Hamilton Exhibition - Post One - Before the Show

I'm a huge fan of musicals.  Not just a few of them; most of them.  And Hamilton has been the best thing I have seen in decades!  I'm a huge fan.  I've seen the Chicago show twice and I used carefully curated bits from it when I was teaching 5th grade language arts as a common text for the class.

So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that when I had the chance to go to "Hamilton: The Exhibition" on opening day, I jumped on it.

I even took a gamble on getting a VIP ticket even though absolutely nowhere on the internet could you find what that meant.  So here's what a VIP ticket gets you:

• Untimed entry on the day of your ticket.  Show up when you want, join the existing line and head in, even if it's not in the half-hour bracket your ticket shows.
• A coffee mug.  Either the black one or the white one.  They both look amazing, but I've been told not to put either in the dishwasher, so mine will probably end up being a pen cup on my desk at work or something.

That's all.  It's not a ridiculously huge charge for the upgraded ticket, but at least now it's out there what you get for that upgrade.

I went on the first day on the off-hand chance that Lin-Manuel Miranda would come to kick everything off.

Luckily enough... he did!  I went early to see if he'd stand on the steps and speak for a few minutes.  He did not.  What he did do... was hand out free Hamilton-inspired donuts.

He literally ran past the line, with the local t.v. crews chasing him and ducked into the donut truck.  But to be fair, I don't think he was just dodging the crowd; he may have just been freaking freezing cold because despite this being on April 27th, we ended up getting about 3 inches of snow by the end of the day.

He said 'hi' and whatnot to people, but he really didn't talk much more than, "Here, want a donut? Thanks for coming out."  

 

So I got my donut, thanked him for choosing Chicago and went to get in line.

This is Angelica, the security girl at the door.  I can only imagine the number of variations of "Are you satisfied?" this poor girl had to hear by the end of the day.

  

 Oh, and Macey Hensley was here and she recorded a bit with Lin for the Ellen show.

So then we cued up outside for a security check before we came in and then we cued up inside.  While you're in line you get your magic audio tour lanyard.  Very lightweight, but they caution you repeatedly that if you don't wear it face out and outside your jacket or whatever, it may not always kick in on the automatic signals.  

There were two types of signals - automatic ones (which could scare the crap out of you when you went from a really, really quiet gallery into the next gallery and all of a sudden Lin-Manuel Miranda is in your ear, often very loud and very animated) and ones where you had to aim your little box at the display and hit the button and it would then kick in the narration.  

Mine was a little hinkey and often stuttered through the first five or six seconds on a loop before giving me the rest of the piece.  You also had to get really close to the signal box to get it to kick in, which could be a bit tricky in a really congested gallery.

Okay, my next post will be about the way the galleries were set up, the themes and the one little glitch that periodically drove the English teacher in me buggy.  A few sneak preview shots...