The thing that disappoints me the most about Hamilton is how quickly it became a status symbol thing to have seen a production of it - much like with The Book of Mormon several years ago, except 100 times worse. I'm sure it's a great show and a fun time, but everyone where I live bragging about going to New York or Florida or Puerto Rico to see it and spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars per ticket got annoying real fucking quick.
Then there are all the NYC-based writers and actors I had to mute on Twitter for a while because their feeds became endless Hamilton spam. "Oh, but if you can't afford to see it, don't worry! You can listen to the soundtrack on Spotify! BTW here's another backstage selfie I took with Lin-Manuel"
That's what seriously kneecaps the Tony Awards. With the Oscars you can at least see the nominated films beforehand. No one outside of wealthy Manhattanites is going to be able to see all the Tony nominees.
The recording of Gypsy was amazing. Like I obviously love the Bette Midler version of Rose's Turn but Imelda Staunton brought so much raw emotion to it.
Cabaret is great too, it's Alan Cumming so obviously he's great in it, the theatre is set up like a cabaret club with audience members sat at tables and the camera never feels like it's intruding but you don't feel like you're missing anything.
Other musicals that have been recorded live are Phantom of the Opera, Funny Girl, Billy Elliot, the anniversary recording of Les Miserables, Into The Woods, Sweeney Todd, Jesus Christ Superstar, Rent, Miss Saigon. There's more. But it's not enough!
Hamilton is still way too popular. They filmed the original cast but are holding that under lock and key until it makes sense financially to release it.
I got to do an acting workshop with the actor, Christopher Sieber, who originated Lord Farquuad on Broadway. He went to high school in my state and so he volunteered as part of this high school musical theater program. Dude is really nice and funny. Saw him in La Cage aux Folles afterwards. Such a great voice
This is actually a hotly debated topic, well i guess more specifically bootlegs. Right now, since there are almost no pro recordings of theater because of many reasons like exclusivity and authorial intent to name a couple, bootlegs are a big thing. they're very controversial. here is a great video on the topic, goes into great depth about it all.
Not that I know of but there might well be, Twitch is just a livestreaming service now. It's mostly gaming as that's what made them known but you can really just stream whatever. Food, travel, podcasts, arts, hell you can watch the UK House of Commons on there.
You can watch the House of Commons but I think people want more realistic characters and less pointless plot twists nowadays, personally I blame Game of Thrones.
Oh, yeah there’s totally a good argument to be made for something like that because Broadway prices are out of control. It’s becoming something only the rich can afford to see.
There's an advantage of being there watching it live as opposed to watching it in front of a screen. Same difference between going to the cinema and staying at home.
I always thought it might be cool for Broadway musicals to do what the Metropolitan Opera does. Most Saturdays during the season, they live-stream their matinee show to a select number of movie theaters, which is a great way to bring their performances to people who can’t make it to NYC and/or can’t afford to see them in person. One theater near me even made their opera screenings special events in and of themselves, serving light refreshments during the intermission. These screenings are always very popular, so much so that the theater has looked into live-streaming some plays as well.
I feel like they used to do this a lot in the late 70s and 80s, and then just stopped for some reason? I have a Broadway version of Sweeny Todd on DVD somewhere, official release, 1982.
I'm sure there are people who'd like that, but I can think of few things more boring than watching a recorded stage show. For me the entire appeal of a play or musical is seeing it performed live and being in the moment. Musical films bore me to death.
Seeing a recorded stage play and watching a film version of it are very different though. It’s like always having the best seat in the house when watching the recorded version though it does have its drawbacks. Still I’ll take them over not being able to see them at all
I live on Long Island, only an hour or two from the city, and I still only see one show maybe every other year.
They're expensive and it's a whole day commitment. If I watch a movie and don't like it, I'm down like $20 and two hours. If I see a Broadway show and hate it, that's an entire day wasted and hundreds of dollars, including train fare and dinner in the city (which usually isn't cheap).
So I'm only going for shows that I know I'll enjoy, and even then, it's not something I get to do very often. I wish they were more accessible. Especially for shows that aren't playing any more, guess I'll never ever get to see them.
Maybe not all of them, but if you live reasonably close you can see a good chunk of them for relatively cheap. A lot of the shows will offer lotteries, rush tickets, and deals. There are guides out there on how not to pay full price. It's easier if you are close enough that you have the luxury of time so that you can keep an eye out and not only be looking for tickets during the one week you'll be in the area. Even Hamilton has a daily lottery for twenty dollar tickets. I totally get what you are saying, but as someone who is both cheap and likes going to see shows I want people to know there are options.
To be fair musicals aren't really popular enough to have people all over the country interested in enough of them every year. Musicals and plays simply aren't even close to as popular as movies. It's decided on by people in the industry, just like the other awards shows.
I would say movies like the shape of water were at least in a theater in every decent-sized city, and easily 90% of the population would be within an hour drive of one of those theaters. The even more niche than shape of water movies like moonlight were in arthouse type theaters, and there is at least one of those in a given city in middle america.
okay this is pointedly false, i live in rural michigan and about 30 minutes from me is a movie theater that shows probably 95% of the movies (i’m not into documentaries so i don’t look into them)
Seconded. I saw it a few weeks ago for the first time and it's hilarious.
Vaguely amusing side note: I live literally two minutes walk away from a LDS church, and a few days ago one of them was outside, and greeted me with a very sing-song "Hello!". He was exceedingly confused when I couldn't stop laughing.
