“It gets kids looking at a historical document and thinking about it in a whole new way,” he said. That’s precisely the purpose of the program, it seems. “One of our teachers who didn’t go on the trip has been having her students write songs based on the ‘Hamilton’ website,” he said. In the weeks since the field trip, there’s been a “ripple effect,” as he put it, throughout the school - and it wasn’t just Marangell hearing a student walking down the hall playing a song from “Hamilton” as he sat in his office a few days later. “To watch these kids experience ‘Hamilton’ onstage - a story told in the music they listen to, with a multiracial cast that looks like them - it’s amazing.” ![]() “This was exactly what Lin Manuel Miranda intended, to bring musical and musical theater to a more diverse audience.” “One of the other teachers pointed out how powerful it was to see so many minority kids in the theater,” she said. “Some of our students were cheering with their hands up in the air clapping.” “There was this interactive energy in the student performances and also in the matinee where audiences are normally so staid,” she said. “The coolest part was when Bianca had Eliza asking her husband if he’d been faithful, and the audience calling out, ‘no you weren’t,’” Luna recalled. ![]() Le was shooting a selfie of the three when, all at once, they were summoned on stage. “She was so good we were kind of nervous, how do we go after that, how do we live up to that?” said Luna. That was when they heard the first student performer doing an original hip-hop song. Then the bus got caught in traffic.Īrriving at their front-row seats with only five minutes to spare, Luna, Apuzzo and Le learned they would be second to perform and immediately were ushered backstage. It took Veleas, a Berlin resident, more than an hour to drive to the school for the 6:30 a.m. “It’s been my dream to go to Broadway, not just go, but be on a Broadway stage.”Īs befits any story involving Broadway, there was drama - and well before the three took their places under the bright lights. ![]() Lisa Veleas, East Haven schools’ english instructional leader who, along with social studies instructional leader Joseph Marangell, initiated the application process, said the 15 to 20 submissions from the students “included everything from poems, spoken word and skits, to creative letters some of them wrote to each other.”Ī week before the trip came word that Luna, Apuzzo and Le were among the chosen few selected to perform their piece, about the tumultuous life of Hamilton’s wife, the former Elizabeth Schuyler, before the afternoon matinee. In addition to paying a “Hamilton” (a $10 bill), the program also requires students to create and perform an original work based on primary sources from the period in the same way Miranda incorporated historical texts into the songs he wrote for the show. The price of admission for the hottest show on the Great White Way begins with a special curriculum that uses a combination of historical documents from the Founding Era and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrical work to teach the history of Alexander Hamilton and America’s Founding Fathers. The mission of the program, Gilder Lehrman Institute President James Basker has said, “is to serve some of the most disadvantaged kids in America and make them feel fully franchised in America.”
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