The Broadway Show That Changed Everything

Oh my God you guys, did you know there was a musical before Hamilton? Like, a long time before. People who are old now loved it. If they had social media back then they totally would have put the playbill on Instagram just to show everyone else that they had gone and seen it. It was, like, a “raw, spontaneous, organic explosion of a show.” But how come no one has ever heard of it? Probably because it happened a million years ago and then nobody ever tried to do a musical that spoke to young people again until now? I don’t know. But one of the guys from the cast of that musical, who is somehow still alive, says, “It started to become a little bit of a machine toward the end, and the cult around the show was in some ways not super-pleasant. The energy had shifted.” So maybe that had something to do with it? That is definitely not something that will ever happen to Hamilton, so there’s no need to worry. I promise you, nothing that so many people are so deeply engaged in letting people know they are into right now could ever fade into memory or lose even a little bit of relevance. Anyway, if reading about things that happened way before your parents were born is something that sounds like fun to you, here is an oral history of that musical that people liked so long ago. It’s funny to think that anyone could get that worked up about a Broadway show, but they did things differently back then.