Long Live the Revolutions
On a musical and a book, telling two different (and the same) stories.
Welcome to Something New, a newsletter about the human curation of movies, music, books, games, and everything else worthwhile.
Stories come to me through varied, typically organic fashions. The most rewarding methods are human hands, passing something along from one soul to another to mine. The most frequent methods are electronic: the still human (newsletters and social media sources sharing what one has consumed and enjoyed), and the non-human (algorithms). Even though the quantity is heavily weighted in the algorithms’ favor, the quality is always with the human.
I spent last week with two organic stories handed to me, and they were marvelous on their own, and strangely cohesive together, even though they came to me separately, across different years-long paths. **HAMILTON** is the broadway musical that you know and love. **SAY NOTHING** is the investigative, journalistic book about a civil war that you may not know, and certainly don’t love. They are each a story of revolution, both revelations of storytelling and style. They both have their fun, and they both ask questions of you, the reader, the survivor, the inhabiter of these post-revolutionary worlds.
Well, maybe not post-revolution.
HAMILTON, in Portland (2025)
My friend Paul invited my partner and I to join him for the Broadway touring performance of HAMILTON many months ago. It was my first chance to see a production of this scale, and I gladly accepted.
The experience of getting dinner and seeing a show, especially a blown-out musical with a lively crowd, was remarkable, energizing, invigorating on many different levels, both physical and emotional. A cast of two dozen actors, singers, and dancers, each one of them a triple threat, was staggering. I immediately clocked my favorite dancer, and having an individual to track across the stage throughout the production — between songs, between coreography, between big emotional moments — revealed relentless craft and focus. These were A players, all of them.
The live band was tremendous. I was in a percussion-tracking headspace, after a recent winter music performance that I am fortunate to be a part of, and the players that night were sharp, controlled, excellent. I got a chance to peek into the pit during the intermission, and found that most, if not all, of the musicians were multi-instrumentalists. Triple threats, all.
My only complaint about the local showing: that shit should have been way louder. Turn this shit up! We all know the songs! I could barely make out Eliza’s singing, and nearly every player had moments of softness that fell silently. I know that, in Portland, for Hamilton, the age of the crowd might be pretty high, and you don’t want to put the front row viewers in literal physical jeopardy, but: crank that shit up!
I had seen the show before, in a house during the 2021 summer. A 4th of July treat to myself, after months (and years) of encouragement to partake. The Disney+ live version was recently released, and I dove in, finding utter delight. There were emotional beats that really reached me — mostly the basal human stories around the edges of the plot — and the music was great, and the performers were wonderful, and everything everyone said was right.
The mechanisms of the plot, however, were elusive to me. The loosest possible story I’ve heard goes: Manuel Miranda reads a biography, wonders why this guy isn’t a bigger deal, finds a way to match the story with his burgeoning musical theater modernization ideas, and voila. For all of the effectiveness of the production, and the experience overall, I can see corners that weren’t painted in, and I can hear creaky floorboards.
Having the show, and it’s story, presented to me again, even in different — and better — circumstances, left me cold. It feels as if the show was “classic” the moment I saw it years ago, and that has left it flattened with time. I know it is easy to dunk on Democrats right now, and has been for a long time, but this feels so strongly connected to Obama-era poptimism, a vibe that has aged like milk. I didn’t need this show to reinvigorate me politically, or to have something Important to say about Our Current Moment; that’s not what I went to the show for. I got what I wanted, but its insisting reach for strong, positive messaging was surprisingly off-putting.
I hope you won’t feel the same.
SAY NOTHING (Radden Keefe, 2019)
I am mostly Irish. My childhood home was filled with beautiful reminders and celebrations of this.
Two weeks ago, I couldn’t have told you shit about Ireland. This is my own fault, of course. Anyone can learn anything about anywhere, at any time. I just haven’t prioritized this interest.
