Kendra James’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
The first Republican Presidential debate for the 2016 presidential campaign aired while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, celebrated its opening night on Broadway. While Bobby Jindal declared that “immigration without assimilation is invasion,” an opening night audience watched a musical about the Founding Fathers that rests on an ideal explicitly stated in the first act: “Immigrants / We get the job done.”
Hamilton opens with the same lines that Miranda performed as Aaron Burr, unfinished, for President Obama in 2009: “How does a bastard, orphan / son of a whore and a Scotsman / dropped into the middle of a / forgotten spot in the Caribbean / by providence and provenance / grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” But instead of standing alone, on Broadway, Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) is joined by Miranda and the rest of the cast. Imagine a stage filling slowly, populated by characters plucked directly from history: Aaron Burr, George Washington, Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette, Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, and others — all white in historical reality, but here imagined as people of color. Imagine a Broadway stage where the only white featured lead is King George III, the one common enemy of everyone onstage telling this story about the struggle to first found and then succeed in America. None of them are dressed as lions, and that you’re not sitting through yet another iteration of A Raisin in the Sun to find some diversity onstage — Hamilton is new, fresh and original and, despite the fact that it’s set over two hundred years ago, it sounds decidedly like today.
You could spend weeks trying to pick out every single hip-hop and musical theatre reference Miranda deploys while he’s weaving genres together to create Hamiton. Plenty of people spent their week doing just that when the cast album dropped early on NPR, asking about everything from a Parade homage to the meaning of a well-placed comma. There are enough influences and hat-tips that Miranda will be releasing his show notes in book form this March. Appropriate, given that an 800-page tome of a biography by Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2005), provided Miranda’s inspiration for the show in the first place.
Despite seeing the show in January and again February, it seemed wrong to me to write about it until now. The melodies, which repeat often, certainly stayed with me, but there was no way to catch every connection that makes Hamilton both musically and politically relevant in just two viewings. On the other hand, it takes only one listen to figure out that Donald Trump will not be one of the show’s numerous fawning audience members or backstage guests. In fact, I’m convinced that every time you listen to the cast recording straight through, one of Trump’s Horcruxes is destroyed. The pro-immigration message of Hamilton is at the forefront — with Hamilton, Miranda tells a story that not at all uncommon: a young immigrant arrives in America and makes his mark in American politics. It’s a story that Miranda saw firsthand growing up (Miranda’s father spoke little English when he left Puerto Rico for America at the age of 17; he is now a Democratic political consultant).
Democrat or Republican, it should be impossible to deny the impact immigrants have had and continue to have on the political landscape of America. Hamilton arrives in the midst of a conversation about immigration that too often devolves into an Us vs. Them narrative – a framework that seeks to deny and outright dehumanize the full American immigrant experience. In Miranda’s show, Alexander Hamilton constantly reminds us that he too is an immigrant, looking to have an impact in his adopted country. Here, the brilliance of the casting extends beyond the novelty of diversity. America is a nation of immigrants, and Hamilton begins at the start of the Revolution, not even 200 years after Jamestown was settled in 1607. Lifespans were shorter, but these were still recent immigrants living on stolen land. The cast of Black, Latina, and Asian American leads emphasizes not only the reality of who actually built and expanded America (“we all know who’s really doing the planting,” Hamilton spits at Jefferson during Act 2), but also how irrelevant the Founding Fathers’ whiteness is to their claim on the country. For in Miranda’s Hamilton, America is claimed not by white men, but by the people of color onstage: “I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / and I’m not giving away my shot.”
This is part musical, part protest music; characters rap their way through songs with themes and lines that wouldn’t be entirely out of place at a Black Lives Matter protest (“and though I’ll never be truly free / until those in bondage got the same rights as you and me”) or a Bernie Sanders rally (“They tax us unrelentlessly / Then King George turns around and has a spending spree”). Both lyrics come from “My Shot,” a song that turns into a rallying cry for protest and revolution: “Rise up / when you’re living on your knees / you rise up / tell your brother that he’s gotta / rise up / tell you sister that she’s gotta / rise up.” In 2015, it was hard for me to watch so many brown bodies play this scene out onstage and not immediately think of the images that came out of Ferguson.
