Hamilton: An American Musical

There are really no words for how excited I was for this and how much I am still in awe over it. 

For quite a while, our whole family has just come to love Hamilton. Thanks to Amazon Prime, we can stream the entire soundtrack for free as often as we'd like. Needless to say, we have listened to it probably to a point approaching insanity. (To clarify, everyone but Steph's family, Janelle's family, and Nate have been in on this obsession.)

Tickets to Hamilton have always been expensive. Once it started to become a bigger thing, the resale of tickets became unreal.  It was very hard to get tickets in any form, LET ALONE anything that came close to being reasonably priced. It was frustrating and became a hopeless dream to ever be able to see it. We entered the Hamilton lottery every day in hopes of winning tickets. (If you win, you have the chance to buy front row tickets for $10...but the odds of winning the lottery are absolutely terrible as you could imagine. Ha!)

Then we found out about the cancellation line. A friend of mine who lives in NYC had posted about going to Hamilton and sitting in the front row. I thought she must have won the lottery! She didn't. She went early, stood in line, and then before the show they release tickets that are box office price to the cancellation line. The idea sounded fun, but we didn't know if we'd be able to make it happen.  

We decided to wait until September when it was not quite so hot and the momentum of the Hamilton movement had died off a bit. We did some researched and decided to go on a Wednesday because they have a matinee and evening show....two shows...better odds of getting in!

We really did not want to drive all the way up to NYC early, wait in line and chance NOT getting in. So we left extra extra early.

Like... this was at 2:30 in the morning when we were leaving :)

We were kind of bummed when we found out the night before that you can no longer bring chairs to wait in line. Thankfully, the line starts right at these stairs to the side doors. So at least it kind of gave us somewhere to sit. We were pretty pleased when we saw this and were the first ones there! 

Me & Mom in front of the Schuyler sisters!

We came up together and were meeting Dad after he finished a half day at work.

"Slummin' it with the poor" is a lyric from the musical. Since we couldn't have chairs, we brought blankets, games and snacks to make the time go more quickly. But at 4:30 in the morning... on the streets of NYC... we really did look a bit homeless.

My poor friends on Snapchat had to tolerate my lame, but sometimes very "punny", pictures with lyrics for captions. We had...just a few hours to kill with not much else to do, haha!

Another lyric...

And when you didn't get much sleep and it's early in the morning... You spell Manhattan wrong. Ha! Ah well, you get the idea.

Okay, I'll spare you the rest of my incredibly corny pictures tied to musical lyrics. There were...hundreds.

Typically with the cancellation line--you wait until about 30 minutes before the show and they release tickets that have been held for other people (lottery winners, unexpected famous guests, etc). They generally have about 10 seats that they're holding just in case. When (if) they are not filled at 30 minutes before the show, they release the tickets to the first people in the cancellation line. We were totally prepared to wait in the line for the majority of the day. Each person in line has the chance to buy a ticket for themselves and one for a guest. 

However, when the actual box office opened at 10 am, we thought we'd check with them and see if they had any ACTUAL cancellations of people who had tickets but cancelled. Turns out, they DID randomly have 3 seats cancel... 8th row Orchestra. Honestly, they were better than first or second row because you don't have to be looking UP at the stage. I am quite certain that they were about the best seats in the theater.  What are the odds?!

We bought the tickets and then ended up having time to kill in NYC until the show! 

While we waited for Dad, Mom and I took the subway up to Ground Zero and the Freedom Tower. Afterwards, we met up with Dad and grabbed some Five Guys before the show.

At Ground Zero, this block was crazy to me. So many family names for Jimmie... We've got "Jimmie" spelled the same way, "Young, Jr." and his paternal grandpa's name which was "Alan Scott". Jimmie also has a Michael on both sides of the family. Crazy!

In the Oculus 

Right in the hub

The whole crew!

Pretty proud of these tickets that we scored!

Just waiting in "the room where it happened"

The original stage

A better view inside of the Richard Rogers

Totally, unapologetically, geeking out.

I have no words to describe how amazing the show was. It was worth every penny.

It was quite simply, the most incredible piece of art, that I've ever had the privilege to witness.

And for the record--I was hoping that SEEING the musical, would help to cure the obsession with continually listening to the music. Just a heads up--it doesn't help. It only makes it worse :)