“If you live in New York City, you would have bet everything you owned on Friday morning that it was impossible for people to talk about the musical Hamilton more,” Seth Meyers said at the top of his Late Night “closer look” Monday night. “And by Saturday morning, you’d be broke.”
That’s because Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show Friday night, was booed by a handful of audience members, and addressed directly by the cast after the curtain call. “We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us,” they said, stressing that last phrase.
Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump spent the rest of the weekend tweeting about how rude the cast was to Pence, as is his wont.
While some pundits have framed the incident as the type of “culture clash” that got Trump elected president, Meyers stressed that “mercilessly booing politicians of both parties is a time-honored tradition” in America. “Our country may be divided, but one thing we can all find comfort in, whether you’re at a Broadway show in Manhattan or a baseball game in Indiana,” he added, “is booing the shit out of Mike Pence.”
Meyers went on to praise Pence’s “calm” and “mature” response to his Hamilton lecture before noting that Trump “went a different way with it,” spending most of his weekend in a “Twitter fight” with a Broadway musical. “But once he’s done with that, it’s on to you, ISIS!” the host joked.
On the conservative effort to #BoycottHamilton, Meyers said that would be a better idea if the show wasn’t sold out until August 2017. “I hate to break it to you guys, but you’re not boycotting Hamilton,” he shared. “Hamilton is boycotting you.”
As “fun” as this story is, Meyers made sure to point out that it is all one big “distraction” from a much more important story that could one day be told in the Broadway musical “Scamilton.” On Friday, Trump settled a fraud suit filed against his Trump University students for $25 million. “Congratulations, America, we did it!” Meyers said. “Our president will not have to go on trial before heading to the White House. It feels good to win again.”
On top of that is the “apparent lack of separation between his business empire and his presidential transition,” Meyers said. “You may recall that a common criticism of the Clintons was how they enriched themselves financially after leaving office,” he added. “Well, Trump is proving yet again that he is the anti-Clinton by enriching himself before he takes office.”
“Twitter feuds may be fun, but we have to pay attention to what Team Trump is really up to,” Meyers said, “because they want us to be distracted.”
