Theater History and Mysteries – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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Alexander Hamilton did some major things that still impact the world we live in today...but you might not really get what those are from watching the musical.  Today's episode is designed to review those things and figure out what the musical focuses on, what Hamilton really did, and why it might be even more impressive than you might think.

My goal is to tell you something you don’t already know about Hamilton the musical, and Alexander Hamilton the guy.

Here’s an opening: Grew up in Utah.  We had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Donny and Marie Osmond, a very LDS influenced state legislature, and we did NOT have underground hip hop scene.

You would have bet me in 1994 that this would have happened, I would have told you that you were crazy: 

“Consider the following. On March 9, 2016, Utah State Senator Jim Dabakis, an openly gay Democrat and founder of an advocacy group called Utah Progressives, and Utah State Representative Ken Ivory, a conservative Republican best known for urging state officials to seize federal land, donned eighteenth-century costumes to extol the virtues of Hamilton to their fellow lawmakers. With Dabakis dressed as King George III and Ivory as Hamilton, they urged their peers to pass a resolution honoring Lin-Manuel Miranda and his historically inspired musical. Despite their many political disagree-ments, these legislators’ love of Hamilton had brought them to-gether. Their resolution praised the musical for capturing “the human drama, intrigue, passion, perplexity, and promise of Ameri-ca’s founding in a way that resonates with a modern and ethnically diverse America” and for captivating audiences “regardless of eco-nomic circumstances or political stances.”1 The resolution easily passed in both the House and Senate, and was quickly signed into law by Utah’s Republican governor Gary Herbert.”

From Historians on Hamilton, chapter 14.

That is mind-blowing.  I want to tell you more things you don’t expect. 

I’ll start with the BASIC history about Hamilton.  Pretty sure that I can do it at least once in this episode of THM.

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What’s the most awesome theater moment you’ve had?  Not, like, the biggest show you’ve been in, or the biggest audience you’ve played to, or the best tickets you ever had…those are important.  I want you to think about awesome…the time you were in times square on the way to a show, stopped to take a picture with Elmo, and got photo bombed by Patrick Stewart.  Or the time you were in a production of In the Heights and right before the blackout scene the power really did go out…Or you were on stage and your fellow performer forgot all their lines and you successfully improved Weird Al Yankovich lyrics for 5 minutes.  I mean, AWESOME.

Today’s guest is Emily Clark, and she’d have a tough time answering that question, because her life, and she, are awesome.  But for my money, it was this:

BIGFOOT!!  She was in Bigfoot the musical!  That’s like an 11 out of 10 on the awesome scale.  And it’s obviously tounge-in cheek, but works as a comedy, has great music, according to Emily is about to open off-broadway, definitely won the 2024 Best of Fringe award…but more than any of that…it’s just awesome.

Today we are going to meet performer, educator, townie in Bigfoot, and Cal. State Fullerton Master’s candidate Emily Clark, who is going to share with us her research about the Secret Garden, which is of course a beloved children’s book and was a Broadway musical that had 7 Tony nomination and 3 wins in 1991…and it was one of the first ever show with an all-female production team.  We’ll cover all that ground, and get to meet Emily, but first…let’s run the intro…

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Normally we release every other Tuesday, but this is our first special episode that uses the more traditional podcasting interview format.  This off-week episode comes just in-between Jesus Christ Superstar and Hadestown, which will start next week.

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Imagine a scared kid going to their first day of high school.  Maybe they’re new at the school and don’t have any friends yet, maybe they’re just a nerd and not all the cool kids are being nice, maybe they have some stuff going on at home and they’re nervous and uptight all the time.

For it all to work out for these kids, something has to go right.  They walk into a room to start an activity that they barely know about, and it changes their life.  Maybe it’s a debate room, or a science class, or a high school paper newsroom.  And maybe…it’s a theater class.

This has happened so often it’s actually a theme at the Tony’s.  When Elaine Strich won in 2002 she invited her high school drama teacher, Mr. Bodick.  When Neil Patrick Harris won for Hedwig he thanked both Churchill Cooke and Danny Flores.  He said “These are teachers in small town New Mexico who when sports was the only option, showed that creativity had a place in the world. Without them I would never be able to do any of this.”

