Look elsewhere for safe places, Donald
It’s hardly his most egregious error, but Donald Trump is sorely mistaken that the theatre ‘‘must always’’ be a safe place.
Safety, in this context, apparently meant the right of his vice president elect Mike Pence to take his daughter to a highly political broadway hit, without getting a hard time about how emphatically the Trump campaign flew in the face of its core messages.
It is possible to describe what happened as bullying, but hardly from the cast themselves.
Pence was more booed than cheered as he took his seat. Experienced politician that he is, he was later able to tell Fox News he told his daughter this was what democracy sounds like. Nice line.
Pence must have known Hamilton is a show with political overtones. It’s about one of the men behind the US constitution. And the story’s told with an ethnically diverse cast.
Scarcely surprising that its core messages, let alone lyrics like the line ‘‘immigrants get the job done’’, sit uncomfortably alongside the Trump campaign’s rhetoric. As they were leaving the performance, actor Brandon Victor Dixon, with the cast behind him, spoke directly to Pence from the stage.
Dixon didn’t use disrespectful language. Far from it.
He asked the audience not to boo and said that this was a story of love. But he did tell the departing Pence that a diverse America was alarmed and anxious his new administration would not protect the people, their planet or their rights. All of which was bookended by a sarcasm-free thanks for coming.
That was pretty much it. Trump couldn’t help himself. Tweeting from a position of supreme ignorance, he opined about the theatre being a safe and special place. Meaning what? Nobody, including society’s most powerful members, should have to endure criticism, challenge or discomfort?
Leaving what? Resolute escapism? Pallid neutrality? Inoffensiveness at any cost? To hold, as it were, rosecoloured glasses to nature?
In Trump’s view of the theatre, would hideous anti-communist witchhunter Senator Joe Mccarthy have been able to sit cosily through a production of The Crucible without anyone pointing out where the inspiration came from?
Admittedly, it’s possible to go too far. As in Ford’s Theatre, 1865, and that famously made-up reporter’s question: ’’Well aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?’’ In the case of Hamilton, the cast could have let the show speak for itself. But Broadway, by and large, isn’t known for its subtlety. Neither’s Trump. Perhaps that’s why he and his VP needed to be encouraged, explicitly, not to take it too impersonally.