Something was missing from Hamilton at last night’s Tony Awards, where the show which was nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards took home a stunning 11 trophies, including Best Musical: guns.
In the wake of the mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando that left 50 dead and even more wounded, the company dropped the use of prop muskets during a performance of “History Has Its Eyes on You” and “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” songs that narrate the climax of the Revolutionary War.
It was a quiet, subtle tribute to what the Tony Awards, in an official statement formally dedicating the night’s proceedings to the Orlando massacre’s victims and their loved ones, acknowledged was an “unimaginable tragedy.” And as often happens in the aftermath of the unimaginable, lyrics that were already powerful took on a meaning so poignant it ached. The Hamilton company performed three times, first as part of the musical parody in which host James Corden made his entrance, then again for the aforementioned songs, and finally at the close of the show after clinching their last award of the night. About the last words anyone watching the telecast through its three-hour-and-twenty-minute run heard were, “Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, accepting the award for Best Score, read a sonnet he’d written for the occasion (he deemed himself “too old” to freestyle). He said, in part:
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us That nothing here is promised, not one day.This show is proof that history remembers. We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;We rise and fall and light from dying embers, Remembrances that hope and love last longer, And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
Corden came onstage before his jokey, song-and-dance opening number to address “the horrific events that took place in Orlando”:
On behalf of the whole theater community and every person in this room, our hearts go out to all of those affected by that atrocity. All we can say is you are not on your own right now. Your tragedy is our tragedy. Theater is a place where every race, creed, sexuality and gender is equal, is embraced and is loved. Hate will never win. Together, we have to make sure of that. Tonight’s show stands as a symbol and a celebration of that principle. This is the Tony Awards.
He quickly landed on another theme of the night: That the Tony Awards were “the Oscars, but with diversity.” But that would be a discredit to this year’s Broadway offerings, which do more than just put the movies to shame. The theater community achieved something remarkable in its own right on Sunday when, for the first time in the 70-year history of the Tony Awards, all four musical acting awards went to performers of color: Cynthia Erivo for The Color Purple, and Renée Elise Goldsberry, Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom, Jr. for Hamilton.
It should be noted here that black actors have only been awarded Oscars for playing a painfully limited array of characters. At the Tony Awards, these actors were honored for playing Celie Johnson, Angelica Schuyler, Thomas Jefferson (and Marquis de Lafayette), and Aaron Burr. Viola Davis’ words from the night she made history as the first African American to win Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the Emmy Awards come to mind: “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”
A pre-taped message from President Obama and the First Lady introduced Hamilton, telling the story of how Miranda performed an early version of “Alexander Hamilton” at the White House seven years ago. The show, the president said, reminds us that America “is a place of inclusiveness, where we value our boisterous diversity as our greatest gift.”
How Deaf West’s ‘Spring Awakening’ Gets At The Heart Of The Show: Everyone Wants To Be HeardIt is hard to put into words what is so extraordinary about the Deaf West Theatre Company’s Spring Awakening. Which is…thinkprogress.orgThat boisterous diversity was on display throughout the night, and not just within Hamilton. Each performance seemed to draw from a completely different culture, from the traditional Jewish wedding in Fiddler on the Roof to Gloria Estefan’s Cuban-fusion dance hits in On Your Feet! to the Audra McDonald-led tap of Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed to the working-class women in Waitress to the all-black cast of The Color Purple to the simultaneous singing and signing in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, which also features the first actor in a wheelchair in a Broadway show.
The result was a telecast that looked far more like America than the Oscars and Emmys (which are better than the Oscars, but not by much) have in years; the ostensibly highbrow, inaccessible Broadway appeared more in touch with the American experience than our more populist offerings on television and in movie theaters. That is not to say that the theater community should feel, to borrow a term from the night’s biggest winner, satisfied. The technical and creative categories have more work to do: Only one the 10 nominees for Best Director of either a musical or a play is a woman. (That would be Liesl Tommy, director of Eclipsed, who lost to Ivo Van Hove, director of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.)
How Do You Direct A Play About Rape Survivors? Talking To The Tony-Nominated Director Of ‘Eclipsed’There are no men in Eclipsed. You can’t see them, anyway. You can feel them. The five women onstage can feel them, too…thinkprogress.orgStill, so many of the shows celebrated by the Tonys this year bust through whatever preconceived notions a theatergoer might have about who has the right to be in a Broadway play, about what stories and which people belong on the most elite, exclusive stages in our country — which is just another way of saying, who has the right to be heard, to be seen, to command our attention. The most expensive Hamilton tickets are about to go for nearly nine hundred dollars. We, the audience, have decided — we have voted with the bills that bear Hamilton’s face — that this show, featuring a cast of color, written by the son of immigrants, about an immigrant, is, literally, the most valuable story being told at this moment.