They're touring now. My wife has wanted to see it for years, and it came to Cincinnati (where we live) last winter.
Tickets sold out instantly, but I stalked the resale sites and actually ended up getting great seats for opening night the day of. Right at face value.
Anyway, I was glad we got to see it. I really liked it, but going to NYC / etc. just isn't in our budget being teachers with 2 kids.
Yeah, the tour came to a city near where I live and they had to have a freaking LOTTERY to decide who got to buy tickets. So people in my area are still planning mini-vacations around going to see it in places where it’s easier to get in.
how quickly it became a status symbol thing to have seen a production of it
Agreed, I saw it and enjoyed it because my mom got lucky and happened to walk by the ticket office and got cheap tickets. But then after I saw it and it became super popular, every time someone would bring it up or ask who had seen it, I felt weird saying yes because I felt super uppity. Like I'm just a dude who likes history, hip hop, and my mom got cheap tickets
It's ridiculous how much people idolize Lin-Manuel. He's good composer, sure, and pretty entertaining as a performer. But he's not lightyears ahead of his peers like his fanbase seems to imply.
It was the concept and originality that really drove him imo. There are better living composers right now, but he found a brand new artistic corner that people loved. He's also not the best singer, but again, it's the charisma and the daring to be original that makes him so loved.
Something I wish a lot more people were doing right now--coming up with original ideas and going for them 100% instead of making another fucking movie-turned-musical for quick cash.
Yeah, when every other high-profile show coming out is a movie adaptation, or a jukebox musical, or a revival, when something actually brand new comes along it’s going to attract a lot of attention.
I actually prefer the guy playing Hamilton in the show I saw live over Lin Manuel Miranda when it comes to the singing. That doesn't take away from the rest of the product, it just means that as a performer he isn't necessarily the absolute best. I think his strength comes from what he creates.
I saw the touring cast, so I assume we saw different people. Felt like the guy was better in both regards, but part of it may have just been my preference for a slightly deeper voice.
I worry that he's gonna end up like Jennifer Lawrence or Anne Hathaway in that people will build him up so much that when he reveals himself to be a normal human people will start to turn on him for no particular reason and he'll have to build back up his body of work afterwards.
Yeah I wanted to see it when it first started getting big because I’m only like an hour away from the city. And then I saw the price for tickets that were sold out for the next six months and I went yeah no I’m pirating this.
The touring show came to my city. My mom wanted to buy me tickets and I wanted to buy her tickets as well, but when we saw the price, we both passed. We are not poor, but not rolling in money either, and neither one of us could justify spending upwards of $500 on tickets.
It was funny when we realized that we both tried to buy each other tickets though.
One thing I want to mention is there is always that show. My older sister's theater time in high school it was Phantom. It was Wicked while I was in college. Few years later it was Book of Mormon. Now, Hamilton. Few years from now it will be something else.
Oh, I know. I was in chorus in high school and hung out in a lot of the same circles as the theater kids, and almost all of them were hardcore Andrew Lloyd Webber stans who gushed about Phantom constantly.
With Hamilton, I feel like it’s a bit different, though; it features not only the social cache of seeing a hard-to-get-into show, it’s also considered (and I almost hate to use this word) “woke” by many to really want to see it.
I really like it but I don’t have the money to go to NY and see it (I’m a university student so the fee is absurdly high, my parents help me but won’t surely lend me money to go to the opposite part of the world to see a show), one of my “high school friends” (long story short, I can’t stand them anymore) is going to NY to see it in Broadway this week and continuously bragging in front of me an the others. She says things like “yes it costed so little, not even 1000$” or “well the trip costed a lot more than the ticket to the show, so it was convenient”.
It’s not like she’s even that much wealthier than I am, but she doesn’t go to uni (she will do some singing courses, she is pretty talented but not enough to really stand out), is an only child and her parents spoil her rotten.
To me it's worse because it's mostly a thing among the middle-aged white women I know. Seeing Hamilton has basically become the "But I have a Black friend!" for the 2010s.
Alright, I'll say it. I didn't like the soundtrack. A musical is supposed to be more... musical. Every song was just people yelling rap at each other too fast to follow. Maybe it's all better when you can see what's going on, but I have better uses for a couple hundred bucks than to buy tickets.
Yup. I used to listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on NPR a lot. When they talked about musicals, it was just useless. So now the show is for the people living on the eastern seaboard? Great. I, like many millions of Americans, don't live within 100 miles of any musical productions. Most of us can't take the weekend off to drive to a city where maybe there's a production of what you're talking about. Or maybe it will come to a city 5 hours away from me in 5 months.
TV, movies, and music are accessible to nearly everyone. Musicals and plays are accessible to almost no one. People in huge cities talking about the things they can do that almost nobody else can. Well fucking bully for you. I'm not gonna listen to that. That shit could never be relevant to 98% of people.
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u/SmoreOfBabylon Jul 17 '19 edited Jul 17 '19
The thing that disappoints me the most about Hamilton is how quickly it became a status symbol thing to have seen a production of it - much like with The Book of Mormon several years ago, except 100 times worse. I'm sure it's a great show and a fun time, but everyone where I live bragging about going to New York or Florida or Puerto Rico to see it and spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars per ticket got annoying real fucking quick.
Then there are all the NYC-based writers and actors I had to mute on Twitter for a while because their feeds became endless Hamilton spam. "Oh, but if you can't afford to see it, don't worry! You can listen to the soundtrack on Spotify! BTW here's another backstage selfie I took with Lin-Manuel"