not as an asset to a country that for centuries has been propelled by their energy and drive, but as an abject menace. The challenge to a theatergoer's conscience in this case seems to be whether you see yourself more aligned, in a sense, with a Trump, or a Tevye. [Fiddler on the Roof is also enjoying a revival.]
So why, you may ask, is the musical such a receptive platform for this consequential issue? The answer may lie in part in the predominantly progressive inclinations of theater-makers, but also in the endlessly, musically adaptive nature of the form: The myriad styles incorporated into musicals over the years, from the blues to bebop, from European operetta to rock, make it a readily accessible echo of a polyglot nation. And since it leaned so heavily in its infancy in the early part of the 20th century on European-born Jewish talent -- the likes of composers Sigmund Romberg and Irving Berlin, among others -- you could say that to some quantifiable degree, the American musical owes its historic robustness to immigration.
Marks felt the necessity to admit these advocacy musicals don't always click. Hamilton is hot, George Takei's internment piece Allegiance is not:
That the musical is able to express evolving attitudes on the subject is illuminated by the current crop of shows. It's hard to imagine, for instance, a musical such as Allegiance and its entirely sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese American internees of a detention camp in 1941 having found anything like a receptive audience during that xenophobic period. Then again, this production, even with Star Trek's George Takei as a draw, has not lit up the box office. Maybe this show's marketing problem is that its themes hit too close to home: The embrace during Republican debates of the idea of banning the entry of Muslims may make the experience of observing another group targeted by government discrimination too much for Broadway audiences to want to pay to see.
Or maybe it's just a bad musical. Marks concluded:
For the New York of West Side Story, composed by some revolutionary theater artists at a time when musicals did not as a rule take on urban social issues, audiences were introduced to a group of Latino "immigrants" with no secure toehold in the city. Its view of their prospects, though not particularly cheery, was intended as a plea for compassion. By the time of Hamilton, another revolutionary artist could look back at the birth of America and confidently lay out an immigrant experience in a far more optimistic light. Immigrants do, indeed, get the job done.
It should be said that Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout ruled last year that Hamilton was not a progressive screed:
[I]f you’re wondering whether a multiracial musical about one of the founding fathers could possibly amount to anything more than a knee-jerk piece of progressive sermonizing, get ready for the biggest surprise of all, which is that this show is at bottom as optimistic about America as 1776.