If Alexander Hamilton is the show’s protester/agitator, then Aaron Burr — with his advice of “talk less / smile more” — is the show’s Respectability Politic. Burr’s lines are quieter, more spoken word than the driving raps performed by Hamilton and the other revolutionaries like Lafayette, Hannibal, and Laurens. In “Farmer Refuted,” Hamilton shouts down the Tory representative Seabury rather like Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford with Bernie Sanders in Seattle, while Burr urges “let him be.” Burr’s philosophy is mapped out perfectly here: “Geniuses, lower your voices / You keep out of trouble and you double your choices / I’m with you but the situation is fraught / You’ve got to be carefully taught / If you talk you’re gonna get shot.” It’s a “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” strategy that mirrors accusations from GOP candidates like Ben Carson that the Black Lives Matter movement is too “divisive.”
But it’s the urgency to force change – the kind of urgency that has prompted the BLM protests, and interrupted presidential campaign stops, and inspired constant chatter on social media platforms – that Miranda captures perfectly at the end of Act 1 in “Non-Stop.” I’ve listened to Hamilton around twenty times since last Monday, so it wasn’t a coincidence that I was listening to “Non-Stop” when Shaun King recently detailed the shooting of Jeremy Mcdole by Delaware police on Twitter. Everyday acts of injustice like this give Black Lives Matter (“Scratch that / this is not a moment, it’s the movement”) its urgency, which Miranda captures in lyrics coupled, in the case, with the kind of rhythm I distinctly remember kids beating out on tables in my high school’s cafeteria: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Write day and night like you’re running out of time? Ev’ry day you fight like you’re running out of time.”
It’s the same urgency I feel when I see, almost daily, new reports of police brutality towards people of color. I do feel like we might be running out of time whenever a GOP candidate is given a platform to say “I’m assuming that if you accept all the tenets of Islam you would have a very difficult time abiding under the Constitution of the United States” (Dr. Ben Carson), or “We’re rounding ’em [immigrants] up in a very humane way, in a very nice way” (Donald Trump). Mindsets like this create the atmosphere that necessitates the existence of BLM and humane immigration reform. Why do we write and fight like we’re running out of time? Because with every Sandra Bland, every family traumatically split by deportation, it seems like we are.
Hamilton isn’t the first show to employ a colorblind cast. It’s not even the first show on 46th Street to do it. The latest production of Les Miserables opened in 2014 before Hamilton moved into the theatre next door, and its cast of revolutionaries (which included leads of Hatian, Persian, and Maori descent) is diverse for a Broadway stage — but it its style and staging is still Eurocentric. Hamilton, in contrast, pairs its remarkable casting with a book and music that make it the “first authentic hip-hop show,” according to Questlove, who produced the cast album. There’s no mistaking the point of view Hamilton aims to capture; Miranda has brilliantly reframed the familiar American Founding Father narrative so that it not only focuses explicitly on the contributions of immigrants, but people of color as a whole.
One hopes all of this isn’t lost on the overwhelmingly white and wealthy people who make up the majority of Broadway audiences. At upwards of $300 a ticket, Hamilton sits in a strange space where it’s repping a group of people who can’t necessarily afford to come out and see it. Releasing the cast recording for free a week before it was available for purchase was far more accessibility than many Broadway shows would allow. But, as I realized after watching a friend leave the show crying because she was so affected by seeing so many people of color occupying a Broadway stage, the visuals of Hamilton are just as important as the music.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has done what many history curricula fail to do: allow young people of color to see themselves in history. To read Chernow’s biography after seeing Hamilton is the equivalent of starting Game of Thrones after watching five seasons of the show on HBO. Even knowing that the figures in history were actually white men, when I read the book, Leslie Odom Jr. is Aaron Burr; Lin-Manuel Miranda is Alexander Hamilton. To hear Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler) tell it, the magic works on her six-year-old son just as well: “These characters are what he’s going to think of when he thinks about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He will be so surprised when someone hands him a book someday, and he sees pictures of them.”
Elasticity of imagination doesn’t change what I know – that the Founding Fathers are not infallible gods to be worshipped. But it does allow me, and hopefully younger students who hear or see this musical, to start drawing connections between Miranda’s revolutionary Hamilton and current events. While the free release of the cast recording and the daily $10 ticket lotto gets mad props from me, what I really hope is that every student who attends public middle and high school in the New York/New Jersey area can take a field trip to see this show, because the value of Hamilton as a teaching tool can’t be overstated. I happened to love American history in school, but as a black woman I was never encouraged to see myself as an active participant in it — at least not until they got to Rosa Parks. Asian Americans often don’t get a mention until the 1940s, or perhaps once America needs railroads if a teacher is particularly enterprising. Listening to Miranda go head to head with Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in a rap battle fight over the financial structure of the American government might grab the handful of students that a basic textbook missed, and watching Philippa Soo – the daughter of a first-generation Chinese immigrant – star as Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth, might court additional interest from some students of color.
