Philly’s new ‘Hamilton’ parody tells the story of America’s most forgettable president

Growing up, Callie Perrone was seriously obsessed with Alexander Hamilton. Mind you, this was seven years before Lin-Manuel Miranda transformed the Founding Father’s soaring immigrant saga into a global cultural phenomenon on Broadway.

Perrone, 33, of Medford, dug the nation’s first treasury secretary when he was still just a pretty face on the $10 bill. In 2015, when Hamilton exploded into the zeitgeist, Perrone’s family and friends teased her with a burn only a true history geek could appreciate: “You should have written Hamilton! But at least you can still write William Henry Harrison, the musical.”

Ouch.

William Henry Harrison. America’s ninth and least consequential president, shared a syllabic similarity with the fascinatingly flawed and heroic Hamilton, but little else. A historical side note, a trivia tidbit, Harrison is remembered, if at all, for the dubious distinction of being the shortest serving president in history, and the first to die in office.

The aspiring Virginia gentlemen’s sojourn to the nation’s capital was painfully brief. Stubbornly refusing to don a hat and coat during his icy inauguration — at 68, Harrison was the oldest person elected president until Ronald Reagan — he promptly delivered a two-hour speech, the longest-winded inaugural address in American history. He died 31 days later. Either from pneumonia or from a fever spiked by sewage-tainted White House water.

Either way, not great.

And not exactly the bastard son of an orphan, who got a lot farther by working a lot harder, and grew up to be a hero and a scholar.

Perrone, who graduated from Haverford College, and works as a government affairs manager at the hunger-relief organization, Philabundance, and who has no previous musical theater or acting experience, has made the joke a reality.

On May 22, Perrone’s delightful, years-in-the-making passion parody, William Henry Harrison: The Musical — a show that bills itself as “preposterous, yet painstakingly accurate” and “a tale so remarkably unremarkable that no one has dared bring it to the stage, until now” — debuts with a series of holiday-weekend shows at Christ Church Neighborhood House.

With instantly familiar melodies heavily drawn from Hamilton, the musical has a joyfully absurd time-bending plot that jumps between the 1840s and a South Philly Quizzo finale. With Perrone’s rapid-fire, history-packed rhymes smartly parodying Hamilton at every turn, this scrappy Philadelphia community theater production about a very forgettable president seems poised to appeal to more than just history geeks.

Some people took up baking during the pandemic. Perrone, a serious self-starter, wrote William Henry Harrison: The Musical.

It was summer 2021. Relaxing down the Shore, Perrone and her brother, Nick, a 32-year-old actor and screenwriter, who lives in California, took a spin through Harrison’s Wikipedia page.

“I was like, let me even see, is there enough here,” she said. “I was going through it, and there were these little nuggets that were like, ‘Oh, this is kind of funny. This is kind of interesting,’ and especially in juxtaposition to the grandeur of Hamilton’s actually interesting life and death.”

It was in that contrast, between the seemingly convictionless Harrison and the relentlessly resolute Hamilton that Perrone found the heart of her musical.

In Harrison, she discovered a character wholly opposite from Hamilton. A member of the pampered plantation aristocracy — his father was a signer of the Declaration of Independence — Harrison adopted a persona as a log cabin-living common man to woo voters. It wasn’t true.

“He really didn’t have any core beliefs,” Perrone said. “He flip-flopped on slavery. He wasn’t even a member of the Whig Party until they asked him to run for president. That’s when I realized there was actually something of substance to write about, in addition to being silly and funny.”

She just had to write it.

“I still had no idea if I could actually write it,” she said. “I’d never done anything like that before.”

That Thanksgiving, isolated at home with COVID-19, Perrone put a pencil to her temple, and wrote her first refrain. Some songs poured right out into demos. Others took months. She surprised herself.

“William Henry Harrison,” goes the opening number. “His name is William Henry Harrison. Don’t know a single thing he’s said or done. Besides the whole speech in the rain. But that’s his name. No-o-o revolution, no new nation, no duel, no one shot him. But! Would our world be different if he’d only put his coat on?”

By last year, Perrone had recruited fellow Haverford alums — Karina Wiener and Erin Berlew — to come on as director and musical director, respectively. More Haverford alums — and a diverse cast of community actors — fill out the ensemble. She gave herself the role of Anna Harrison, the doomed president’s beleaguered wife. And cast Nick as William Henry Harrison.

“He pitched so many funny lines when I was first starting the writing process, that I couldn’t picture anyone else as Harrison,” she said, adding that the dynamic between the Harrisons is combative and comedic, not romantic.

For her part, Wiener was drawn to the textured layers of Perrone’s rhymes — both the laughs and sharply drawn parallels to modern political figures on both sides of the aisle.

“On the one hand, it’s a fun, silly musical,” Wiener said. “On the other hand, it’s a part of history that one knows about.”

It all still feels like a fever dream to Callie Perrone.

“Honestly, it feels unreal,” she said, laughing. “I was having so much fun writing it — and I always hoped I would find people to make this a reality. But I never expected it. I’m so grateful that I have a team of producers and a cast and crew that is actually bringing this to life.”

“William Henry Harrison: The Musical” runs May 22 through May 24, at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St. Tickets ($25) are available at www.whhthemusical.com/tickets.