Playbill: The Door Christian Fellowship McAllen Church has released an apology for their recent unauthorized production of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, revealing that the church will pay unspecified "damages" for the performances. The Texas church performed the Tony-winning musical earlier this month without obtaining the legal right to do so, additionally making changes to the work that inserted biblical references.
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I first found out about the Door McAllen Hamilton production scandal over social media a couple of weeks ago. At first, I simply found it amusing but as it has become a bigger news story, I have realized how problematic it is. We’ve spent all of our academic lives learning about academic integrity and plagiarism and this is an example of that on a much bigger scale. Seeing this has made me realize just how serious of a violation it can be and how serious the repercussions can be. Thankfully, this production was caught and they will be forced to pay damages. However, the production of Hamilton clearly doesn’t need the money from the damages which is why I found it so honorable when I found out they were donating the money. I also think it is very fitting that the money is going to an LGBTQ+ coalition given that they not only produced the production illegally but also changed the lyrics to promote their messages of religion and homophobia.
-TJ
I originally heard about the illegal performance of Hamilton by the McAllen Church through a friend I follow on Instagram. I was originally surprised that such a thing could happen in the theatre industry. Upon further investigation I became acutely aware of how disturbing it was that someone’s intellectual property had been altered and changed to benefit someone else's profit. I wondered what the church’s thought process was and what they hoped to accomplish by copyrighting and altering a broadway show. Especially one like Hamilton that is so influential and important to today’s society. The process in which the church was caught and held accountable was inspiring and uplifting to the theatre community. After being taught for so many years in school that plagiarism is not to be taken lightly, it was nice to see that it is not taken lightly either in the adult world. This article helped me understand the importance of respecting each other's rights always, especially when it comes to intellectual property in the theatre community.
-Abby Brunner
I was shocked when I first heard about this a few weeks back. Of course, other shows have had their intellectual properties infringed upon, but I never thought that any group would be dumb enough to do it with Hamilton, which is definitely one of if not the biggest and most influential musical to come out in the last decade, at least in terms of the impact it made on national media and the vast amounts of attention it drew even from the non-theatergoing crowd. Not only that, but you would take that show and twist it to fit your own religious and homophobic agenda, things that are completely counter to one of the original work's goals of promoting diversity and inclusion, especially in its casting. And even if one were to disregard the moral implications of that, even just on a financial and legal level, why the heck would you be that dumb? Because what, their legal team WASN'T gonna come after you, especially once the live stream started to face backlash online?
This phenomenon has been known online as “Scamilton”. Quite frankly, I thought it was a massive internet joke when I first heard of it. I was incredibly surprised when I found out this was real. The entirety of my social media feed was filled with jokes about it and I hate to say it, but I had a blast. Besides the obvious blatant disregard for copyright, they still went ahead and made a full-blown production with lighting and costumes, and script changes. To my understanding, they did not charge for entry which makes this better somehow. I also wanted to comment on how Lin-Manuel Miranda shared later that the money he raised back from the legal battle would be donated to LGBT organizations which I just think is neat. Personally, I’m trying to look at this through a more playful lens instead of thinking of how tragic it is that such a popular piece of media was just entirely adapted a la “Christian Harry Potter” books. As a side note, as someone who has seen clips from it, Aaron Burr was kind of good.
Initially I learned about this production from a Tiktok post making fun of their production quality and line changes. At that point it was still growing in popularity and I never thought it would go so far as to reach Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda himself. Of course I knew they would get in trouble in some capacity. Paying a fee was a necessity since it is literally a federal crime to not only perform this content, but to also record and post it online. The Door McAllen Church claims that they took down all of their social media posting about it, which I believe is true, but there are still many traces of their performance online in the form of memes poking fun at how bad it was. I cannot wait to follow how the church plans to recover from this, if they still plan to put on musicals, and what other jokes may arise.
I (like a lot of people) heard about this production of Hamilton on social media. To not only illegally produce a show, but to fundamentally alter its message to include homophobia and heavy religious themes is an interesting (bad) choice overall. I only really heard about this from second hand social media posting but I thought it was fascinating how the church tried to spin it a few ways before lawyers were involved - and how the internet could not get enough of it. The interesting thing to me is that this is not the first time this church has done this - before they did Hamilton, they did shows like the Greatest Showman and Beauty and the Beast, but it was only when the internet picked it up and took notice that change occurred. It makes me wonder how many other institutions have done this for other shows (I remember reading about an Avengers religious rip-off that for the life of me I cannot find).
I'm very curious as to what the people at the church were thinking. I mean, I guess really it comes down to the fact that they knew they should have obtained the rights, but were unable to while still feeling entitle to put on the show anyway. Hopefully those in charge will be properly educated so this doesn't happen in the future.
I'm also curious how much they will be forced to pay in damages. With Hamilton being such a high profile show, I feel like this church really kicked a hornets nest and can expect to pay a lot more in damages than if this had been a much lower profile show that they had neglected to get the rights to produce. Overall, they really didn't use their best judgement given that Hamilton is still touring. Eventually someone was going to do an online search and discover this unauthorized production.
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