The gambling sorts among us should count on Hamilton when it comes time for the office Tony Pool. It’s even better than what you’re hearing on the cast recording, and It’s going to win 99.9% of what it’s nominated for because, politics and timeliness aside, the show is a damned masterpiece. Yet even the gold statues won’t be the summation of the show’s success — for Hamilton’s true legacy will be measured by its influence. While it’s great that Ben Brantley loves Hamilton, the review that matters most will probably be a social media status of some sort, and it will come from a teenager of color with no prior interest in history or musical theatre who has just heard Hamilton for the first time. Maybe they will be the child of an immigrant, like Miranda, or maybe it will be a student from one of the most segregated school systems in the country. The review will go something like this: “!!!!!! Marquis de Laffayette spittin’ Nicki-Minaj-on-Monster level [fire emoji] [fire emoji] [fire emoji] on this track omggggggg
…but for real tho, did Hillary’s bae know about this Reynolds Pamphlet thing? bc I didn’t and it’s on Wiki”
And with that, Hamilton could lose every Tony it’s nominated for, and I’d still count it as a win.
Tags: hamilton, kendra james, music, musicals, politics, race, theatre
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I’ve been thinking a LOT about how they use the term “immigrant” in the show. Like how in the first Act where they’re creating the nation, it’s primarily in a hopeful/positive context, but in the second where the nation is becoming recognizable as America and Hamilton is struggling again, it’s mostly used as a hateful epithet by his enemies.
This post is amazing and I am going to post it EVERYWHERE.
On that immigrant note- when Jefferson and Burr and Madison sing “Ya best g’wan run back where ya come from!” in “We Know.” SO GOOD.
Are you posting it on Tumblr? If so, shoot me the permalink and I’ll reblog from you.
Here it is: http://ppyajunebug.tumblr.com/post/130274188625/r…
Reblogged. Thanks!
Also reblogged!
My biggest hope right now is that it gets filmed with tho original cast for release as one of those Fathom Events things in movie theaters. They do concerts and plays and musicals pretty consistently and that seems like a level of access that would really open this up to a wider audience. I have no idea how that comes about with money and rights and everything. But it’s nice to dream
I don’t know if it will happen, but if any musical does it, it will be Hamilton. I wouldn’t be surprised if they film a performance and make it available to schools as a teaching tool. Lin-Manuel is pretty committed to making sure that kids, and especially kids of color, get to see the show.
Did you see his comments in that one interview about how when he writes a show, he’s always thinking about how to make it so the most people can be in it if it were the school play? I died.
Oh, shoot, yeah! I would definitely go see this if it was on Fathom events!
Oh HELL yes. National Theatre does this too and it’s awesome, I get to see Hamlet without paying for a plane ticket to London. I’d be shocked if that doesn’t happen at some point (hopefully with the original cast!)
I know I’ve seen shows like Into the Woods and Light in the Piazza filmed and shown on PBS so surely…they’re going to do something like that with this? I hope? Like, even if it’s just Lin stationing an intern with an iphone behind the pit and then bootlegging it on youtube, right?
They do definitely film them all for historical archive purposes. But access to that is super restricted. They want to convince people to come see it on Broadway.
That policy has always seemed so shitty to me. I’d be fine–happy, even–waiting until the production closes to watch the filmed version. Not all of us can see it on Broadway, assholes. Would I pay for the plane fare, hotel, and show ticket if I could? YES. Can I possibly do that? NO.
I think a lot of it has to do with the multitude of union contracts involved – there have never really been negotiations on how all the union members would get paid for this kind of thing. Remember, professional theater is basically the most unionized industry left in this country, and that complicates the question of doing a wide-release filmed version.
UGH look at you being all PRACTICAL and shit.
I mean the thing is that I agree that I would like more people to be able to see shows and I think that all the unions need to CATCH THE FUCK UP and include this idea in the next round of contract negotiations. And I’m super fucking privileged to live in NYC and have enough money that I can afford to see theater pretty regularly. But I’m also really proud of the fact this industry, which is so centered on my city, has remained unionized and allows people to make a living by making art? Like I’m THRILLED to pay enough for my tickets that all the cast, crew, orchestra, etc gets paid a solid middle-class and higher wage.
