The cast of Hamilton accepting the Grammy for best cast recording (Photo by Howard Sherman)
I guess my dash from row O to row A the other night pretty much erased any pretence of professional distance. Especially once Entertainment Weekly magazine saw fit to write about it.
My so-called sprint was occasioned by my attendance at Monday night’s live broadcast of the opening number from the musical Hamilton, which was being performed at its home at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York as part of the recording industry’s annual Grammy Awards. My seating shift was in response to a request for someone to fill an empty front row seat. I was happy to help out, and I received a round of applause for my selflessness.
Online, my efforts prompted a number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends to call me a “fanboy”, and while it’s not a term I’d apply to myself in middle age, there are worse things that could be said of me. Since I have always maintained that I am not a critic, seeing myself as someone of the theatre who sometimes writes about the theatre, I’m actually a bit reassured to find that my fandom is showing. Thirty-six years after I first went to work in a box office, there’s something rejuvenating about finding that I am indeed still an enthusiastic fan of theatre, although a long way from starstruck.
Hamilton has certainly been the most public expression of my fandom, as evidenced by the 48 Ham4Ham videos that I’ve shot on the street outside the Rodgers, having begun them simply as material for a blog post I wrote in August, and never stopped. Just this week, my cover story on the musical’s protean creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, comes out in Dramatics magazine, the only national US publication for high school theatre students. But I am not without self-control: I’ve seen Hamilton only twice, and I’ve never entered the ticket lottery for day-of-show seats.
By the standards of die-hards, I am an amateur. I have not committed the Hamilton cast recording to memory, like many fans who have yet to even see the show. While I would like to see it again at some point, I am not given to seeing shows numerous times; barring professional commitments, I rarely see any show more than twice, unlike fans I know and read of who happily see the same show dozens of times. My theatre fandom drives me to predominantly see that which I have not seen before. So little time, and so many shows.
As it happens, my front row experience, which also included witnessing Hamilton win the Grammy for best cast recording and a rapped acceptance by Lin-Manuel, came only four days after my latest opportunity to see perhaps my favourite stage performer work his magic once again. Bill Irwin, a gifted actor, clown, mime and so many other things, has returned to New York’s Signature Theatre with his sometime partner David Shiner for a second run of Old Hats, perhaps the 10th or 11th time I’ve seen Bill in a show of his own singular creation. I have been an unabashed fan of Bill’s since I first saw him in the mid-1980s; his particular gifts have the effect of making me grin the moment he walks on a stage (save for his career-changing turns in Albee’s The Goat and Virginia Woolf). Privileged to have first met him 15 years ago, when I greeted him excitedly by ticking off the litany of his work that I’d seen, like Kathy Bates in Misery, I take unbridled joy in seeing him at work – and now going backstage to see him along with an always intriguing mix of acting and circus royalty. I have long been a proselytiser to the cult of Bill, and I’m not in the least ashamed of it or subtle about it.
I think there’s something to be said for maintaining the enthusiasm of a fan even as the realities of raising money, balancing budgets, serving and collaborating with artists and staff, and so on, can abstract and distract from the very reason that drew us to work in the theatre in the first place. Given my career, I’m no longer the teen who stood in awe as James Earl Jones signed a programme for me, but I am also far from a jaded aesthete who deploys 35 years of theatregoing to decry the theatre of today. If you spot me by a stage door awaiting an audience with Laura Benanti or Audra McDonald, or at an event with camera phone at the ready (the better to feed my social media activity), don’t think less of me. After all, I’m still in touch with the kid who fell hard for theatre and never wanted to do anything else, and can still be thrilled by it and the people who make it.
Theatre needs fans not just in the seats, but in its offices, its rehearsal rooms and on its stages as well. After all, it’s not as if we’re in it for the money.
This essay originally appeared in The Stage.
