Broadway gets Donnie all upsetted

What sanctity? The man can watch gay people entertain him, but when they want the same rights as every heterosexual couple, suddenly they're not so entertaining anymore. The theater is a safe haven for every drama nerd, every gay person who was picked on. It is not the domain of men who wish to eradicate the hard work and accomplishments of an entire community.

I am in total agreement that the message should be sent to pense, but we need other things to be without this political vitriol. I would have been fine if they gave the message and cancelled the show in protest. If you cannot do the performance without the protest it is important to not do the performance. Don't toss shit into the performance that I did not pay for.

Your argument here is absurd. Theater is political. It is designed to evoke emotion. The cast felt so strongly about who and what Mike Pence represents, they petitioned him directly, after the performance. You can talk about impropriety all you like, but it's either they speak out now, or later when they try to send a letter that isn't read, a video that isn't watched, or a petition that is disregarded in the Trump White House. This was the best way, and now that it has received notoriety, and with Pence in attendance, there's no way he can say he never got the message.

Furthermore, their petition was respectful, complimentary, and reasonable. Nothing was done out of sorts here, nothing to stir indignation. Donald Trump stirred the pot, but he's a fucking moron who can't help opening his mouth, and you would chastise the people whose rights are in danger? Your priorities are skewed.

Yes, there is a sanctity to the theater. We go in and are silent while the actors perform. There is room for laughter and gasps, but we respect the actors by not bringing our interruptions with us. We sit next to people we may hate in silence to see the show. It is a social contract that we do not start calling out people in the audience, and the glbt community should recognize that. Should the actors call out same sex couples or trans people? Should people in the audience shut up and watch the show and not worry about the same sex couples around them or the trans person next to them? That is part of the sanctity of the theater, and to have the people running it open up the doors of criticism ruins that sanctity. It is why I don't see movies in regular theaters anymore.

The LGBT community shouldn't have to kowtow or be silent when the next man in the White House is going to legislate away their rights. No person should be silent in the face of their oppressor. You can be silent if you wish, but I'll continue to stand by the cast of Hamilton, and applaud their efforts to respectfully petition the VP Elect of the United States.

No, they did not take the high ground, they took a cheap shot.

You never single out a member of the audience for abuse because of something they do on the outside - ever. You can joust with hecklers. You can joke with fellow actors. But you never single out somebody who is just there to see a show. Shit like that is why Trump won the election.

The Constitution guarantees that Mike Pence can't have them all shot for what they did. It doesn't say they weren't assholes for doing it.

And there's the problem. The left has gotten so sanctimonious and self-absorbed that they can't behave in polite society. They have no manners, no breeding, and no ethics. They think that whatever stupid little infantile mood they feel justifies any outburst or action.

Everybody has issues they care about. We don't use a stage in an entertainment venue to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting audience members, whoever they might be. The right could certainly do that on any issue, so that liberals wouldn't feel safe going to public venues, but we don't. We could make sure that Obama couldn't go to a concert without being singled out and lambasted. We could turn any place Hillary goes, like a cafe, restaurant, or concert into a free-fire zone where we scream "Benghazi, you bitch!", but we don't.

Yes, and now they have people shouting at them during their performance. There are better ways to go about it, and people ruin performances. I guess we live in a world where you cannot have a performance without distraction.

Firstly, because apparently you keep missing it, the petition occurred after curtain call. People were getting up to leave. Pence had already begun to walk out into the hall. When the audience booed, the cast asked them to stop booing. They did. That sanctity and respect is still there. Again, you don't have to like it, and you can be as quiet as you like, but whether before or after the performance, the cast is not on the clock. Nothing they did interrupted the performance in any way. So go on and be quiet if you wish. Bow your head, stay in the corner, don't say a word. It is your choice, and that is true, I wouldn't remove it from you, but it is also their choice to petition him the way they did, and since the response in the theater was favorable, sounds like nothing was harmed, and possibly some good was accomplished.