So if I can somehow get a ticket (eventually, someday), I can crash on your sofa, yeah?
The number of friends who sleep on an air mattress in my tiny apartment’s tiny living room because they want to see theater is HYSTERICAL.
AirBNB should make a page just for people in NYC willing to let people crash on their couch to see Hamilton. They can pay with a second ticket for the host. And I would SIGN RIGHT UP.
Yes. This is my job. I work for theaters, and the fathom event things…man, it’s hard. The unions are not into it unless their members get $$$$ (fair, that’s their job). But if the members get all the money… Etc.
As a general rule, every theater I’ve ever worked for has wanted a greater ability to film and screen productions (even at no/low revenue, it’s just good business). And the unions Do Not.
Pro tip: working for a theater will make good liberals have really complicated feelings about unions.
Pro tip: working for a theater will make good liberals have really complicated feelings about unions.
Story of my liiiiiiiife.
Yep. I don’t work in theater, and I’m generally a fan of unions, and I still recognize that the unions are basically preventing theater from having the broader audience that is possible and that we desperately need if people are going to keep paying $100+ for tickets on Broadway.
I want this so badly. Or a film of it like RENT filmed live or Passing Strange. But those were done as the shows were closing, and Hamilton can’t close for years.
I feel like a pro-shot of Hamilton is not just likely, it’s inevitable. The producers are not unaware of the educational potential of the show — I feel like I read somewhere that they were going to lengths to pack the student matinees with the kids who need it the most — and even a filmed version would be fantastic in a classroom. Not to mention, shows with critical acclaim like this tend to archival copies as well. A DVD copy of Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn basically changed my 15-year-old life.
EVEN BETTER THAN THAT, LMM has tweeted frequently over the last year about looking forward to licensing the shows to schools. Forget watching; can you imagine what performing this show is going to do for kids all over? I’m kind of choking up thinking about it.
That’s assuming the school will put it on, of course. My high school just did a loop of The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, and Fiddler, because those were the “safe, accepted” shows.
I mean, some schools probably won’t, but I can imagine some kids lobbying their schools to do it. There’s a junior version of RENT for a reason. With some minor edits to some of the more colourful language, it’s definitely appropriate for teenagers, and for American schools it has a curriculum tie-in.
My high school put on Ragtime and it was SUCH A THING. First of all, they cast a white guy as Coalhouse. Now, I do believe this wasn’t a deliberate choice of whitewashing; it was that it was a very white school, and of the small number of black boys at the school, very few were interested in doing the musical, and so it just kind of by default came down to this one guy. (Crucially, I am probably missing a lot of information, because in fact it was two schools–one all-girls and one all-boys–and so of course I know less about what went on on the guys’ side of things. Maybe there was something much worse going on that I don’t know about.) But that’s still terrible. (Sarah at least was black.)
Much worse (just as bad?) was that they edited the book a lot to minimize the racial dynamics of it all. I can’t remember the details of what they took out and what they left in (and I was already familiar with the show, so I think I probably mentally filled a lot in), but I do remember that one of the girls in the cast literally did not know that Coalhouse was supposed to be black. How any of it makes sense without the whole…racism…aspect is beyond me, but by god I guess they tried. I remember we had to have at least one big meeting about it because it stirred up a lot of controversy (and rightfully so).
The next year we did Fiddler.
Unfortunately, for all that he’s a creator of populist art, LMM is pretty intensely against filming stage shows. He’s taken a strong stance against bootlegs, and he has stated that he generally believes film a) can’t communicate the experience of seeing a show and b) will discourage people from actually going to see it. Those points seem pretty contradictory to me (if nothing can replicate the experience of live theater, then seeing a film version won’t take away the desire to see it live), but they’re common in theater as an industry. There’s this widespread anti-preservationist stance that is, honestly, weird and counterproductive, and he definitely buys into that. It’s my one gripe with him.
I get that there is very much a different energy at live performances that can’t be captured on film. But there is a world of difference between an illegal bootleg of a show and something that’s released with all the legal stuff covered so everyone continues to get compensated. It’d be nice if everyone could travel to NYC and see this on stage, but that’s just not feasible. Touring will help, of course, but even that is beyond what many people can afford, and there’s still a hard limit on audience sizes.
