Reading for Rhymes, Imagining Immigrants, Getting the Gospel

OK, so I haven’t posted a blog entry in a while. I hope this one works because we’ve had some trouble getting the publisher thing to publish them. Here’s Ravel in classic cat, Volkswagen Beetle pose complete with front and rear fenders. He is not allowed on the table but in his defense, he was watching neighbor Colin’s dog frolic freely in the side yard.

I have been listening to and reading excessively about the new Broadway musical, Hamilton. This is not the first musical where I have listened to the entire soundtrack before ever seeing the show live. Hamilton opened on Broadway in August of 2015. I guarantee it will win several 2016 Tony awards.  It is sold out well into next summer so there was never a chance that Sue and I would see it in a few weeks when we’ll be in New York.  Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, book writer, and title character (in the photo) is a highly skilled rapper. The show is a ‘rap/hip-hop musical’ but to me it has a huge range of musical styles and quite frankly just sounds like good music regardless of the labels people try to put on it.  Apparently the cast is very ethnically diverse representing what America looks like today even though the costumes are from the 1780.

I am reading the biography of Hamilton that the musical is based on by Ron Chernow. So far I have learned what life was like for a person living in the Dutch West Indies in the 1750s. Alexander Hamilton’s parents were of French and Scottish origin and he was born on a tropical Dutch Island. He came to America to study at university but joined the Americans in fighting the British for American independence. Imagine that: a founding father of our country was an immigrant! Here’s a good line from one of the songs: “Immigrants. We get the job done.”

 

In the same way that I am reading a Hamilton biography looking for the words that inspired Miranda to compose Hamilton, I am reading our new Saint John’s Gospels Bible looking for the words that made their way into Stephan Schwarz’s Godspell.

Band concert tonight!