O President-Elect, my President-Elect,
I understand you got into the theater criticism business recently. Why not? You're qualified. You called on the cast of the Broadway smash hit Hamilton to apologize for prepared remarks they made through a spokesperson to the vice president-elect at the end of a performance Mr. Pence attended with his family. (By the way, for someone who creates so many opportunities to apologize and almost never does, you sure seem to demand a lot of apologies.)
But why demand an apology from the Hamilton cast in the first place?
They didn't call the vice president-elect names, like, I don't know, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary, or Little Marco.
It's not like the cast incited the crowd to chant threats like "Lock him up!" In fact, at the first sign of disrespectful booing, the Hamilton spokesperson rebuked the crowd and quickly told them--and this is a quote, not something completely fabricated in my imagination--"There's nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen."
So what do they have to apologize for? It's not like they seized on some insecurity or disability in the vice president-elect and then mocked him for it. That would be childish, petty--the sign of a weak temperament and an even weaker argument.
I was strangely warmed by your misbegotten call for the theater to be a "safe place." Warmed by the realization that you at least know what a safe place is and value the concept a little. But, come on, Mr. President-Elect, you know that the American Theater has a long, storied tradition of being the place that explores and expresses thorny issues and ideas. You know that, right?
There is something about all this that I would have thought you of all people could appreciate. The Broadway version of American Theater is also American Capitalism at its finest. It is a purely market-driven enterprise built on the creativity and ingenuity of artistic entrepreneurs working in concert with working-class tradespeople and dynastic landowners with names like Schubert and Nederlander. It lives or dies by one thing: whether or not people buy tickets. There's no electoral college on Broadway, it's all popular vote.
What is Hamilton if not a small business that's having a very good run? Huge, even. Big league. It's a business that employs many dozens of ordinary Americans who show up every day to prepare the theater and facilitate an audience's experience of something made by American artists. The original investors put up $12.5 million to mount the show. Conservative estimates are that it will run for a decade on Broadway and gross $1 billion in New York alone. Touring and licensing will add multiple millions to that number. Vision, hard work, good jobs, massive return on investment--we might do well to listen more to Team Hamilton.
I will say this for you, you managed to get the attention off of your unprecedented $25 million settlement with the plaintiffs in the Trump University fraud case. This is the case about which you repeatedly boasted you "would never settle." "Never" is the word you repeated in speeches, interviews, and tweets when you were claiming how good your case was for going to trial.
It doesn't bother me that you change your mind. It bothers me that you change it so often. And it seems just as often that you do the exact opposite of what you said you would never do. Maybe the lesson here is that you'd be better served by saying something like, "I don't have enough information about that at the moment to make a quality decision. I'm going to get up to speed, get all the input I can and then make a good decision. And if it turns out it wasn't a good decision, I'll own it, re-evaluate and we'll go another direction."
Or maybe the lesson is that we should just wait and see what you do in any given situation because the only way we can know for sure what you're going to do is after you've done it.
But I digress ...
You tweeted that you'd heard Hamilton is overrated. I heard the same thing about your show. Not the one you used to have on NBC. The one you've been starring in since June 2015. But now you've got a guaranteed four-year run. You don't have to perform. You don't have to deliver. You don't have to do anything you said you would do. As long as you keep breathing, don't commit an impeachable offense, and don't get bored and quit, you're guaranteed a captive audience through 2020.
Tim Jackson of Little Rock is a writer/producer in the film and television industry.
Editorial on 11/27/2016