*Hamilton*, Hypocrisy, and... Havel?

A little over seven hours SSW of Chez Curmie is the medium-sized city of McAllen, TX, home to, no doubt, some quite wonderful people.  Alas, it is also home to the Door Church and RGV Productions: these people are considerably less than wonderful unless your definition of that term includes intellectual property theft, active misreading, hypocrisy, hatefulness and general assholitude.

This weekend, RGV Productions staged a production of the Broadway megahit Hamilton at the Door Church in McAllen; they also videoed the show and posted it to YouTube (it’s since been taken down).  What they didn’t do was to obtain the rights to do the play at all, let alone to make changes that completely distort the meaning of the script.  Curmie confesses that he’s never actually seen a production of the show, but he feels pretty confident that the story doesn’t end with a preacher telling us we can be cured of our problem with homosexuality.

The issues here are in one sense pretty clear: there is no question that the production company and the church violated copyright law, or that they did so absolutely intentionally.  There is similarly no doubt but that they are sufficiently self-righteous that they believe themselves exempt from the dictates of regulations they consider inconvenient.  One wonders how the notoriously anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche would respond to his concept of the amoral übermensch being co-opted by a passel of dim-witted Bible-thumpers.

As for those folks, it seems that whole “render unto Caesar” business that appears in not one, but three, of the Gospels (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25, for those of you playing along at home), got skipped over while they were concentrating on mistranslating passages that condemned pederasty and raping male slaves as if they were indictments of homosexuality in general.

Certainly if Lin-Manuel Miranda and his cohorts chose to sue the production company, the church, and all the individual decision-makers involved, they’d have a very strong case, and, as Chris Peterson of the OnStage Blog notes, the penalty for the offenders could easily run to five or six figures.

Part of Curmie wants LMM and Disney, which paid a very large chunk of change ($75 million) for exclusive video rights to the show, to put these hypocritical buffoons out of business permanently.  They certainly deserve it. 

But Curmie is also reminded of one of his favorite acting roles, that of Leopold Nettles in the great Czech playwright (and, later, President) Václav Havel’s Largo Desolato.  In that play, Nettles, the central character, has written a book which the powers-that-be don’t like.  Indeed, he is visited by two goons we are led to believe are representatives of the ŠtB (the Czech equivalent of the USSR’s KGB or East Germany’s Stasi).  Still, he remains undaunted.  They do eventually succeed in breaking him down, however, by removing their threats, suggesting that his book was too insignificant to merit their attention.

It’s certainly true that Hamilton, like virtually every other show anyone has ever liked, probably gets staged illegally on a regular basis, and that chasing them all down might be more trouble than it’s worth.  A lawsuit could also feed the church’s finely crafted persecution complex, as if idiots like what passes for a brain-trust at Door McAllen were somehow innocent victims of a massive conspiracy to deny their religious expression or some such horseshit.

Perhaps, then, the way to go would be to issue a statement that the church’s ill-intentioned theft of intellectual property was so insignificant, that despite the best efforts of the perpetrators the production failed so miserably to undermine the meaning of Hamilton that to sue such a gaggle of incompetent amateurs would be beneath our collective dignity… but do this again, to literally anyone else, and we will clobber you so hard and so fast that you will never know what hit you, only that you’re penniless, nationally disgraced, and revealed as the small-time con men you truly are.

There’s something to be said for this strategic approach.  Still, Curmie would absolutely love it if LMM and the Mouse were to squash this church and all its adherents like a bug on the windshield at 70 mph.