You still don't get it. Take Tererun, for example. She's outnumbered 200 to 1 in just about any public place she goes. At any of these events someone on stage could just single her out and go full-bore with a rant from the 1970's. One of Edie Murphy's comedy routines from the 80's was the most anti-gay smear peace you can imagine, and it was hilarious. They won't even show that one on Comedy Central. But gays and trans people never have to worry about being singled out for ridicule from the stage because we don't do that - ever.

It has all the class of making fun of children in wheel chairs and inviting thousands of people to openly laugh at and mock them.

When did I say any of that? Check yourself because I am not going to let you put words in my mouth. I am all for them using their fame to send that message. The performers have ways of being heard, and I am not for taking them away. I even feel that the morals clauses in contracts which limit the actors ability to speak out on their time to be way too intrusive. You do not shit on the performance even if it is at the end where few are watching. The performance in this case is not meant to be political speech, so don't turn it into political speech. Have some respect for your art because your fans want to see it without the crap.

Oh, some good was definitely accomplished. They all but guaranteed that Mike Pence will be President from 2024 to 2032.

The performance is entirely political. It's about the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of one if its founding fathers! Once more, they had every right to petition him, and they did so the best way they knew how. What's great is that it worked. Right now, the civil rights of every LGBT person, as well as the rights for many women, Muslims, and Hispanics, are in danger of being curtailed. This was the perfect moment, with Mike Pence in the audience, to redress their grievances with his policies, because it affects them directly. They did it after the performance, and they were beyond respectful in the way they worded it.

This isn't just about politics, it's about rights. Real rights being in danger. I think they addressed the issue in the most American way possible, and I'm proud of them for it. Your mileage clearly varies.

If I said "21,000 children, worldwide, die every day from malnutrition. We have to help them, goddammit!" what would offend you more, the dying children or the swearing?

Sometimes, being improper is the only way to get the message across. In the case of the Hamilton cast, they were proper, AND they got the message across. People will remember what was said, and they'll remember Pence was there when the cast said it. They did the right thing.

Actually no. It's a crazy rap-hip hop version of the Founding in which the Founders were black and Latino and slavery never happened. It has nothing to do with reality.

Well, they obviously don't know very much because they just scored an own goal. Maybe they should work on the Hillary 2020 campaign.

Uh no. That's in your own fevered imagination. The press, in collusion with the Hillary campaign, stuck that stupid idea in your tiny little brain, where it took over for rational thought, logic, and common sense.

It would be like having Trump supporters absolutely convinced that if Hillary won she was going to have every cat and dog in the United States murdered like poor Socks and Buddy, with all kinds of outraged pet owners committing daily outrages to save their pets from the coming furpocalypse.

No, they were flaming fucking assholes who just set their cause back by years. That kind of shit makes people in middle America want to punch people in the face.

It's about pets, real pets, members of families, who are going to be slaughtered because Hillary fucking hates pets. Anything is therefore justified!

I am arguing a different issue. It is more about trying to stop the decay of the theater experience. It is a place to go for escape even if the theme may be similar to life. Pense is a horrible deplorable. May rats make a nest in his colon.

Well you argue about the decay of the theater experience from this particular instance. When you're ready to talk about Mike Pence's penchant for taking away the rights of LGBT people, as well as women, Muslims, and Hispanics, you find me for that discussion. I'll leave you to straighten the deck chairs. I have to go up to the bridge and let the navigator know the ship's heading for an iceberg.

It's about more than the theater. It's about public spaces and venues, where all the civilized people give each other wide leeway and personal space to go about their business without having people get up in their face with diatribes.

For example, and this may surprise some people, but my car is covered with liberal bumper stickers. "I my piercer", etc. You could say I go undercover a lot. Yet I have absolutely no worry that any right-wing, gun-toting GOP/NRA operative is ever going to give my or my vehicle a second glance. I can roll out at a gun show or police shoot without the slightest hesitation that someone is going to confront me about being a leftist.

That's because the right respects people's personal space if people don't go out of their way to throw away their public anonymity in public spaces by being a fucking asshole like the cast of Hamilton. If they do, all bets are off, and good luck getting through the throngs of Trump protesters to get to the theater.

I don't think so. They have no bigger stage than the one they used.

