Church Illegally Performs a Jesusy Version of “Hamilton”
Some of you might remember a few months ago how a church up in Alberta, Canada, got some notoriety when part of its Easter performance from a few years back (featuring various Marvel and DC characters) was put on the interwebs. I rolled it forward to the moment where Loki has his minions crucify Iron Man to the tune of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” just to refresh your memory.
The church pretty much memory holed this stuff afterwards.
Well, a church down in McAllen, Texas decided to stage Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” And, as you might have expected, it was a cluster.
Of course, they apparently didn’t get the rights to ANYTHING. They just went ahead and did it.
Then they changed up the songs with Jesus-y references. And after the show was over, there was a mini-sermon which compared being LGBTQ to being an alcoholic.
This theatre blog put out the initial report yesterday with the title:
Texas Church Illegally Performs ‘Hamilton’ with Anti-LGBTQ Messaging
The blog goes into a brief discussion of which rights may have been violated (hint: not just Lin Manuel Miranda’s rights) and whether a church could get away with it (probably not, it’s a secular production).
Here’s the Dallas Morning News on it:
Texas church criticized for its take on ‘Hamilton’ https://t.co/NQonABiFch
— Micheal Soriano (@Soriano310ms) August 8, 2022
The church apparently live streamed this on YouTube, but took it down after they were contacted by Disney lawyers.
Hemant Mehta over at Only Sky Media received a copy of the performance and he’s been posting various fair use excerpts on Twitter explaining what was changed. For example:
More from The Door McAllen church’s illegal Christianized “Hamilton.” The song is supposed to go: “But I’m not afraidI know who I marriedSo long as you come home at the end of the dayThat would be enough” pic.twitter.com/CUitoUXQ34
— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) August 8, 2022
Mehta is also following it on his blog: onlysky.media
All right, American Evangelical Christians have been doing this for DECADES. I remember back in the 1970s, there was a t-shirt with the MasterCharge logo and the words “Give the Master Charge of your life.” There are many, many other rip-offs of secular products, services and art, too many to list here. It’s as if Evangelical Christianity didn’t have its own internal art, but has to steal from the wider culture, which just says volumes.
Anyway, I expect that we won’t hear anything from Miranda or from Disney, it will be kept on the down low. But man, it takes a lot of BALLS to do this, and I’m rather pleased the theatre community found out about it first, because they have the right to be incensed that a man’s work of art is being bastardized in the service of crass religion.