In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner offers commentary on the two best-selling plays on record, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Hamilton. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner examines how the Anglo-American world’s favorite orphans play at home, adopted, as it were, from the stage to the page

Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel

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Linfield College DigitalCommons@Linfield Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works 10-28-2016 Harry Potter and Hamilton from the Stage to the Page Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Linfield College, dpollac@linfield.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs  Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, and the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons DigitalCommons@Linfield Citation Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel, "Harry Potter and Hamilton from the Stage to the Page" (2016). Faculty Publications. Published Version. Submission 70. https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs/70 This Published Version is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It is brought to you for free via open access, courtesy of DigitalCommons@Linfield, with permission from the rights-holder(s). Your use of this Published Version must comply with the Terms of Use for material posted in DigitalCommons@Linfield, or with other stated terms (such as a Creative Commons license) indicated in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, or if you have questions about permitted uses, please contact digitalcommons@linfield.edu. “HARRY POTTER” AND “HAMILTON” FROM THESTAGE TO THE PAGE10.28.2016Move over, Shakespeare. The best-selling play on record is the script of the Londontheater smash Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was published as the latestinstallment of J. K. Rowling’s wizard saga this summer. In its first week, the scriptwhizzed past the cumulative sales for the previously top-ranked Romeo and Juliet,making it the fastest-selling title in almost a decade. Not far behind comes the libretto for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway musical, Hamilton, leading Amazon’s theater list. (Hamletlags a distant sixth.) The two shows are sold out well into the next presidential administration.BY DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNERBut millions of readers who haven’t picked up a play since The Crucible in ninth-gradeEnglish are now getting another cursed child script and another colonial American dramadelivered by Amazon’s overnight owls to their doorstep. So how do Harry and Hamilton—theAnglo-American world’s favorite orphans—play at home, adopted from the stage to the page?Both books try to navigate the difficulty of appealing to their ardent fandoms throughunfamiliar media, and they do so by summoning and repurposing the expectations of theiraudiences. It’s tricky, though, to apply novel-reading norms to plays, or cast-albumconventions to an annotated script. Skillfully marketed, with a careful manipulation of theirliterary lineage, these books seem canny about the ways they hope to control their interpretivecommunities.For a start, they both trade on genre confusion. Although a gold banner on the cover ofHarry Potter and the Cursed Child reads “Special Rehearsal Edition Script,” it’s designed tolook like an eighth Harry Potter novel, hardbound (unlike most scripts) with a dust jacket thatadvertises “The Eighth Story. Nineteen Years Later.” Story time doesn’t quite map ontopublication time; it’s only been nine years since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallowsappeared. But that culminating volume’s epilogue becomes the play’s starting scene, whereHarry, now a middle-aged minister, encourages his son to run through the King’s CrossStation wall to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. It’s a parallel for the readers who grew upwith Rowling’s novels (myself included) and are now trying to lure their kids onto theHogwarts Express. The show’s creators (Rowling shaped the story with Jack Thorne, whowrote the script, and John Tiffany, who directed the production) stated their wish that it willturn a new audience on to theater just as the books enticed a generation to read. Scholasticevidently hopes the script will do the same for young readers unaccustomed to stagedirections.Will these young readers be hooked? The plot twists as breathlessly as ever; thecharacters, new and old, hew agreeably to type; the dialogue is serviceable; emotions run theadolescent gamut. But the selling point of the show is its spectacular magic, and that’s wherethings get complicated. “I’d just write it on a page and make John [Tiffany, the director] do it,”the playwright, Jack Thorne, explained. “And he does.” (Reviews concur.) But how do we asreaders experience the show’s special effects? Let’s take a look at a stage direction from thescript that