Hamilton250
A call to inspire Lin-Manuel Miranda and the rights holders of Hamilton to grant a special youth license — for one year — and give a generation something extraordinary.
Hamilton250
A call to inspire Lin-Manuel Miranda and the rights holders of Hamilton grant a special youth license — for one year — and give a generation something extraordinary.
Don’t throw away this shot.
A DECLARATION OF GENEROSITY
Milton Glaser was my mentor. He taught me that art has the power to make change. I am a mother, an artist, and a civilian. I am writing this because the institutions I wrote to — the government, the NEA, the rights holders, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s own team and Lin-Manuel himself — have not yet responded and I hope maybe your support will. The 250th anniversary is here. The data on youth loneliness, anxiety, depression and disconnection is escalating. I want to do something to help. So I am writing to everyone who might (if it were possible) put on a production of Hamilton this year, or would want to be in one, or would want to see their children or grandchildren or siblings and friends perform it. I'm hoping that some more support for this idea will encourage the rights holders to offer America’s young a very special license to live in a performance rather than only watch one.
The story that inspired me started in 1977... New York City was dying. Bankrupt, burning, abandoned by the federal government. Businesses fled. The middle class fled. The streets belonged to crime and despair and a municipal government that had run out of options.
Milton Glaser made what became the world’s best known logo out of three letters and a shape. And then he did something that changed everything: he gave it away. No copyright. No control. No license fee. He insisted that the state make it available to everyone with no restrictions.
What happened next is the only argument needed about the relationship between art’s generosity and cultural power. I♥NY didn’t just save a tourism campaign. It saved a city’s belief in itself. Its meaning penetrated the consciousness of the entire world — into every language, every city, every heart. Fifty years later it is still circulating, still being transformed, still generating meaning. It became infinite because he refused to fence it.
Now I know that a musical is not the same as a logo, and that it needs some protection to keep generating income and employing professional artists. But that doesn’t prohibit an act of generosity at scale when its necessary.
Generosity is the most powerful creative act. And we are at a moment in time that desperately needs it again.
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America turns 250 this year. A generation of children is in crisis — measurably. They came through a pandemic with their social architectures destroyed at the exact ages those architectures form. We handed them social media algorithms engineered to extract their attention at the cost of their sense of self and their mental health. And now we thrust upon them AI — more isolation, no loyalty, and disguised as friendship with none of its humanity. Each technology more frictionless. Each one more dehumanizing.
The data on youth loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection is not ambiguous. We have done serious damage and we have done nothing to reckon with it.
And while all of this has unfolded the performing arts have been losing audiences, education, and accessibility — slowly diminishing their cultural relevance. And yet they remain the single most transformative cultural infrastructure we have. You cannot stream your way to what happens when a child stands on a stage and feels a story move through them. No algorithm delivers it. No AI approximates it. Embodied experience is irreplaceable and we are letting it disappear when we need it most.
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Which brings me to Hamilton.
Lin-Manuel Miranda made a work that is, at its core, an argument about who gets to tell the American story. His marvelous imagination took the founding documents and released them into new bodies, new voices, new melody. The work itself is an act of radical inclusion — it says this history belongs to all of us, it always did. And yet it gated, exclusive, and largely inaccessible as a cultural experience to most of the country.
Hamilton celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. This year, the actual 250th anniversary of the nation that inspired it — there is nothing... but the opportunity to make history again.
Grant a special low cost or no cost youth license. Let Hamilton be performed by every school, every community youth theater, every church basement youth ensemble in America that wants it. This year only. July 4th to July 4th.
Not as charity. As completion of the work’s own logic. And the most generous thing Miranda could do for his audience, who are the future of America.
You can set off a million fireworks. You can fund five hundred thousand initiatives. But the grass roots act of giving children the chance to embody this work — to be Hamilton, to be Eliza, to stand in front of their families and communities and sing about who America is and who it could be — and you are doing something no other anniversary gesture can do. You are giving a generation an experience of collective meaning at the exact moment they need it most and at the exact moment in time that it deserves to be given.
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Why should this fall to one artist? Why not? Milton Glaser didn’t wait for a movement. He made a decision to help, to make change. Artists may be the only people capable of generosity at this scale because generosity is not incidental to what they are — it is constitutive of it.
And for those with significant investment in Hamilton — this is not sacrifice. It is the strategy that big tech companies aspire to: genuine cultural embedding. Give a generation the chance to perform this work now. Let their parents and grandparents, siblings and friends watch. Let it live in school gyms and community centers, church halls, and dance on the streets across the country during America250 and watch your audience blossom and bear fruit for generations to come.
I wrote to the government. I wrote to the National Endowment for the Arts. I wrote to the rights holders. I wrote to Miranda’s team directly and DM’d Lin-Manuel himself. The anniversary is here. So far, I hear only silence.
So I am writing to you. Maybe your support will encourage others.
Art’s generosity is specific and strange. It gives without depleting.
The hand just has to open.
Katja Maas
Mentee and apprentice of Milton Glaser.
Designer. Writer.
Mother. Civilian.
Greensboro, NC.