I got chatting with one of the students at my work yesterday. Told her I was seeing Hamilton.
"Be nice to the ushers," she says, lowing her voice and her head as she fixes her eyes on me.
"Tough gig?" I ask.
She sighs and nods. “They have it really hard."
"Is it the audience?"
She hesitates. "Well, it's the security. It's considered a high risk venue. With Buckingham Palace on one side and Victoria station on the other."
"Ah," I say. I've seen the sniffer dogs prowling the aisles pre-show when I've been before (twice... not that I'm showing off about having seen Hamilton twice already, but I'm totally showing off about having seen Hamilton twice already). "They don't get danger pay I take it..."
She laughs. "No. They do not."
Well then.
I decide to walk to the Victoria Palace. I'm not taking any chances on the tube. Not tonight.
As I wait for the traffic lights to change, I pull out my phone and double check the pre-show email. Last time I was here it was chock full of instructions to arrive early, bring photo ID, your mother's birth certificate, and a full family tree stretching back to the Norman Conquest. But things have changed since then. Or least, I hope they have. Because I haven't brought any of that shit with me.
The queue to get in stretches all the way along the front of the theatre, down the road, and to the corner.
"If you're collecting, keep to the left," orders a dog handler. His charge monitors the queue with watchful eyes and ever ready nose.
An old woman pauses on the pavement to stare at the line incredulously. "These people are all queuing to get in the theatre!" she says, sounding absolutely flabbergasted at the idea. "My word!"
I find my way to the end. Within seconds more people fall in behind me.
"Certainly the longest theatre queue I've been in," sniffs the person standing behind me.
We shuffle forward.
"Tickets on the right!" calls out a queue controller. "If you're collecting, follow round to the left."
I stare down at my hands. Which way is left again?
I panic. I can't remember.
"Sorry," I say to the queue controller as I pass him. "Which way if I'm collecting?"
"To the left, madam," he says, helping pointing out which way left actually is.
I head for the left. "Are you collecting, madam?" asks the controller of the junction.
"Yes!" I say, happy that I'm going the right way.
"Perfect!" she says, beaming right back.
We're moving fast now that we've got rid of those people who had their tickets posted to them in advance.
The two men in front of me turn around.
"Do you want to go ahead?" they ask in very American accents.
"Are you sure?" I say, going into full-scale Queen-mode with my British one.
"Yeah, we're waiting for someone," they say, and step back to let me pass.
I'm near the front now.
"If you could get your bag ready," says the bag checker. He doesn't sound impressed.
I open my bag.
"How are you?" he asks.
"I'm great!" I say.
"That's the way!" he says, waving me through.
The woman on the door puts out her hand to still me. "If you could stop there, my love," she says, turning to look back into the foyer.
We wait until one of the box officers is free and she lowers her hand. "Right over there, if you don't mind."
I don't mind at all. In I go.
The box officers are running back and forth behind their counter, fetching tickets. My one smiles at me from the end of the line.
"Hi! The surname's Smiles!"
With a nod, he disappears to the back, returning seconds later with my ticket.
"Maxine?"
"Yup!"
"You're in the Grand Circle. Right at the top."
After spending eleven months trying to get a ticket on the Hamilton lottery app, I admitted defeat and bought the cheapest ticket I could find. Thirty-seven quid to sit in the Grand Circle. Right at the top.
It's a quality show. But still.
I turn around and almost bounce against the mass of people heading towards the Stalls. Oof. Okay. I hang back, waiting for a gap, but I soon realise that I'm going to have to make my own.
Elbows out, I step forward, and don't stop until I reach the bottom step of the stair that will take me up to the Grand Circle. I keep on going, not even pausing as I take a photo. I find myself in a bar. There's a pretty light installation falling through the oculus that runs though the ceiling and then the floor.
It's very pretty, but there's not time to hang around. I've just spotted a programme seller lurking over by the door.
"These ones are four fifty," he says, pointing to the smaller of the two options he is clutching in his hands.
I pull out my purse. Not Fred. Fred is dead. This one is black. A gift from my sister-in-law from years and years ago. It's a grown-up purse. Patent leather, and not in the shape of an elephant. I'm not sure how I feel about it.
"Err, do you have change for a tenner?" I ask, as I peer inside the black interior.
"I do! Here's five and fifty pee."
As he hands me the change, someone else comes up and asks to get a programme.
"That's four fifty," says the programme seller, turning away from me.
"Sorry," I say, as the newcomer hands over a five pound note. "Can I get my programme?"
The programme seller jumps. "Oh!" he exclaims. "Sorry!"
He pulls one from his pile and hands it over.
I squeeze myself past him and start the long climb up to the Grand Circle. There are a lot of stairs. Every time I turn a corner I think I'm done, but nope: there's even more.
As I emerge into the auditorium, my head spins at the sight of the stage far below us. It's really high up here.
"It slopes," warns a woman we go in.
No kidding. The steps are very steep. And very tiny. Small enough that even with my size twos, I can't fit my entire foot on one, giving a constant feeling of unbalance. Not the emotion you really want to be having when you are hundreds of feet above the stalls.
I clutch at the balustrades as I make my way down to my row.
A woman stops right ahead of me, and I almost barrel into her. But I manage to regain my footing just before I send her flying into the orchestra pit.
I wait, but she doesn't seem to have any intention of moving.
We stand there, blocking the aisle. Me struggling to stay upright on these tiny steps. Her... doing whatever she's doing.
Just as I consider fainting as a viable way of getting myself out of this situation, she moves on, and I am able to sink into my seat, helpfully placed right on the aisle.
My shins bang against the chair in front.
