I wrote an article about this topic last year, and received actual d3@th thr3Ats from HAMILTON fans. I am glad that there are changes being made and that LMM, for as grating as I think he is, seems open to criticism.
I have a few friends that are in HAMILTON productions--either Broadway or the touring ones, and it means the world to them to be in that show and to play those roles. I am never going to tell them how to feel about it. Especially since in my early days of auditioning I used to be told all of the time, "this isn't THE KING AND I," and "we aren't casting for WEST SIDE STORY," I know how hard it is to be cast and be seen. As flawed as HAMILTON is, I am grateful that it HAS opened up conversations about casting--especially when talking about historical shows set in times and places that BIPOC would have absolutely existed and NOT casting them is, in fact, the revisionist history.
The New York Times has an article about changes shows are making, including Hamilton:
“The Book of Mormon,” “The Lion King” and “Hamilton” are among those making changes as theaters reopen following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.
www.nytimes.com
"At “Hamilton,” which broke ground by casting people of color to play the nation’s founders but has faced criticism for what some historians see as its misleading depiction of the title character as an abolitionist, attention during preparations for its reopening last month focused on Jefferson.
Jefferson has become an increasingly controversial figure — the New York City Council earlier this month
voted to remove his statue from its chambers — and “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail said the cast and creative team concentrated its revisions on Jefferson’s big number because of “the shameful distance between the liberty he wrote about, and the life he lived as a slaveholder.”
There was another factor, too: the song contains the only moment in the show when an enslaved person is named — Hemings. “When you invoke the name of an enslaved person, you have to give some kind of respect,” said James Monroe Iglehart, who plays Jefferson.
Hemings has no lines, but is represented through dance when Jefferson, saying “Sally be a lamb,” asks her to bring him a letter from George Washington; the choreography, Mr. Kail said, is now “quite different,” with “a different tone — one that is more respectful to Sally’s point of view.”
In the prepandemic staging, Hemings would dance around Jefferson flirtatiously, performing a battement; in the new version, she still kicks her leg, but she faces away from him, arms forming a cradle as if to remind viewers of
the children she bore him. “Rather than the playful, romantic energy that the previous version had, I’m now playing a person that had no claim over her own life and her own body,” said Justice Moore, who dances the Hemings role.
There are changes for the ensemble, too. Gone are the white gloves and the pantomimed motions of slaves at work as Jefferson arrives at Monticello; now some members of the ensemble stand at a distance, and don’t even join in the singing. “The gloves automatically put you in a servant place, in a minstrel show sort of place, and the more we dug deeper, the more we asked why we need that weight on the story,” said Shonica Gooden, a member of the show’s ensemble."
