BY SARAH L. KAUFMAN

Democracy in action has never looked coolerthan in “Hamilton,” in which the fighting strength of people who changed the worldcomes through in the tension and bravado ofthe choreography.

Contemporary urgency is the great gift ofthis remarkable musical, which has begun itsfourth year on Broadway and has spawned

numerous touring produc-tions, including one now atthe Kennedy Center. Creditthe fiery magnetism of its key

performers (I’ve recently seen both the NewYork and Washington casts, and they’re equallystrong), as well as creator Lin-Manuel Miran-da’s Pulitzer Prize-winning rap lyrics and com-positional mastery.

But there’s another, relatively unsung hero,and his name is Andy Blankenbuehler.

He’s the one who makes the revolution sexy.And not just because the dancers are, prettymuch, wearing underwear. (And boots.)

Blankenbuehler won a Tony for his “Hamil-ton” choreography and has two others, forMiranda’s earlier musical “In the Heights” and,more recently, “Bandstand.” Yet the intricacyand impact of his work haven’t received nearlythe same critical attention as “Hamilton’s”other elements.

HAMILTON CONTINUED ON E5

BY CHRIS RICHARDS

Lori McKenna can mint country hits out of everyday talk, just not every day. On a recent visit tothe hair salon, with her head thrown back in the sink, she was listening for lyrics over a rush of warm water, hoping that the talky woman in the next chair might volunteer a few magic words.Slosh­slosh­slosh. Blah­blah­blah. And . . . nope. Instead of going home with a new hook in herhead, McKenna had to settle for some new color in her hair.

But this is how her songwriting often begins — eavesdropping and people-watching while sheruns her daily errands. “We’re all people-watchers in some way,” McKenna says over the telephonefrom her living room in Massachusetts. “We see a person, and we make a story up in our head. . . .I don’t know if empathy is the right word, but we develop some curiosity in one another.”

McKenna’s exquisite new album, “The Tree,” directs that curiosity toward families — her family,other people’s families, imagined families, families where the kids grow up too fast, and theparents grow old too soon, families that make her new songs feel as mundane and urgent as lifeand death. And while many have praised McKenna for her ability to elevate our most piddlingpedestrian life-stuff to profound heights, for her, there’s no heavy lifting involved. When theordinary is already extraordinary, the music is all around us.

MCKENNA CONTINUED ON E12

LISTENING FOR MAGIC WORDS

How Lori McKenna writes the most

devastating ballads in country music

DOUG KAPUSTIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

BY ZACHARY PINCUS-ROTH

Paul and Shirley Attryde drove from Durham, N.C., toWashington this spring for a live taping of “The WestWing Weekly,” a podcast about a TV series that ended 12years ago. They stood on the Lincoln Theatre stairs beforethe show, watching audience members line up to meethosts Hrishikesh Hirway and Josh Malina, who spendabout an hour every week analyzing a single episode.

The Attrydes, both in their 40s, are apolitical, but still —these days, rewatching a show about idealistic wonksworking for a Nobel Prize-winning economist president is“a little slice of heaven,” said Paul, wearing a gray “WestWing Weekly” sweatshirt. “It’s the president we all wantbut don’t have.”

“When you see so much partisanship and so muchanger and hatred of politics right now,” Shirley added, “it’srefreshing to remember that maybe there are peoplebehind the scenes that really are trying their best to workfor the greater good.”

On the podcast, Hirway brings a fan’s passion and acritic’s rigor, while Malina, who played deputy communi-cations director Will Bailey on “The West Wing,” is thecomic relief. At the Lincoln Theatre, Malina trades insultswith fellow former cast member (and frequent guest)

WEST WING CONTINUED ON E4

CRITIC’SNOTEBOOK

‘Hamilton’: A revolution in danceEscaping into ‘The West Wing’To distract from the drama of the real-life White House, some turn to a fictional one

JOAN MARCUS

Julia K. Harriman, Sabrina Sloan and Isa Briones in the Kennedy Center production of “Hamilton.” The show’s dancing is primarily hip-hop, but it’s deeply idiosyncratic.

KLMNO

Arts&Style  SUNDAY,  JULY  22, 2018  .   SECTION E   EZ EE

E4 PG EE THE WASHINGTON POST . SUNDAY,  JULY  22 ,  2018

Given current events and Hol-lywood’s nostalgia fever, Sorkinhas said NBC gave him a standingoffer for a reboot, and he hassuggested that “This Is Us” starSterling K. Brown play a newpresident.

Malina predicts it won’t hap-pen — not that it wouldn’t bewelcome. In revisiting each epi-sode, he has found that “the showdoes not feel like a museumpiece, or something that’s beenpreserved under glass because allthe issues are still relevant today— because they haven’t beensolved.”

At the podcast taping, audi-ence member Dan Friedman, 32,a government lawyer who lives inBrookland, found that aspect ofthe show “in some ways depress-ing, that we’re fighting thesesame battles.”

But there’s one reason hekeeps watching: “It seems likemore of a normal White House.Whereas the current WhiteHouse seems stranger than fic-tion.”zachary.pincus­roth@washpost.com

Michael O’Sullivan contributed to this report.

common purpose in the country,”Attie recalled. But the show cameback with an episode about theroots of terrorism, kicking off itsthird of four seasons winning thebest drama Emmy, on its way tobecoming a fictional liberal oasisduring the Bush years.

The show was more in tunewith the Obama administration.In 2004, during the senator’spolitical rise, Attie consultedwith Obama adviser David Axel-rod to inspire the presidentialcampaign of Jimmy Smits’s char-acter, an upstart, telegenic legis-lator who tells one audience,“Hope is real.”

