Like the calm before the storm, we caught up with Hamilton’s Brandon Victor Dixon (Aaron Burr) a few days before Mike Pence got booed by the Hamilton audience on Friday night, followed by Dixon delivering a Lin-Manuel Miranda–penned statement to the Vice-President-Elect during a special curtain call, followed by President-Elect Donald Trump tweeting that he wants Hamilton to apologize to Pence, which spurred social-media speculations it’s a distraction from his $25 million settlement over the Trump University fraud lawsuit. (Phew.) This prompted Dixon to publicly respond to Trump on Twitter: “conversation is not harassment sir. And I appreciate @mike_pence for stopping to listen.”
And that brings us to our interview with Dixon last Monday at the Theatre Communications Group annual gala at the Edison Ballroom, to find out what our founding fathers would have thought about the election outcome and subsequent protests. “Democracy is at work,” he quipped. “We had an election between two contentious individuals and one side won. That’s what it is.” He continued: “Now, the response from the other side, I don’t know how they would feel about it, maybe they would feel good about that having been Sons of the Revolution themselves or maybe they’d say this is the way our democracy works and now let’s engage in the system.”
As for the Electoral College versus popular-vote debate, Dixon explained that there are two sides to that conversation. “Part of the elements of the electoral college is creation,” he said. “Certainly it was created in slave states and them wanting to balance power but there’s not a specific set of the country always determining who the president is.”
Plus, he mentioned once you go solely by the popular vote, it boils down to concentrated areas of the country: “Those are the people who will choose the president every time. It’ll be California, it’ll be New York — so you have to find the balance.” And that balance brings us back to today, with #BoycottHamilton trending on Twitter, which we can only hope means we’ll finally be able to get our hands on some highly coveted tickets.