I totally agree! I brought up bootlegs because they were mentioned in other replies as something he might endorse, but his stance on it is broader than that. He just doesn’t believe in filming theater. At all. He’s so intense about the necessity of live performance, in fact, that he actually held back some material from the cast recording, which would otherwise be the complete show, since it’s sung through, because he believes people should have things to “discover” when they see it live. He compromised a little on that one by posting the script for the scene on his tumblr, acknowledging some people might never see it, but yeah. (For those wondering, the scene is Hamilton receiving word of Laurens’ death, which includes a reprise of “The Story of Tonight.”)
I was wondering when Laurens died! Because he says at the beginning that he died for Ham… and then he just wasn’t mentioned anymore eventually.
Uh, bruh, that is not true. I mean, the bootleg thing is true, but the rest of your comment is false. At this point, LMM has both tweeted and spoken about how he’d like Hamilton to be filmed: “I said we WANT to film the show with this cast before the year is out.” (The “want” is in all caps because people got way excited and thought it was a sure thing.) He also said, “I have talked to producers about filming this cast before this cast moves on.”
Saw this post and just had to come down to say oh FUCK to the YES. Now going to actually read……
Yes yes yes yes yesssssssss
hahaha, on Facebook I got into an argument with someone who said that casting white people in the Mikado is okay because “Look at Hamilton!”
Dang but I hope this comes to Philadelphia one day.
…ha? Good lord people are stupid.
Dang but I hope this comes to Philadelphia one day.
Me tooooo I am seriously considering going to New York to see it because I know it will be forever before it gets here, even though I hate New York with a fiery passion.
I think it’s a sign of a masterpiece that almost everyone can connect to at least some aspect of it – and Hamilton certainly qualifies.
There are many aspects that resonate with me (a musical with the lines “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’m ‘a compel him to put women in the sequel” is basically made exactly for me), but the most related to current events, for me, is more Europe-centric: due to the Syrian refugee crisis, there has been so much vileness everywhere directed to (brown) foreigners/refugees/immigrants. I’m talking about things clearly done without any historical awareness whatsoever: the phrase “Own People First” has been making a comeback, for example.
It’s so discouraging – but listening to Hamilton makes me hopeful again. I almost wish I could force certain people to listen to it, Clockwork Orange style, so that I could make them see the humanity of ALL humans, not just the ones with white skin who happen to have been born Dutch.
Yes! This is how I’ve been thinking of it also. The constant references to immigration seem very pointed, and you can’t escape the contrast between how proudly they’re used in the show and how negatively they’re used in the news.
You guys, I just love that our collective Hamilton obsession is still alive and well here. WE WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED.
YES I was so happy this morning to see that HamilToast is alive and well — not JUST quoting lyrics at each other (AS IMPORTANT AS THAT IS) but also thinking more deeply about the show.
Yes, I’m so, so happy that this piece was published, it’s amazing. And after a certain amount of reading reviews and posts about Hamilton, most of them end up covering the same ground. I’m very thankful that the Toast published this more in-depth piece.
A Toast for the four of us, for the soon-to-be-more of us!
I am so happy to read this post. When I saw it, I registered at some level that almost the whole cast was POC, but it wasn’t until King George came out on stage (at that point played by Brian D’Arcy James, I think, so a white guy that was also at least 10 years older than the rest of the cast) that it really hit me like a suckerpunch. The one white guy in the show, the person we’re usually automatically told to identify with, is King George. It is a really brilliant casting note, and one I can’t really put into words well.
It’s also something that the only non-constructive criticism I’ve heard of the Broadway show is either knee-jerk at the concept or hype aversion — it only comes from people who haven’t seen it.
There was that one New Yorker review that called Pippa’s performance “dull”, but that’s about it (still not over how wrong that is)
Well, that one is obviously objectively wrong, because Phillipa Soo is a glowing ball of energy who has cartoon birds do her hair in the morning. So it doesn’t count. 😉
I sighed when that moment happened. Miranda may as well have put a flashing light saying “MORAL! MORAL! MORAL!” when white King George appeared. I think keeping the cast all-POC would have been a better casting move.
This article is everything. Thank you for expressing some of the uneasiness around this show in particular being accessible mostly only to wealthy mostly-white New Yorkers; I really hope there are plans for a wider release/recording/movie theater showings. I’ve seen some criticisms of Hamilton as feeling too much like an overly-earnest first-year teacher telling her students that SHAKESPEARE IS REALLY RAP but for me that falls so short of what the show actually is and you expressed it really well.
