Dear White Performers, Let's Not Audition With That Song From 'Hamilton'
(©Joan Marcus)
Casey Nabors
As many places slowly open up again, you will likely see more community theatres coming out of the woodwork with audition events for their remaining shows of the season. With so many great contemporary shows out there, it’s hard to resist the temptation to use a more modern musical song for your next audition.
And for the most part, you don’t have to resist- unless, of course, you’re a white person who wants to sing something from Hamilton (or any show that’s about the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color(BIPOC) experience).
If you’ve been living under a rock and somehow still don’t know what Hamilton is, it’s a sung-through 2016 musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda that details the life of Alexander Hamilton and the people that were most influential to him. What makes this show unique and brilliant is its utilization of BIPOC talents: instead of casting for historical accuracy by simply making every character white, every principal character (save for King George III) is written to be BIPOC.
Hamilton was written by BIPOC, for BIPOC, using the backdrop of the founding fathers to empower groups of marginalized people who, historically, did not reap the benefits of forming the United States.
Looking at the musical through its intended lens, nearly every song, even those that appear to evoke universal experiences such as “Burn,” are coded specifically for the BIPOC experience and therefore cannot be adequately or appropriately expressed by non-BIPOC.
Hamilton is an incredibly popular musical with a strong audience made up of all races and ethnicities, and while it’s acceptable (and encouraged!) for white people to consume and support art made by BIPOC, it’s not okay to take that art and use it for our own agendas.
There’s nothing wrong with singing along to Hamilton on your car ride or jamming out to it with your friends, but when it comes to publicly performing musical theatre in any capacity, it is our responsibility as non-BIPOC to select appropriate music.
For years, musical theatre has been white-centric, so we have hundreds and hundreds of song snippets to choose from. And all contemporary pieces certainly aren’t off-limits; so long as a song wasn’t coded to be sung specifically by a BIPOC, it’s fair game. But the purpose of Hamilton is to showcase the POC experience, and the same can be said of such musicals as The Color Purple, In The Heights, and others.
As white people we do not know their lived experiences on the same level; it is something we have literally never experienced and will likely never experience. To take a song that was very obviously not written for us, even just a short snippet for an audition is just another microaggression within the theatre world that we need to learn to stop doing.
If you think it would be ridiculous for a white girl to audition with a Maria snippet from West Side Story or a white boy to audition with a Seaweed snippet from Hairspray, then this same concept should be easy to grasp if a white person were to walk into an audition room with intentions to sing “Burn” or “Dear Theodosia.”
When we elect to publicly perform songs intentionally written for BIPOC, we communicate that the literal hundreds of other song options simply aren’t good enough for us and we can do whatever we want at the expense of BIPOC, whose lived experiences are told through these shows. And to be frank, that’s just shitty. Skipping “My Shot” as your go-to audition piece in favor of something else is just one small change you can make as a white person working against racism in theatre, but it does make a difference.
So while you’re looking through potential songs to sing for your next audition (which I know we’re all dying to get to, we all miss theatre!), maybe (definitely) pass on literally any song that was written for a BIPOC character, which rules out basically all of Hamilton.
Unless, of course, you’re going to sing any variation of King George’s “You’ll Be Back” melody, in which case, go for it.