I can appreciate that concern. How would you respond if attending a show, at the end of the curtain call, as the audience was preparing to leave, an actor asked them to stop so that he could share a remembrance of a deer friend and fellow actor who had died that day from AIDS? Would that also be inappropriate?

Nice people can make changes, but sometimes you need someone willing to speak up openly. See, that's when someone goes from being called nice to being an asshole, because they won't sit down in silence and meekly accept their fates. Mike Pence has a history of LGBT discrimination. We're not going to let him do on the national level what he has done to Indiana. - John

So if you are so fired up about the Pence track record on LGBT (as is the cast of Hamilton) then organize a movement with that being your sole goal! Stay on his ass and use your creativity & talent to spread your message in a format that shows the non-theater going crowd you are serious and it was not a one-off stunt. Everybody wins, including theater goers. If the audience started to boo that should have been a "red flag" that this was not the time or the place for a lecture. Am I right?

See, you were making coherent and quite reasonable points. Then you posted this and ruined it all.

Do you ever stay to read the credits at the end of a film? Very often there’s an afterword or “lecture” about the purpose of the film, or how things have changed since the 17th/18th century, etc., or even since the McCarthy era.

Bet you love “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” from 1776, though, because you get to say “See? See? The North was just as evil when it came to slavery as the South,” amiright?

As to your point about the opinion of the straight white male “not being allowed,” consider the word “inclusion.” It means “everybody.” The need for minorities to express ideas that have been greeted with fire hoses for generations is a phase. Once you White Boyz stop acting as if there’s only so much freedom to go around, and someone else getting more means you’ll somehow get less, everyone will calm down.

It’s called progress. Otherwise we’d still be worshiping gods who required blood sacrifice.

Breathe. It's gonna be all right.

What has changed since the McCarthy era? We just had a candidate blaming everything on Russian spies.

No, you're not right. Protesting to accommodate everyone, including the people you're protesting against, kind of misses the point of protesting. During the Civil Rights Era, when black men and women staged sit-ins to protest Jim Crow laws, people like you would have lectured them for not finding a better avenue in which to protest. "Why can't you just find a way to express to the non-restaurant crowd that you are serious and that this isn't a one-off stunt?" you'd say. You'd have been wrong there, too.

I guess on your planet leftists, women, and "people of color" aren't allowed into theaters or plays?

I get where you're going with that, but I think you're still missing the forrest for the trees here.

Because you're not Oldfella level of stupid, I'm sure you can understand the hypocrisy of the most anti LGBT governor in recent years going to a venue for which the majority of performers are the very people he's built his policies against.

A rowdy audience is a small price to pay for taking an opportunity to gain the ear of guy who may be called upon to leas the free world if or when Trump gets bored and quits mid-term. And then what? The gays in liberal areas are well protected...privileged, even. But what about you living in Florida, or Nova in her bumfuck area of MS?

If someone can't speak up about horrendous injustice in a play about the injustice that led to our nation's founding, then where else *can* they speak?

I promise you no one in that liberal elitist audience was booing over the "lecture" given to Pence.

Wait. So you're accusing all those cast members of being homosexuals?

And what a cast it is. For example, they are okay with Obama using drone strikes to kill innocent children of color, because they never questioned his drone policy when he went to their play.

An interesting viewpoint of someone who isn't white or American:

Let’s switch it around a little. Whatever else he is, Mike Pence had the class to just wave and walk out. If Donnie had been there instead, he'd have been tweeting through the entire performance, after he realized hed wasn’t getting a standing ovation just for showing up.

Once he realized the speech was aimed at him, he’d have been charging down the aisle bellowing “Who the fuck do you people think you are?” [Hoping the Secret Service would hold him back before he got on stage and actually had to do something.] “I demand to see everyone’s green card right now. I don’t care if you were born in this country or not!”

Red-faced and struggling he’d have been “escorted” by the SS to his limo and sat up all night tweeting anyway.

Only the last part actually happened because Donnie doesn’t go to the theater unless it includes a floor show with feathers at one of his own casinos.

You have very vivid fantasies.