The Heights of Stupidity

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

 

When they were lampooned in the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not stage a Catholic League–style tantrum but instead took out a series of wry advertisements in the playbill, inviting theater-goers to receive a copy of the Mormon scriptures. “You’ve seen the play, now read the book,” read one ad, while another advised: “Our version is sliiiightly different.”

 

I thought conservatives missed a similar opportunity with Hamilton, the most patriotic thing on Broadway since George M. Cohan was belting out “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Somebody should have left copies of The Federalist Papers under the theater seats or something like that. Alexander Hamilton’s patriotism was not the mawkish kind — it was the mature and wary kind: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” This is, I think, still true.

 

Hamilton is famous for its casting. The founding fathers are played mostly by black and brown actors, while King George III provides the show’s most prominent white face. This choice was, in some circles, controversial. (Not at National Review: Rick Brookhiser, in his review of the show, notes that its “incongruous” casting “makes us consider paths marked out but not yet taken.”) Entertainment-industry unions objected to casting calls specifying a desire for nonwhite actors, and at least one civil-rights lawyer argued that Hamilton’s producers were breaking the law.

 

The issue of “representation” in entertainment most often is approached primitively and stupidly — I can report with all humility that when I see Peter O’Toole on screen, I do not think to myself, “Now, there goes a man who reminds me of me!” — but Hamilton’s heart was in the right place, and so was its brain: It was an invitation for African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants to see themselves as part of the genuinely glorious American story, to understand themselves as inheritors of a great tradition that is not, whatever the professors might say, the exclusive patrimony of a handful of dead white men and their heirs.

 

Lin-Manuel Miranda is now the subject of criticism that is sometimes withering and often perplexing, and again the controversy revolves around casting: The film of his musical In the Heights has a cast full of Latinos, but they are — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — the wrong kind of Latinos. The actors cast in the film are, the critics insist, fairer-skinned than the average resident of Washington Heights, a mostly Dominican neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. The leads are mostly not Dominican or from the neighborhood: Anthony Ramos of Brooklyn is of Puerto Rican background, Corey Hawkins is an African American from Washington, D.C., Olga Merediz is a Cuban American born in Guantánamo, Melissa Barrera is a Mexican from Monterrey, Daphne Rubin-Vega was born in Panama City, etc.

 

Using the ridiculous, voguish language of contemporary progressive politics, Julissa Contreras and Dash Harris Machado complain in the Washington Post: “The deprioritization of lived and racialized experiences in favor of a nonexistent mono-cultural ‘Latinidad’ has no function beyond fantasy. How can we honor those who came before us and risked everything to exist despite the challenge of erasure?” Indeed — who among us has not had the identical thought?

 

“The issue is dishonesty,” the authors insist. “Washington Heights is home to a population of mostly dark-skinned Black Dominicans.” That is true. It is also true that “colorism” is a force in much of Latin America and the Caribbean. (Maybe Contreras and Machado should try writing a musical about that.) It is also true that the constitutional convention was not exactly jam-packed with brown and black delegates, as it is in Hamilton. And West Side Story’s original Maria was Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko to immigrant parents who most definitely were not from Puerto Rico. Kelly Macdonald was great in No Country for Old Men even though she comes from the Scottish part of West Texas and spends the movie talking like she developed her accent by studying reruns of Mama’s Family. (There has been a spate of movies set in West Texas in recent years, and Tommy Lee Jones can’t play all the roles, hard as he may try.) When’s the last time you saw a Macbeth who was actually Scottish? (Alan Cumming, I suppose, in his sort-of Macbeth.) When’s the last time you saw a prestigious/gritty American drama in which half the actors weren’t British?

 

In Hamilton, the casting of nonwhite actors in the roles of famous white men served a particular artistic end for a story whose subject is, in part, Americanness. The relatively light complexion of the cast of In the Heights presumably is not self-consciously programmatic in that way, which is what upsets the critics, who insist that Miranda et al. have committed some kind of moral offense by putting forward a less particularistic vision of Latinoness: “generic Latinidad” as Frances Negrón-Muntaner called it in The New Yorker. This is ultimately ridiculous: 16th-century Verona was more ethnically homogeneous than Washington Heights, but nobody thinks twice about casting non-Italians in Romeo and Juliet (not that William Shakespeare’s fantastical “Italy” had much of anything to do with the real thing in any case), just as nobody who isn’t insane gets bent out of shape when the Royal Shakespeare Company relocates Julius Caesar to an imaginary African setting or Ralph Fiennes takes Coriolanus to the Balkans. On the other hand, there are those among us who insist that Ben Kingsley’s performance in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi must be retroactively declared a crime against humanity: The fair-skinned actor is only half-Gujarati and had his face darkened with makeup in some scenes.

 

The Book of Mormon wasn’t the first or last word about Mormons, Julius Caesar wasn’t the final word on Julius Caesar, and part of the interest of Hamilton comes from the fact that it is only one story in a rich narrative tradition, engaged in a kind of conversation with the other stories in that tradition. Lin-Manuel Miranda has earned the right to tell his stories his way, even if he hasn’t quite discovered the courage to say as much without reservation or apology. It is a remarkable feature of our time that someone with Miranda’s success allows himself to be pushed around by nobodies. For comparison, consider George M. Cohan, responding to a critic at Life magazine:

 

I write my own songs because I write better songs than anyone else I know of. I publish these songs because they bring greater royalties than any other class of music sold in this country. I write my own plays because I have not yet seen or read plays from the pens of other authors that seem as good as the plays I write. I produce my own plays because I think I’m as good a theatrical manager as any other man in this line. I dance because I know I’m the best dancer in the country. I sing because I can sing my own songs better than any other man on the stage. I write these little stories because I think I write them better than other writers of stories. I play leading parts in most of my plays because I think I’m the best actor available. I pay myself the biggest salary ever paid a song and dance comedian because I know I deserve it. But believe me, kind reader, when I say, I am not an egotist.

 

Cohan was a Yankee doodle dandy, born on the Fourth of July, even if he was, in reality, an Irish-Catholic vaudevillian born on July 3 — an artist may take liberties. He knew how to put on a show, and he lived in less unforgiving times.