Also, this tweet from LMM makes me so happy: “Yes, Countdown by Beyonce is the most perfect song ever written, and influences EVERYTHING.” YESsssss.
Well, this made me real teary-eyed. As white & very privileged person I knew it was striking a chord with so many people but I couldn’t really describe why or how. I’m extremely grateful that you’ve so eloquently captured the reasons that this musical is important to those whose context I don’t share.
Thank you for this piece!!! (Sorry, I don’t have anything intelligent to say because this piece is TOO good)
This is a GREAT piece, and I hope it gets passed around a lot. I am going to be a pedant, though, and ask for a correction on the lyrics you quote at the beginning: “…dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
I’m also going to join the pendantry, sorry–could the quote “I’m not giving away my shot” be changed to “I’m not throwing away my shot”?
Can’t stop listening to #Hamiltunes, and this article is so spot on. I think LMM is doing such great work!
And seconding and thirding the hope that this show will make it to movie theaters or other accessible venues SOON. I keep running the stats on buying a ticket, but even with a free place to stay in NYC, it’s out of reach.
This post is EVERYTHING that I feel about Hamilton.
No really: this is what I posted to Facebook after seeing at the Public in February. It’s a show about bringing revolution to our modern time, and that’s exactly what I’m seeing in the world right now. This is so important. This musical matters. There needs to be some way for more of the world to see it, and I really truly think Lin Manuel Miranda gets that.
As a general FYI: every Wednesday matinee, both at the Public and now in the Broadway run, they’re doing student matinees in which about a hundred kids are brought to see the show. I think they’re mostly NYC public school kids, and the cast does a talkback for those kids. I saw the Wednesday matinee on August 5th and stuck around for the talkback because they didn’t tell me I couldn’t, and it happened to be the day kids from LaGuardia High School, the FAME school, were there, and they got to ask Lin Manuel Miranda all these questions about his creation process and it was SO EXCITING and everything we need to have happen.
Well shit I didn’t need to cry again today.
Side note: how many complete listenings of the entire cast recording will I have to rack up before I stop turning into a bawling mess every time? Won’t this eventually wear down the raw edges of my emotions? Or am I destined for flooding tear ducts the second “Stay Alive” starts up? Are all of the themes from “The World Was Wide Enough” that are foreshadowed in the rest of the songs always going to make me cry when I’m not even at that part yet, cause I know they’re part of the built-up emotion there?
Help! I can’t stop listening, and I can’t get immunity.
We impulse-planned a trip to New York just to see Hamilton (and after reading this, I realize now more than ever how privileged we are to be able to do that). It’s not until next April, so I’m hoping by then I’ll have listened to It’s Quiet Uptown enough times that I won’t descend into full-on sobbing at the live performance.
Pretty positive that if I ever see it live, it will be through an unending upwelling of tears.
I’ve seen it twice, once at the Public and once on Broadway (SO MUCH THEATER PRIVILEGE) and both times I first cried during the only scene that is not on the album at the end of act 1, and then I cried basically from “Burn” straight through the end, with serious sobbing at “Stay Alive (Reprise)” and “It’s Quiet Uptown” and the last two numbers. When Eliza shows up in “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” I DIE.
It’s “Satisfied”– especially Angelica’s reprise of it after the Reynolds Pamphlet is published– that does me in. I have stepped between my little brother and someone who meant to do him harm, and I would do it again, even though we are both in our 30s and he can take care of himself pretty well. Ferocious sibling devotion wrecks me.
I don’t think it will ever be enough for me. I mean, I still cry every time for certain songs from Les Mis, and lord knows I’ve listened to it an INSANE number of times. I’m just a cryer.
Burn makes me cry more every time I listen to it, so I think repeated exposure is having the opposite effect on me.
I was wondering just today how many listenings of “Blow Us Away” and “It’s Quiet Uptown” would it take until I am inured to the emotional punches they pack.
From the Reynolds Pamphlet wiki link above: “Prior to this, Maria Reynolds had divorced James Reynolds; her attorney in the proceedings was none other than Burr”
What?!??
Also, this is incisive and perfect and needs to be shared everywhere, so excuse me, I’m going to email it to my son’s US History teacher now.