Melody Herzfeld, a high school drama teacher, got special recognition at the Tony Awards in 2018.  She was a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS, and she hid 65 students during the horrific shooting there.

If the measure of a life is the impact it has on other lives, there is no doubt that one profession that may lead the pack in changing lives are high school drama teachers.  Before almost everyone who has made it to Broadway is someone who made it to Broadway, they were theater kids, and they wouldn’t have been there without theater teachers.

And today we’re going to take a departure from our normal formula and talk to one of the best high school teachers, the FUSD’s Teacher on Special Assignment, Michael Despars.

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It is the 4th century AD…Jesus has been dead for at least 300 years but the stories and ideas about him have not.  After having been persecuted for decades, and fed to lions in the Coliseum, the Christians are now becoming the dominant religion under the new emperor Constantine.  But they aren’t the only Christians, and they aren’t the only ones with ideas about who Jesus was, and who Judas was.  They are becoming the institution that would later start the inquisition, and torture and suppress every other form of thought.

We aren’t there yet, but non-catholic ideas about Jesus are being actively suppressed.

In upper Egypt, on the west banks of the Nile, there is a true believer in Gnosticism.  The gnostics have their own writings, their own theology, and even their own gospels.  And one of those Gospels is the gospel according to Judas.  And books like this are exactly the sort that Rome is seeking out to destroy.

To protect these ideas, these books, and this knowledge, the gnostic believer takes his manuscripts, stores them in a clay container, and hides them away in a cave.  There they will sit for 15 centuries and when they are final discovered in the 1980s, and finally published in 2006, they will have the exact same approach to understanding the crucifixion that the musical JCS superstar launched only decades earlier.  What are we to make of that?  Let’s excavate together on this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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There is a new musical about to open, and boldly it declares that it will re-tell the story of the crucifixion, and do so from the perspective of…Judas.  The advanced publicity is massive – as will become a hallmark of the coming age of megamusicals – and the theme of the show has not escaped notice.  No less an evangelical figure than Billy Graham himself said the show was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege.”

His concern about the content is shared.  In a rare moment of agreement between Graham and the National Secular Society, both groups showed up to protest the opening of the show.  The Secular Society handed out leaflets entitled ‘Jesus Christ Supersham.’  The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee also responded … rather strongly … to the show.

Ted Neely, who has played the lead role of Jesus in scores of productions, looked back at the role when he had passed his 80th year.  He “by the controversy the show stirred up.  "I gotta tell you, it was very strange," he told Tapestry.  "Our production company said, no matter what they may say to you, don't say anything, because they might punch you right in the face. So we were silent."

But the show would not be.  Would the controversy shut the show down?  Would protestors block the doors?  Or would the show simply go on?  We’ll talk about how the audiences, the critics, and the world reacted to the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar in this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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There is a new show out there, and this one is, boldly enough, a re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Judas.  That, by itself, is likely to be controversial.  And to take on this sacred topic the cast prepares itself by…covering the body of performer playing Christ and having the castmates lick it off of him, to get “closer to Jesus.”

The stage crew is pulling together the props and set pieces to make the show work which include… plastic tambourines, fish, enormous protozoa-like creatures, representations of the man in the moon, strings of beads hanging from poles, boulders, and a gigantic set of false teeth.

Jesus will need to be crucified, and for that the actor playing Jesus will be wrapped in what one reviewer will call an “auto-erotic silver artichoke.”  He’ll be followed around by his conscience, which will be represented as a group of performers dressed in puffy suits that look like the stay-puffed marshmellow man.