A couple of months ago, for a reason I cannot remember, a seed was planted in my head to actually learn something about the place. The seed was from The Troubles, the near 30 year conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, Republicans and Unionists, fighting for a single, united Ireland, as opposed to its partial British occupation. It was guerilla warfare, infighting, and political gaming from a small group of paramilitary against another country. It was a youthful resurgence of revolt and violence against an occupier. It was ugly, it was sad, and it lives in the bodies and minds of everyone who lived through it, or has come after it.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2019 book Say Nothing tells the story, start to “finish”. It centers around a widowed mother — Jean McConville — who was abducted from her home in 1973, while her seven children watched, and was never seen again. She simply disappeared.
Before, during, and after this disappearance, several other key players were plotting bombings, establishing safe homes, collecting intel, informing on their comrades, fighting in the streets, and managing combatants. Two sisters, Marian and Dolours Price, would get radicalized at a rally, join the deepest ranks of the resistance, become part of a killing squad, go to jail, partake in hunger strikes, and much, much more, while becoming icons of a movement, for better and for much, much worse.
In my mind, Radden Keefe had three jobs to put something like this together: research, present, and invite. His research — hours of interviews, unknown amounts of readings and archival digging — is not only dense, but actively stands upon the shoulders of those who conducted good, deep research before him, both in corrective ways and in additive. The presentation of the material, in readability, arrangement, and prose, is compelling — I scarcely put the book down. It is clear, it is legible, it is exciting, it is moving. I have seen stray complaints about his use of quoting and sourcing, and his specific use of literal quotes and quotation marks, but his decision (to not literally quote anything that was not confidently stated in a literal manner) allows him to craft the story with real information in a way that flows naturally, and provides a reading experience that is not bogged down in clunky non-fiction reporting.
Finally, Radden Keefe should invite us into the story. If we are kept outside the barriers, without feeling or understanding, we will skim through and forget. With the power of the research and presentation, he opens doors at every interval. The final act of the book, which takes place after the peace talks have come and gone, is a devastating look at what happens after “peace” has been reached, and what happens when no plans have been made to deal with the repercussions of the past. The McConnville children lived on, still desperately searching for their mother. The Price sisters lived on, still struggling with their radical ideas or with their former comrades who abandoned those ideas. The country lives on, mostly unchanged for the last 100 years, even after all of the struggle, all of the death.
Radden Keefe talks directly to us in the final pages. These things just happened. These things are not over. What were they supposed to do, he asks us. What are we supposed to do?
Say Nothing is nothing short of incredible, in its affect and its craft. Check it out from your local library, and then watch the Hulu show adaptation that Radden Keefe executive produced along with me.
These two stories both center around scrappy paramilitaries attempting to free themselves from English authority. Both have magnetic leaders, raucous showings of youthful inexperience, and death – both “for the cause” and for nothing. One story has a winner. The other has lasting resentment and confusion and “a solution”. Each story takes different paths to get from point A to point Z, each carefully choosing what to point your attention towards. One builds you up, while brushing over genuine missteps; the other tears you down, with only momentary, passing glances of light. The two don’t demand comparison, nor should they necessarily suffer or rise because of it. But when life gives you apples and oranges, in the same day, it is tempting to hold them up together under the light.
These two “true” stories are both like rivers: always changing, always flowing forward, different every time you visit them, even though they remain stuck in the same place in time. Rivers, and stories, smooth their edges over time, and wear down the structures that hold them. When we leave them, we return to something different: the cities, the suburbs, the mountains, the deserts, to other rivers, other stories. Our focus shifts, our interests wax, our interests wane. But we can always return to the river, to try to find our own reflections in their running waters. What will we see this time?
Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope you are reading something challenging, yourself. Or something soothing. I hope you get the chance to get to see real people perform something in real life sometime soon. Let me know what you’re listening to, what you’re cooking, what you’re watching.
I’ll be back soon, with something new.
TTFN,
bobby