has come in for some derision: “This is chaos. This is magic. This is St. Oswald’sHome for Old Witches and Wizards and it is as wonderful as you might hope.” Is it, though?The script’s gushy abstractions seem to substitute for the precise descriptions—those found inRowling’s novels—that would conjure chaos or magic or wonder in our minds.The Harry Potter Shop at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, 2016. Photograph by Madeley / FlickrThis sense of inadequacy, however, stems from a category mistake. Elaine Scarry hasdistinguished between forms of art that give us “immediate sensory content” (painting, music,the Harry Potter films), forms that provide “instructions for the production of actual sensorycontent” (a written musical score, say), and—one step more removed—forms that offer“instructions for how to imagine” the sensory world (the realm of fiction and poetry).  Adescription that suggests a place “as wonderful as you might hope” looks like an impoverishedversion of the third category: a fiction with meager instructions for imagination, full of deicticphrases (“This is …”) that point to a world we can’t see. But it really falls in the secondcategory: in a rehearsal script, stage directions yield instructions for the director and designersto produce a sensory world. The second-person “you” who might “hope” isn’t you, the reader;it’s the director (though it’s hard to shake the sense that it’s also you, the tantalized ticketbuyer). “Plays are like sheet music, meant to be sung,” the playwright Thorne has tweeted.Harry Potter and the Cursed Child isn’t a bad novel. It’s just packaged to look like one.If Cursed Child is a script masquerading as a novel, then Hamilton: The Revolution isa novel disguised as a script—a bildungsroman chronicling the growth of the show’s subject(the “Founding Father without a father”), its author, its form, and even its nation. The bookframes Miranda’s lyrics with astute essays by the cultural critic Jeremy McCarter and revealing1annotations by Miranda himself that together narrate the genesis of the hip-hop musicalalongside the historical revolution it retells. “It’s not a metaphor to call a play like Hamilton aliving, changing thing,” McCarter insists, “It has the same surprising life as a baby, or a newnation.”Part of the surprise of the musical—in the theater and on the chart-topping castalbum—comes from hearing 18th-century statesmen swagger like young MCs. (ThomasJefferson, riffing on the Declaration of Independence in “Cabinet Battle #1”: “These are wisewords, enterprising men quote ’em. / Don’t act surprised, you guys, cuz I wrote ’em.”) Thebook inverts this convention, documenting the origin story of a 21st-century show in the formof an 18th-century volume: leather binding, deckled edges, and chapter titles out of Tom Jonesor Thomas Paine (Ch. I: “On the Origins of Revolution, Both National & Musical, withReference to Opening Numbers & White House Raps”). This double exposure, mapping thepresent onto the past, also shines through luscious production photos that showcaseHamilton’s own visual effects: the black, Latino, and Asian-American actors who reclaimAmerican history onstage in Paul Tazewell’s colonial costumes. “Period from the neck down,”as McCarter puts it, “modern from the neck up.”Critics have debated just how revolutionary the show’s politics of racial and genderrepresentation really are. If you’re inclined to see Hamilton as a brilliant Broadwaybromance that treats the Founding Fathers as a hetero band of hip-hop brothers, you won’t bedissuaded by McCarter’s account of the guys behind the scenes, from the all-male productionteam that Miranda dubbed his “Cabinet” to his nearly all-male creative influences. But thebook makes a good case for the revolution of Hamilton’s lyrics, which transform the showbizlegacies that Miranda has inherited and cultivated. A bildungsroman needs a family tree, andMcCarter supplies one. “The four grandparents of the show,” he explains, quoting the directorTommy Kail, “are Sweeney Todd, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and Gypsy”: a pair of StephenSondheim’s antihero librettos embracing two of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s faux-historical scores.If Broadway in the late 1970s and ’80s was divided between Lloyd Webber’s British popanthems and Sondheim’s dissonant New York sophistication, then it seems that Miranda—born in 1980—fathered the love child to heal the rift.“HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSEDCHILD” ISN’T A BAD NOVEL. IT’S JUSTPACKAGED TO LOOK LIKE ONE.But while Miranda’s cast recording was inspired by sung-through concept albums likeSuperstar, the origins of the book stem from Jay-Z’s memoir-cum-explication, Decoded, andSondheim’s two volumes of essays and annotated lyrics, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made aHat. (When Miranda won his first Tony Award in 2008, for the score of In the Heights, hefreestyled: “Mr. Sondheim, look, I made a hat—where there never was a hat! It’s a Latin hat atthat!”) Miranda’s annotations continue Jay-Z’s project to legitimate hip-hop as a literary artform as complex as a sonnet, while testing Sondheim’s notoriously prescriptive account ofwhat the best lyricists do.  (Sondheim denounced imperfect rhymes, for instance, as “jugglingclumsily” with pop music’s “vagueness and fuzziness”; whereas “in the theater,” he claimed,“true rhyme works best on every level.”)  You can see the debate play out when Mirandaglosses Hamilton’s couplet on the eve of revolution, “Then I remember my Eliza’s expectingme … / Not only that, my Eliza’s expecting.” Miranda explains, “This is the kind of thing thathappens in hip-hop but not so much in musical theater: breaking the rhyme scheme tohighlight a different meaning of the word. Musical theater purists may scoff, but I love thatHamilton’s soliloquy here leads him to maturity.” He seems to be saying: slow down,Sondheim, this is a shift in genre, not a lapse in craft.Both books’ implied conversation, however, runs less between stage and page, orbetween musicals and hip-hop, than between web and print. Cursed Child and Hamiltonpresent authorized, merchandized, hardcover versions of discourses that float for free online.Rowling’s new story is only one Harry Potter follow-up among a flood of fan fictions availableon sites like FictionAlley, MuggleNet, and Archive Of Our Own. (The latter offers 106,411entries from Potter fandom to date.) Unlike many popular authors, Rowling hassanctioned readers who spin their own stories with her characters, as long as their writing stays“non-commercial.” Harry Potter and online fandom may have been linked at birth.Cursed Child, however, invokes the counterfactual energy of fan fiction and yet alsocurtails it. The plot hinges on a magical “Time-Turner” that allows Harry’s son to travel backto Hogwarts in his father’s era in the hope of correcting his mistakes. It’s a joy ride forMillennial readers, although tampering with the past leads, as usual, to unpredictable shifts inthe present. This setup taps the excitement of the alternate scenarios so common in online fanfiction: What if Harry’s son fell in love with the son of his nemesis, Draco Malfoy? (Same-sexromance is by far the most popular subject for fic.) What if Voldemort fathered a child? Whatif Hermione never married Ron and became a guerrilla warrior instead? (Casting a blackactress, Noma Dumezweni, as Hermione in the London production confirmed a long-standingfan theory about her race, though the character is given so little to do that fans’ enthusiasm, aswell their outrage, seem a tad overblown.) But the script turns the existence of alternateuniverses into a nightmare that the plot has to remedy. The characters channel their energyinto restoring the world as Rowling originally left it, as if to say: Didn’t you prefer thecanonical version after all?Because the cautionary fan parable is wrapped in a reassuring quest for understandingbetween father and son, mirroring the generational divide of its target audience, the lessongoes down easily. But it seems nevertheless rather punitive in its treatment of the desire to playwith Rowling’s authorized world. On the book’s cover, the marquee names—“Harry Potter”and “J. K. Rowling”—appear in parallel large type, whereas “Cursed Child” and “John Tiffany& Jack Thorne” are printed in smaller type below, as though the truly foul offspring were23misbegotten spinoffs. (Tiffany and Thorne had previously collaborated on well-regarded stageversion of the Swedish teen vampire film Let the Right One In, so presumably they werethought to know how to handle adolescent fantasy.)Fans who attend the London show are issued buttons that read #KeepTheSecrets,simultaneously an invitation to an online hashtag community as well as a caution againstspoiling the official word. Miranda, an avowed Potterhead and Twitter maven, posted his own#KeepTheSecrets selfie outside the Palace Theatre, but the motto of #Hamilfans seems morelike #SpillTheBeans. In the spirit of fandom, Miranda announced that he had plantedallusions throughout his lyrics, “Easter eggs” for fans to track down. “I don’t want to givethem away,” he said, “because I feel like Rap Genius is going to have a field day finding them.”If you visit the Hamilton page on the Rap Genius site—where lyrics are annotatedcollaboratively—you can see the result: thousands of notes citing chapter and verse from MobbDeep, Les Miserables, and Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography. There are even several notesby Miranda himself, who seems to have overcome his spoiler scruples. The published#Hamiltome (as fans dubbed it) supplies many annotations that hadn’t appeared online,though fans are now posting Miranda’s printed additions, too. Internet genres, in turn, findtheir way into the form of the Hamiltome, which reprints several of Miranda’s tweets, Googlechats, and email exchanges as primary sources for the musical’s creation. An entertainingchapter about Alex Lacamoire’s orchestration techniques—including