Do these seem like typical staging choices to represent the final days of Christ to you?  And this is definitely NOT a parody; this is miles from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  None of these are attempts to make fun of, or deconstruct, the story of Jesus.  They are legitimate efforts to enhance the story.  Why are they so weird?  Why were they there?  Did they propel the show to success or did they have to be overcome for the production to become the very first to run for 8 years in London and serve as the protype for both rock operas specifically and megamusicals overall?  Our sermon will be begin shortly, no this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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It is 1432 and the small, medieval French village is abuzz.  There’s a travelling theater troupe and they’re going to perform what is, far and away, the most exciting show the town will ever see.  It happens every year, but only once a year, and everyone – from the smallest child to the oldest farmer – is going to see it.  It’s like a modern musical; you’ve seen it before, but the performance itself is so spectacular you see it again.

The crowd is absolutely alight before the show even starts.  There is energy and chatter; think of a heavy metal concert crossed with a soccer match.  And it’s a heavy metal show with a huge amount of fake blood.  There’s man who gets lashed over and over, his side is pierced with a spear, nails are driven through his hands, thorns are dragged over his scalp.  His tormenters take turns pulling out his beard until his flesh comes off with it.

This tale, gory as it is, does come from original source material.  But there is one key change.  In the original version, the people killing this poor victim are Roman soldiers.  In this play, they are Jews.  And it’s not hard to tell they are Jewish – the features of the performers are grossly exaggerated so everyone, including those small children, can tell who they are.  They live on the edge of the village and you’d never hire them to work for you, but they never go away, either.

The crowd is pumped by the action.  The tormenters are pure evil; the victim is pure good.  This is a passion play of Christ, and Judas the villain is portrayed so convincingly, and his identity is so linked to his race, that everyone knows what to do when the show is over.  They move as a vigilante mob to the Jewish sections and dispense street punishments for these children of Judas, beating them, breaking their possessions, burning what they can, and of course a few will die actual deaths to atone for the staged death that everyone has just witnessed.  It will happen this year.  It happened last year.  It will happen next year.  This is just how the village celebrates the miracle of Easter.  But looking back over history, it’s not hard to conclude that this was less a celebration of Jesus than a condemnation of Judas, a man who’s name is synonymous with betrayal, a man who bears the most hated name in all of western history.

Eight centuries later two Anglicans would take up the story again, with modern and elaborate staging, but with two important differences.  Their story would include music, and their story would be told from the perspective of Judas.  

They couldn’t be more opposite in their sympathies, but neither the passion plays of the middle ages nor the modern rock opera JCS are the Biblical story of Judas – and maybe, neither one could be.  

What is the Biblical story of Judas?  It is NOT the same in all of the gospels…and a large chunk of what is considered the Judas story was added after the Bible canon was written.  What was the historical Judas, who was the Judas in the Bible, how does all that connect to JCS, and what does it tell us about life and theater?  We’ll take our own reflective walk through Gethsemane together on this episode of THM. 

[footnotes in episode 24]

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The year is 1525 and William Tyndale is doing what nobody has done before…he has translated the Bible from Latin to English.  This as not well received; the church condemned the book, and one Bishop Tunstall bought all available copies and publicly burned them.  Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic.  The English government had sent agents out for his arrest.

That did not end matters for Tyndale.  He roamed the continent staying where it was safe for 10 years, spending much time in Antwerp.  But then, in 1535, he was betrayed by Henry Phillips who turned him over to church authorities.  He could be put to death by the secular state if was a deemed a heretic, but he could be spared if he proved to the church that he was not.

He had no illusions.  The trial would be for show.  He spent 18 months in the Filford prison in Brussels, where he prepared his statements and continued to translate.  And what a process it was.  His prosecutor was the Roman Catholic inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus, gave him the opportunity to write a book stating his views; Latomus wrote a book in response to convince him of his errors; Tyndale wrote two in reply; Latomus wrote two further books in response to Tyndale. Latomus' three books were subsequently published as one volume: in these it can be seen that the discussion on heresy revolves around the contents of three other books Tyndale had written on topics like justification by faith, free will, the denial of the soul, and so on. See Latomus' report of Tyndale's beliefs below. Latomus makes no mention of Bible translation; indeed, it seems that in prison, Tyndale was allowed to continue making translations from the Hebrew.

