Original ‘Hamilton’ star Christopher Jackson is doing a concert for Northlight Theatre. And no, not from his basement.
On Saturday night, Northlight Theatre in Skokie will present Christopher Jackson live and in concert from the Upper West Side of New York City. You might know the venue as New World Stages at 340 W. 50th St., although for this auspicious occasion, it has been renamed Shubert Virtual Studios.
Such is this moment.
West 50th Street is more usually referred to as Hell’s Kitchen. But then “Live from Hell’s Kitchen” does not have quite the same ring right now.
Actually, if you are living in a city other than Chicago, though, you might be reading that Jackson live and in concert from New York is being presented instead by Theatre Under the Stars in Houston.
Or the Morrison Center in Boise, Idaho.
Or the Hennepin Theatre Trust in Minneapolis.
In fact, 17 different non-profit arts centers are sharing the services of Jackson, the original George Washington in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” (and the original Benny in “In the Heights”), said Mike Richman of Dallas Summer Musicals. He’s part of the braintrust that put this virtual event together and then offered it to arts organizations who could react quickly and brand it on their own.
“All of the revenue will be shared between these non-profit organizations that need help right now,” Richman said.
Since you can’t really control who is watching, the Jackson event is being sold as a “per household ticket,” allowing purchasers access to Saturday’s livestream performance plus an additional 72 hours of “on-demand viewing of a video recording of the livestream,” available beginning one hour after the live broadcast ends. Jackson then presumably disappears into a puff of virtual smoke.
Where the money goes depends on which theater makes the sale. If you want to support Northlight with your $40, for example, you should buy your ticket through Northlight’s website. Only one theater presents in each city to prevent confusion. And, of course, Northlight does not have to worry about a limited seating capacity in this virtual world. With its theater dark for months now and revenue collapsing, this is a rare chance for Northlight to awaken its box office with an “exclusive” performance by a certified Broadway star.
In a Zoom interview with the Tribune Tuesday, Jackson said that he planned to sing selections from his major Broadway roles, including “Hamilton” (”even though Lin doesn’t like to write solos for me”), “In the Heights” and “The Lion King” (he played Simba for years) and then mix that up with some unexpected fare, including at least one of his own compositions, as yet unheard in public.
The live band, he said, is made up of temporarily unemployed musicians usually found in the Broadway pit for “Hamilton,” players who have accompanied Jackson over hundreds of performances.
That particular hit musical, of course, has been the subject of much recent online chatter about what Miranda’s show does or doesn’t say about the slave-owning Founding Fathers, a group that of course included George Washington. The debate was, in part, a consequence of “Hamilton” reaching a much broader audience on the Disney Plus streaming service last month and, of course, landing in a very different cultural moment, notwithstanding the relative youth of the show. These days, a show hailed as singularly progressive just four or five years ago can find itself facing a backlash incredibly fast.
“That entire experience has been full,” Jackson said, carefully choosing his word to describe the whirl of the Disney airing and its Twitter- and TikTok-dominated aftermath. “I do think that great art is able to stand up to paradigm shifts in both taste and culture and the things that are being talked about now are no different from what we were already talking about at the beginning of this process, years ago, back when no one was watching. But, look, I am a Black man. I was never celebrating the fact that I was playing a man who thought he owned people. As an actor, you present a character. That is part of the experience that I can’t change and I am just glad we are having a conversation. Whatever you feel or think about him is right.”
Jackson, who is not known as a cabaret artist, hasn’t really done a show like this before, especially since fans will be able to ask questions during the broadcast. And unlike many streaming events, the performance will be a multi-camera shoot in a bonafide theater, not from an iPhone pointed at a corner of someone’s basement. Jackson said the needs for social distancing and limited contact time made the process tricky to pull off, but he’s ready to go and, he said, “try and make people happy.”
“I am singing the songs that make me feel good when I am singing them,” Jackson said. “It is as simple as that. None of this music is about me and we are not trying to claim that what we are doing is essential work. But theater fills a great space for many of us.”
Indeed it does.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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