"Alexander Hamilton repents for his sins and accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior"

The Times story about this crazy production of Hamilton in McAllen, Texas is the most detailed, but their headline is misleading (shocker!) — sure, the production added “Christian themes,” but that’s mild language for the kind of vandalism they describe. The OnStage Blog story’s headline (“Texas Church Illegally Performs 'Hamilton' with Anti-LGBTQ Messaging”) gets closer.

This is interesting for so many reasons. I think most church people have the attitude that they're special and above the law. (For that matter, I think most Americans, or at least a very large portion of them, believe that churches are special and above the law.) But this kind of behavior isn't just churches. We've never come across an unlicensed production of LIZZIE, but we've been self-licensing the show for several years now, over a hundred productions, and you'd be surprised -- or maybe you wouldn't -- at how often people think they can change things to suit their own agendas, despite having signed a contract that clearly says they can't. The ways in which this Hamilton production was altered (among many other changes, they added a scene in which Hamilton "accepts Jesus Christ as his lord and savior") makes me think of our experience with the Communist Party censors in China who wanted us to change the ending of LIZZIE to have her convicted and sent to jail. Also, I'm kind of enjoying the irony of a fundamentalist Christian church taking what is already a fairly reactionary show and editing it to make it explicitly illiberal.