If you read the entirety of my post, my issue was not with the play itself, per se, since I regard it as entertainment and nothing more than that.
Nothing personal against any of them, but I wouldn’t trust any rendition by anyone in the entertainment industry to be accurate, no matter how accurate they say they want to be.
The innate nature of doing a play like that forces an author to make up dialog. There is no other way to do it, since verbatim conversations are rarely available in historic documentation.
But that isn’t the issue I have-the issue I have is that we have a large portion of the population that views things like this as...history. They just accept it as such.
In the case of this play, I do have an issue with portraying someone like Hamilton as a black man, not because I think black men are bad or incapable, but it is different than portraying Santa Claus as black.
In history, what people did in their life is often a direct offshoot of their experiences in life. While it is true that Alexander Hamilton was a bastard who was defensive about it his whole life (and had it used frequently against him as an epithet by his enemies), I would think that being born and rising to an adult as a black male in the 16th century would be quite a different experience and be a completely different story than than the true story of a man growing to adulthood as a white bastard in the 16th century. And to me, that makes a difference.
Jesus was a real person who existed. He was a white, or at least a Caucasian more than he was black, but that doesn’t stop some from insisting he was a black man, or changing his racial makeup to suit the exigencies of today’s world. I see the same thing in things like this play. It may just be entertainment to me, but to other people, it is history.
That is the issue I have.
Not a fan of Shakespeare’s history plays? ;-)
The role of Hamilton isn’t played by a black man, by the way, either in NYC or Chicago.
And as far as what Jesus looked like, he was Middle Eastern, so he probably looked like a typical Middle Easterner: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a234/1282186/