He was not specifically accused of heresy for his translations; he did not recant or seriously contest the rest of the charges against him.  He was condemned.

In October of 1536 he was led to a town square where a circle of stakes surrounded the place of execution.  He was offered one more chance to recant.  His words were, instead, defiant: “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

He was burned at the stake, but not burned alive.  He was given the courtesy of being strangled to death before his body was lit on fire.

This ended the life of a Luthern, reformer, and first translator of the Bible to the English language.  Be careful when you mess with the ineffable word of God.  For hundred and fifty years later two other Englishman would be even more bold: they would take the Biblical story of the crucifixtion, put it to music, and open it on Broadway.  Nobody was going to strangle them, but the heart of the matter remained the same: Were mere mortals allowed to re-translate and re-interpret the Bible, outside the sanction of an official church?   To know what’s OK and what isn’t, don’t we need to know how the Bible get translated in the first place, and who decides what goes into it?  In the words of Barnett College Biblical scholar Indiana Jones, only the penitent man shall pass.  We humble ourselves in this episode of THM.

[References and bibliography for the Superstar series are in this episode]

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I have promised that this podcast will explore the lessons that different shows have for theater and for life, and to explore the unexpected and unlikely connections the bring cross human lives on the plane of theater.  To help me better understand all that, I reached out to the internet to ask, anyone who was willing, to share with me what made their favorite show work.  That’s it – not anything deep or all that philosophical, just why Phanton of the Opera drew you in.

What I got back was so, so much more.  What kind of people are drawn to musical theater?  How does it affect them?  How does musical theater fit into a human life?  And how are those lives changed?  In ways that I, at least, could never have imagined.  I imagined I was asking what made a show your favorite form of entertainment, and what I learned is how it could change your life forever.  And that, my friends, may be the greatest theater mystery of all.  I will be your spirit guide today, on a totally different episode of Theater History and Mysteries. 

Holli performing at the white party.  A second image.

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I am writing this on Father’s Day, 2025, and to mark this occasion I will share my greatest parenting victory.  Last spring, during Taylor Swift’s eras Tour my daughter did all the things one does to try to get a ticket.  Tried the presale, pre-registered, looked at the fan resale sites, looked at the predatory reseller sites, put alerts on all her accounts.  But, no dice.  The only tickets that were available were well out of our price range.

And then, 2 days before the last concert in LA, a family friend found tickets we could – barely – afford, and asked if our daughter wanted to join.  Sending the text message announcing that she had tickets made me feel like the parent of the year and, undoubtedly, badly interrupted her AP English class.

And so, with 48 hours to go, my daughter came home, disappeared into her room, and took to her homework like any good AP student would and announced that she needed to make sure that she had memorized every song that was on the set list, plus every song that might be one of the two “surprise” songs that Swift added to each concert performance.  If there was any song, in any format, that Taylor Swift had ever recorded, my daughter was going to make sure that she could sing along with it word for word at the concert.

When she came home, she described the experience as a “fever dream.”

Ms. Swift, if you are out there listening to this podcast, or more likely the lectures I have uploaded to YouTube on advanced linear multiple regression heterogeneity tests, I just want you to know that you made my daughter’s year.

So imagine my surprise when I was researching this episode, asked her what she thought of “beautiful ghosts.”  To my stunned amazement, she had never heard of it.  Ever.  Beautiful ghosts is the original song that Taylor Swift had recorded for the fraught, and failed, CGI animated version of Cats.

How is it possible to make a show with a budget that large, with an all-star cast, including the single most popular entertainer on the face of the planet earth (who can date whoever she wants but should really be cheering for Justin Herbert and the San Diego Chargers) – how can you put together a production with every single bit of mass marketed momentum going for it, and end up with a flop?  That is a more commercial but harder to untangle mystery than most that we’ve dealt with, and we’ll be watching it from the cheap seats in this episode of THM.

Show watching

https://www.broadwayleague.com/research/statistics-broadway-nyc/

Musical artist net worth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_artists_by_net_worth

The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber

https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/prepare-for-yet-another-very-andrew-lloyd-webber-summer

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