This one is about musicals – but it’s about more than that. It’s about how our collective psyche needs to gather around campfires and hear stories about heroes: it’s about our need to be reminded of the importance of the hero’s quest.
But I’m ahead of myself.
I’m guessing you’re sad that Hamilton is in lockdown. I am. But maybe you don’t really care.
I guess there are two types of people in the world.
Some of us believe in musical theatre. Others of us roll our eyes at the implausibility of adults breaking into song in the middle of everyday life.
I’m a deep believer.
My life is punctuated by watching the Sound of Music again and again and I am thoroughly committed to Maria’s quest to have a heart that beats like the wings of a bird in flight and laughs like a brook as it trips and falls. Maria must bring music to the world.
Theologically, I am actually a believer in this.
Hearing in the theme of singing in Isaiah and the practice of singing in the Psalms that singing is actually a God-given way of expressing our deepest convictions.
She must leave the restrictions of a convent and face monsters: a militaristic father and naughty children. Act I is about her triumph with music against these monsters and then, Act II is about the whole family using music to triumph over Nazism.
Critics tell us that musicals generally involve the protagonist singing a quest song early in the piece.
Among the many layers of plot in Les Miserables, Jean Valjean must come to terms with his identity: Who am I? An escaped convict or a redeemed man?
Some critics thought musicals would die out but Disney animation kept them alive and a little lion sang his quest: I just can’t wait to be king.
Apparently, Elsa was meant to be a straightforward villain until someone wrote Let It Go and her quest to make sense of her frightening gifts and her identity meant she now had a quest and had to be woven back into the story in a more heroic way.
Even when you do the cut-and-paste of Abba’s back catalogue to hobble together a plot, Sophie sings I Have a Dream and perhaps the three strange men who turn up in her life, like unknown monsters, she must face if she is to arrive at self-knowledge.
COVID gave Pippin a stop-start and masked season in Sydney recently. This 1970s musical has the show-stopping song Corner of the Sky:
Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky
It’s one of my favourites when I’m in the car by myself. And the passion of the song can actually help me to articulate in prayer:
What am I longing for at the moment?
Why do I feel displaced and disconnected?
How can I set aside my quest for a corner of the sky?
For a quest that’s more truly connected to the fact that the heavens are there to declare the glory of God, the sky is not for me to find my place but to proclaim the works of God.
The musical is postmodern in its impulses
The quest is make explicit: Pippin tries power, sex, religion, domesticity and is tempted to suicide. We see our own lives and ambitions lived out before us and the watching of the show is a moral tale that encourages us and warns us about the quests that drive our lives.
The original 1970s version ends with a slightly cynical resignation that makes us wonder if anyone is a hero. And the latest version ends with the quest being passed down the generations in a menacing way.
No generation of human beings seems to be content.
And locked down Hamilton. We fist pump and stand with Hamilton I am not throwing away my shot. I am not wasting my life.
This musical’s postmodern turn is to remind us that the hero is not just a white male. And maybe the hero of Hamilton’s life is Eliza, and she is given the last word.
I want to return to the Hero Quest later this year.
But, for all its problems, the hero quest is not illegitimate.
We can take up the hero quest selfishly cynically. We can reshape it into an excuse for sinful self-assertion. Sure.
But in a life informed by the narrative of the gospel, we have a race to run, we’re surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, we have to run with determination with the energy of a protagonist singing their quest song.
Will you run with determination (and singing) the race set before you?