Okay so I’m super late to the Hamilton party but I listened to it Tuesday night for the first time, and I’m just, like, speechless. I’ve listened to it at least 6 times since then? It is the intersection of pretty much everything I love.
(ALSO HI EVERYONE IT HAS BEEN FOREVER HOW ARE YOU?)
Also, oh shit, I showed up on a post about race and immigration and made it about me. FUCK. WHOOPS.
The graphic is brilliant, btw.
I love this article so much! But please, fix this: “It’s a story that Miranda saw firsthand growing up (Miranda’s father spoke little English when he left Puerto Rico for America at the age of 17; he is now a Democratic political consultant).” Puerto Rico is a US territory. Whether that status is a good thing or a bad thing, it should be recognized.
thank you so much for pointing this out, I have [shamefacedly] fixed!
Please also fix the reference in the last paragraph to Miranda being the child of an immigrant.
I’m glad I read all the way down, because I was about to post this, too. Even the fix, though, doesn’t quite make sense to me. Maybe things in Puerto Rico have changed since Miranda’s father was 17, but one of my very best friends is Puerto Rican and everyone speaks both English and Spanish fluently because they speak Spanish at home and English at school. If that’s the truth, though, it’s the truth (I imagine it came from Miranda himself); maybe English taught in schools is only a recent thing?
Sorry, it’s a bit of a sore spot, because my friend IS American, and I hear a lot of people talk about PR like it’s another Latin American country that only speaks Spanish, and it’s not.
So glad you pointed this out and that Nicole was able to correct!
… Hannibal?
(“Burr’s lines are quieter, more spoken word than the driving raps performed by Hamilton and the other revolutionaries like Lafayette, Hannibal, and Laurens”)
I’m guessing the author meant Hercules (Mulligan).
But considering that Hamilton and Hannibal are my 2 primary fandoms, the error is understandable.
The horcrux line alone makes this a great piece!
And just to ensure that my obsessive reading about the cast members has a purpose other than annoying my friends, a slight correction! Soo’s father was born in the U.S. Her paternal grandparents immigrated from China in the 40s. (“watching Philippa Soo – the daughter of a first-generation Chinese immigrant – star as Hamilton’s wife”)
I’m always confused as hell when to use “first-generation”–is it for the first person to move to the country, or the first person to be born in the country?
“First generation” is often used to refer to both. I would say “first-generation immigrant” would be the first to move to the country and then “First-generation American” to be the first person born in the country, but I usually call that “second-generation”. Also, just to confuse you more, 1.5 generation refers to people who immigrate as children.
Thank you! This is actually really helpful–it sounds like the words used around “first-generation” will make the meaning more clear. I’ll have to pay more attention!
There was a Parade reference and I missed it? WHAT WAS IT
(i finally stopped lurking just to ask that. been in love with Parade since I interned on a production a couple years ago)
But forreals, I was just thinking about this earlier today. Fantastic article!
Came to ask this also – what’s the reference??
I ALSO NEED TO KNOW THE PARADE REFERENCE
My college put on that musical, and it was just devastating. Also, the impact of the Confederate flag was never made clearer to me than the start of the show, when the actors marched out carrying giant-ass Confederate flags, angling them out proudly from the stage as they sang the opening number. It was like a punch in the gut; couldn’t have been much different if they’d been swastika flags.
After all, the parade in Parade is for Confederate Memorial Day.
There’s an obvious and Lin-confirmed reference to The Last Five Years (the line “nobody needs to know” in Say No To This), which is another Jason Robert Brown musical, so maybe that got confused for a Parade reference? I’m not familiar with Parade the way I am with L5Y, so there easily could be another reference.
guyyyys Lin saw this he knows about the toastttt
WHAT? Source??
I grew up with a DVD of the original cast production of Into the Woods and it has only ensured that I will see a live production whenever possible.
I Haven’t had time to read this yet–but that graphic alone gave me chills.
I was wondering when Laurens died! Because he says at the beginning that he died for Ham… and then he just wasn't mentioned anymore eventually.
Now if Lin-Manuel Miranda were really trying to ‘push the limits’, they’d do a play about the civil rights era, only with an all white cast. Maybe about the Montgomery bus boycott or the March on Washington.
Thank you for this! I have been trying to sum up a swirl of thoughts in my head since I had the chance to see the show. It’s brilliant, magnificent, beyond words. Your writing expresses all my thoughts regarding the current political climate, immigration and the brilliance of this masterpiece and its impact on our future. Thank you!