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[nyc-urbanism]

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[thefederalistfreestyle]

‘Hamilton’ Under the Weight of the Puerto Rican Flag (American Theatre):

[. . .] As always with any performance of Hamilton, the pre-show energy in the audience was high. It was when I saw the original cast perform in New York, but this time—the energy was on fire. A current, a buzz, a thing you can’t touch that vibrates through your body until you find yourself at the edge of your seat, waiting for the curtain to rise.

And the curtain certainly did rise. And when Miranda took the stage, the crowd carved out a pedestal of applause. So much so that he could not continue to sing for two minutes.

Inside that applause were so many layers. The aftermath of Hurricane Maria: its death toll of nearly 3,000 people, its economic blow of $43 billion. The fact that the show had to be moved from the University of Puerto Rico to CBA because of student protests and lack of safety. Depending on who you ask, these protests have their roots root in campus union demands, and among the students themselves, who are struggling to survive with rising tuition, slashes in aid, and the inability to access higher education due to federal cuts. Add to this the 22 people who have died in just the first few weeks of the year, victims of gang violence, daytime killings, and a crime wave that is terrorizing many Puerto Ricans.

[. . .]

In particular, [Miranda] explained, he felt it in a song from the show called “Hurricane.” It’s a song about how Hamilton, grappling with what his adversaries knew about an extramarital affair he’d had with Maria Reynolds, hoped to write his way out of it, just as he wrote his way out of St. Croix, as an orphan, after yet another hurricane.

But from this angle, in Puerto Rico, it didn’t feel like a metaphor. Indeed Miranda couldn’t get through the song the first time he rehearsed it in San Juan.

“Because you all know better than I do what it’s like to survive a hurricane, the quiet after the storm—that’s what we felt out there in the Diaspora, the quiet,” Miranda said of the terrible period when folks in the continental U.S. couldn’t hear from loved ones on the island. “That quiet and that terror,” he continued. “I feel like I’m going back to Maria every time I sing it.”

As Hamilton washed over us in the audience, I thought of something Alex Lacamoire, musical director, conductor, and overall music man forHamilton, told me in a conversation before the show. He said that what he does, for this show and for a living, is “pay attention to the individual parts of the music. It’s a constant code switching.” He has to be able to approach a piece from all directions, put himself inside all the instruments.

[. . .]

Like Lacamoire I’m of Cuban descent, the daughter of two Cuban refugees.

When Miranda appeared onstage, and, later, when he pulled out the Puerto Rican flag during the curtain call—that flag, so close in semblance to the Cuban flag—when he covered himself with it, when he carried it on his back to a rising roar, I could feel the freedom of that flag flying, and also its weight—the responsibility it bestowed on the person it covered.

For this little Cubanita in the audience, the knot in my throat untied when I saw that flag. My insides started code switching from English to Spanish, Caribeña to Americana and back again, and my hands found themselves beating loudly, playing my part in the music we were all making together.

That’s what happens when someone takes a shot for all of us and shows the world who we really are. We rise up.

read Vanessa Garcia’s full essay here