Schiff helped Joe Biden cam-paign in the 2008 and recalled,“Everywhere I went the massiveObama foot soldier army wouldsurround me and say, ‘You, you’re“The West Wing,” you’re the rea-son we’re doing this.’ ” A 2012Vanity Fair story chronicled thewide-eyed “ ‘West Wing’ babies”who had invaded the halls ofgovernment. In 2016, Allison Jan-ney crashed a White House pressbriefing as C.J. Fans have tweetedMalina with Bartlet’s pet phrase“What’s next?” written on theirgraduation caps.

The Monica Lewinsky scandallanded as Sorkin had finishedtyping the pilot and was onereason its premiere was delayedfor a year: “It was hard . . . to lookat the White House and think ofanything but a punchline,” Sor-kin said in one oral history.

Eli Attie, an Al Gore speech-writer who became a writer onthe show, said that when itpremiered, in 1999, “there weresome people who thought it wasan antidote to the Clinton WhiteHouse because it was the Clin-ton White House minus thescandals.”

So then, as George W. Bushtook the presidency, Attie added,“there was this view that it’s outof sync with a conservative ad-ministration — it’s going to seemfake.”

The 9/11 attacks created an-other wrinkle, as a monumentalevent had taken place outside theshow’s fictional world. Attie re-called Sorkin telling the writershe wasn’t sure whether he want-ed to continue. “We’re basicallymaking fun of congressionalbickering and trying to rise aboutpartisan spats — how is that at allrelevant at a time when there is

1999 to 2006, predating TV’s fullpivot toward anti-heroes, as po-litical shows turned to the cravenoperators on “House of Cards”and “Scandal” and childish bum-blers on “Veep.” In one episode,the president appoints two Su-preme Court justices, one liberaland one conservative, in thename of spirited debate. A Re-publican presidential candidateargues for free trade, and thewinning Democrat wants tomake him secretary of state.

“People tell us that they turn to‘The West Wing’ these days assome kind of salve,” Hirway said.The podcast, he said, “lets themmarinate in that beyond just the42 minutes of an episode.”

Dan Pfeiffer, communicationsdirector under President BarackObama, binged the first fiveseasons with his wife after the2016 election. On the liberalactivist podcast “Pod Save Amer-ica,” he said that after a Trumpspeech in Phoenix, “[we]cleansed our palette afterwardby watching an old ‘West Wing’on Netflix to remind ourselvesthat there was a time, at least inour fictional history, when wehad a good, sane president.”

Alyssa Mastromonaco, anObama deputy chief of staff,wrote an essay in October saying,“I now find myself joining allthose escapist liberals who like toreminisce about ‘The WestWing.’ ” And Chris Lu, Obama’sCabinet secretary, said in an in-terview that the show “remindsme of working for a presidentwho was 100 percent committedto public service, working withWhite House staffers, my col-leagues, who were there to fur-ther the public interest instead ofenriching themselves.”

Aaron Sorkin, the show’s cre-ator, is flattered that it’s still asubject of conversation. “It wasalways aspirational, but not sofantastical that it didn’t feel likeit was possible,” he said, and “notin the sense of ‘Let me teach youhow it should be done.’ ”

He recognizes that the gapbetween its fiction and today’snonfiction is pretty wide. “If youwere to watch ‘West Wing’ in theage of Trump, you could watch asimple C.J. Cregg press confer-ence about nothing . . . and Ithink feel a sense of ‘Isn’t thatwhat a press conference shouldlook like and sound like?’ And nota crazy thing where a woman is,you know, just plainly lying.”

Real-life events always compli-cated how the show was received.

communications director TobyZiegler, said that since 2016, he’sseen “a massive spike” in thenumber of people talking aboutthe show.

“On Twitter every single daythere’s a reference to some ‘WestWing’ episode and people la-menting the fact that the Bartletadministration can’t be in theWhite House for real,” he added.“Seventy percent of my tweets[sent to me] are still ‘West Wing’related despite the fact that I’mapparently on a very big hit showright now” (ABC’s “The GoodDoctor”).

Revisiting the series on Net-flix means revisiting modera-tion, collegiality, principles overpartisanship. Compare the vir-tuous-to-a-fault communica-tions director Ziegler to the10-day flameout of AnthonyScaramucci. The characters for-get their own imperfections buthelp each other overcome them(some questionable gender poli-tics aside). As Ziegler tells Mar-tin Sheen’s President Jed Bartlet,“In a battle between a presi-dent’s demons and his betterangels, for the first time in a longwhile, I think we just might haveourselves a fair fight.”

“The West Wing” ran from

Bradley Whitford as longtimeDemocratic operative Ron Klainchimes in with a real-world per-spective.

“This is the closest I’m gettingto the actual West Wing until2021,” Klain said to audiencecheers.

“The West Wing Weekly’s”guests have included Sen. TammyDuckworth (D-Ill.) and CanadianPrime Minister Justin Trudeau,and it sold out its five-city tour,from Boston to Dublin. Its popu-larity — an average of 1.3 milliondownloads a month — indicatesjust how much the NBC seriesstill resonates, especially forthose on the leftward side of thepolitical spectrum.

Richard Schiff, who played

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In 2018, ‘The West Wing’ still resonates

NBC/GETTY IMAGES

TV’s “West Wing”: Stockard Channing, Janel Moloney, Rob Lowe, John Spencer, Dule Hill, Bradley Whitford, Allison Janney and Richard Schiff surround Martin Sheen, who played President Bartlet.

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