The cast of the Tony-award winning Broadway musical, “Hamilton,” had some words for Mike Pence when he attended the show two weeks ago on Nov. 18. The cast went off script to voice some of its concerns with the new president-elect and the way the country is going: “We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you, and we truly thank you for joining us here at ‘Hamilton: An American Musical.’ We really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us, all of us. … We truly thank you for sharing this show — this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women, of different colors, creeds and orientations.”
To me, it wasn’t a terribly overbearing message for the vice-president elect. The cast recognized that its platform reaches a lot of people including Mike Pence and took the opportunity to state something that should be very obvious: Hold up the American values and work for the people. Pence himself was not offended by the cast calling him out.
He did question, though, if the musical “was the appropriate venue to say it.” Yet, “Hamilton” is a story about America’s political history and Alexander Hamilton — that sounds like a pretty good place to discuss some American politics to me.
I asked two friends what they thought of the situation, and I purposely picked them because I had talked to them about politics before and are pretty obviously left- or right-winged. My conservative friend said he was “fed up” with people complaining and that America had chosen the president-elect for a reason. He went on to say that one of the reasons was that people were sick of how soft America was becoming under eight years of a Barack Obama presidency. My other more liberal friend disagreed, saying that the cast, as a private entity, was just exercising its right to freedom of speech.
I hate to be that predictably liberal writer, but I am going to have to agree with the latter. Just as the people had a right to cheer when Pence walked in, people had the right to boo him as well. We are all in the same boat because we all get the same right to freedom of speech. It’s just how you choose to use it. The “Hamilton” cast didn’t say anything out of line, it was just expressing its concern for the diversity of the country without insulting anyone.
Apparently, people were offended, regardless of how eloquently the cast spoke, and Donald Trump took the issue to Twitter stating that his vice president-elect was “harassed.” Now, that was an exaggeration if I have ever seen one, but I am not going to spend this space in the spread to complain about Trump because that’ll just be redundant.
The alarming part of this whole issue is how divided people are, showcased by the current protests erupting around the country. People abroad keep asking me what good the protests in America are going to do about the president-elect, and I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if the people protesting are even protesting the events or if they are just trying to cope by having their voices heard. I know that the division created by the election is not going to just go away with a couple of weeks, and I especially can’t judge the situation since I am sitting in a different country, but the fact that one man can walk into a room and cause such division and distraction from the show is concerning.
People should voice their opinions, but also make efforts to reconcile with the other half, hear both sides of the story and attempt to find compromise. If we can do that on a small scale with the people we interact with daily, hopefully that attitude will carry on upstream and reconcile our politically tense country.