a few Beatles guitarchords for King George III—is illustrated with a backstage snapshot of Sir Paul McCartneyhimself, arms draped around Lacamoire and Miranda. It’s as though we’ve become Miranda’sonline followers, flipping through his Instagram feed.You could also see the Hamiltome itself as a kind of Harry Potter fan fiction. In hisnotes, Miranda reveals that the image in his head for the opening number, when Hamiltonbegins to plan his education, “is of Harry Potter finding out he’s a wizard”; he describesHamilton’s first encounter with Burr as “basically Harry Potter meeting Draco Malfoy beforemeeting his real friends.” But the volume is really a three-pound, 30 dollar monument toHamilfandom, just as Cursed Child is a commodity wrapped as a gift for fans who don’t needa Time-Turner to recall the role that Neville Longbottom played at the Battle of Hogwarts.Over the past year, since I saw the musical on Broadway, I’ve ridden the waves ofHamilton obsession: the hype, the hyper-hype, the backlash, the backlash to the backlash. AndI still can’t resist the punning rhymes in lines like the insults Hamilton spits at John Adams:“You nuisance with no sense! / You will die of irrelevance! / Go ahead: You can call me theDevil / You aspire to my level, / You aspire to malevolence!” Miranda can’t resist either,cheering from the margins that “The wordplay in this is just so much fun.” McCarter,Miranda’s Boswell, claims that his essays will show that the musical’s triumph, like theAmerican Revolution itself, was not “inevitable.” Yet his narrative tone is so triumphalist that,for an era of Federalists and Democratic Republicans, it seems downright Whiggish. Thatdiatribe against Adams—based on a lengthy pamphlet Hamilton actually published—was cutfrom the Broadway show, a choice that McCarter says “demonstrates Hamilton’s lack ofdiscipline and Lin and Tommy’s abundance of it.” But the decision to slip the rap back intothe book slightly weakens this claim. Instead it seems as though fandom trumped discipline—or rather, it’s the readers who have to become disciples.BOTH WORKS RESOLVE THEIR FAMILYROMANCES IN A PLURALISTIC POLITYWHERE ORPHAN IMMIGRANTS AREEMBRACED AND PUREBLOOD DIE-HARDSARE DEFEATED.Like the Harry Potter rehearsal script, which includes material that would likely be cutor revised in production, the backstage drama of the Hamilton book shows the gap betweentext and performance. In a way, though, the sensory deprivation of the books allows us tomake more sense of the shows’ popularity, to step back from their theatrical thrills so we canconsider their position within our culture. McCarter encourages this broader perspective,bracketing his essays on Hamilton’s rise with two appearances by President Obama himself:first, when the president cheered from the audience as Miranda performed the nascent versionof his opening Hamilton rap at a White House evening in 2009; and later, when Obamaaddressed the cast on Broadway to celebrate its representation of popular change and nationalunity for a Democratic Party fundraiser in 2015. “The Obama presidency will end in January2017, but the show that shares so much of its spirit will keep running,” McCarter prophesies.He envisions a political future conditioned by Hamilton’s success, much as Cursed Child mapsout future narratives to continue Rowling’s reign. Both works resolve their family romances ina pluralistic polity where the legacies of orphan immigrants—like Hamilton—are embraced,racist threats from pureblood die-hards—like Voldemort’s minions—are defeated, andMiranda and Rowling are canonized.Currently, the reach of the books exceeds that of the shows. While the scripts havebecome transatlantic reading phenomena, the performances are still confined within nationalboundaries. What will happen next year when the shows transfer, when Harry Potter’salternate realities confront America after Obama and Hamilton’s pro-immigrant spectacle hitspost-Brexit Britain? Just you wait.  Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 6. 1.  Jay-Z, Decoded (Spiegel & Grau, 2010), p. 26. 2.  Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat (Knopf, 2010), p. xxvi-xxvii. 3. © 2018 PUBLIC BOOKS.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDFeatured image: The President greets the cast and crew of “Hamilton” after seeing the play with his daughters at theRichard Rodgers Theatre in New York City, 2015. Photograph by Pete Souza / White House#DRAMA #FICTION #HISTORY #MULTICULTURALISM #NONFICTION #POLITICS #THEATERON THE TABLEHarry Potter and the Cursed ChildStory by J.  K.  Rowling,  John Tiffany,  andJack ThornePlay by Jack ThorneArthur A.  Levine / Scholast ic,  2016Hamilton: The RevolutionLin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarterGrand Central  Publ ishing,  2016TM

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\u3cem\u3eHarry Potter\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eHamilton\u3c/em\u3e from the Stage to the Page

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