I don't remember the leg room being this bad down in the Stalls.
Yup, I saw Hamilton from the stalls. Twice. Did I mention that I have already seen Hamilton twice? Well, it's true. I've seen it twice.
As bruises start to form on my legs, I try to distract myself by the cries of anguish from the people still tackling the stairs.
"Oh gawd, these steps!"
"Oh gawd, these are so high!"
"Oh gawd, I hate being so high up!"
The man sitting in front of me arrives, blocking my view of the stage and immediately sets about ramming himself back into his seat, right against my legs.
This is going to be a long night. What's the running time on this musical again?
I look it up.
Two hours and forty-five minutes.
Holy fuck.
Eventually the stairs clear and the lights dim.
A disembodied voice introduces himself as our king and tells us to turn off our phones before enjoying his show.
A small whoop goes up from the back of the circle, and those familiar beats start. We're off.
And I mean... I fucking love Hamilton.
I know it's cool not to be into it anymore. All the sneering hipsters have moved on to rhapsodising about panto, because that's how the world works nowadays.
Well, fuck them. I think it's great. And if they want to spend their days shouting "it's behind you!" then they are welcome to it.
It does occur to me though, about halfway through the King's first song, that Hamilton is a bit... well, Brexity. I mean, all that stuff about wanting to be independent from a distant ruler across the sea who controls the price of tea...
The thought it making me very uncomfortable.
As the battle-smoke clears and the victory song of Yorktown starts I hold my breath for that famous line.
"Immigrants: we get the job done."
Silence.
Then a wry titter flows through the audience.
Lafayette and Hamilton barely even pause. They're used to this lack of reaction to the line. A line that stopped the show for a full minute when I was here in 2017, as the audience exploded into applause.
Oh dear.
I wince as the man in front of me rams himself back again, like a toddler throwing a tantrum in a car seat.
The King is back.
"All alone, across the sea," he sings and I cringe. He couldn't be more on the nose if he tried. That Lin-Manuel is a bloody fortune teller. "When your people say they hate you. Don't come crawling back to me."
Christ. We'll on be crawling on our knees to Brussels like medieval pilgrims soon enough.
I clamp my lips shut, struggling to keep down the need to scream out: “VOTE LABOUR!” in this packed theatre.
We're at Non-Stop now. Thank the theatre gods. It got here just in time. The pre-interval banger in a musical stuffed with bangers.
This is the song I always put on when I need to crash out a two-thousand word blog post in my lunchbreak.
"How do you write ev’ry second you’re alive?" is a question I ask myself every damn day as I approach the half-million mark on my blog's word count for the year. These fingers are typing like they're running out of time... just twenty-two days left to go.
As soon as the house lights are up, I grab my bag and make a bolt for the bar, unable to spend another second in that seat.
"It is clever, isn't it?" says someone as I pass them. "Who wrote it?"
Mind-boggling I listed as their friend tries to explain who Lin-Manuel Miranda is.
"Is it based on a true story?"
"... I think so? He was a founding father. I think. Yeah, like, in seventeen...something."
I mean... she's not wrong?
"Five minutes until the start of act two!" shouts the bar man.
"Act two?" asks someone.
The person he's with shakes his head. He doesn't know that term either.
We go back in.
I lean against my chair until the rest of my row arrives. I don't want to be sitting down in that seat a second longer than I need to. As the last person squeezes past me I wriggle my toes and then give my knees a good rub in preparation.
A disembodied voice who is very much not the King warns us that there is three minutes to go and we should probably be turning off our phone now.
The man sitting in front of me bounces against the back of his chair, adding in a few elbow thrusts into his repertoire.
As the lights go down, his elbow connects with my knee.
He half turns his head, but soon realises it's only a woman he hit, and goes back to his bouncing and thrusting and moving his head around.
I follow his movements, tilting my head right and left in the opposite direction to him. But every turn sends shoots of pain down my back as the pressure on my legs makes itself known in the rest of my body.
I'm going to need a gift membership with my local chiropractor for Christmas at this rate.
Hamilton runs about, building his new, independent country.
It may be my imagination, but I can feel the yearning in the audience. These huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
They want the American dream. But in Britain. And with wifi.
The King is back. I'm beginning to feel quite kindly towards him and his tyranny.
As he dismisses us with a sneering "Good Luck" I can't help but think it's going to take a good deal more than luck.
We're nearing the end. The bit that always makes me cry. But it's alright. Three trips is enough for me to be over that. My eyes are dry. I'm safe.
But as Burr tells us that both Eliza and Angelica were at Hamilton's side as he dies, that's it. I'm gone.
Tears are falling. Eyeliner is lost.
And I sob my way through to the end.
We're all fucking done for, aren't we?
I pull my coat tight around me as I race down the stairs and out into the cold December air and dive into the tube station.
The train pulls into Green Park.
Doors open.
Doors close.
We don't move.
A breathless voice comes over the tannoy.
There's a fight in car number five.
Men run down the platform to break it up.
Doors open.
Doors close.
We move on.
And I make my way back to that Tory-rat hole, Finchley.
I'm all ready to cast my useless vote. Useless because those meglamanical, power-hungry, statistic-twisting Lib Dems have been trying to pretend they have a chance and are determined to split the Labour vote in a marginal seat where they barely scrapped through as the third party in 2017.
Not a day has gone past in the past two weeks were I haven't got their nonsense flyers coming through my letterbox, wanking on about bullshit antisemitism. Yeah, well fuck all that. I may be Jewish but I'm not blinkered.
Because when all is said and all is done… Corbyn has beliefs; Boris has none.
VOTE LABOUR!