The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I are watching "Hamilton" on the Disney Network (I can only take watching anything in small doses these days, so we stopped for the night about forty minutes in).
Rap doesn't move me the way more traditional musics do. The poetry plays with rhyme, assonance, and meter (I find myself thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins). The sometimes-startling images I get from other forms of poetry I have not heard in the little bit of rap with which I'm familiar, (and that's OK, I don't think that's what rappers are trying to do), and what I've heard so far in "Hamilton" has not made me change my mind about that.
It's my contention that American musical theater will become (or has become) a repertory form, the way Italian opera is, and "Hamilton" represents a new form-within-the-form. I think part of the buzz is the novelty, and the adaptation of street music to musical theater. I find that interesting.
One thing rankles, though, and I can't get past it. So far, all - ALL - of the people in the cast are persons of color, EXCEPT for the one loyalist and the by-turns-comical-and-threatening King George. They are pure white.
This is racist casting. There is no other way to describe it. It is perhaps understandable given the history of casting all forms of theatric art. It is racist, nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment