Word to your father
HAMILTON IS THE CONFEDERATION HIP-HOP MUSICAL PHENOMENON THAT HAS ALL THE MAKINGS OF A CLASSIC
The musical Hamilton is a phenomenon. That’s evident at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York, and also on the cast album, a double CD on Atlantic. There are phenomena among American musicals, and there are hits, and there are classics. The categories can overlap. Phenomena are shows that create box- office frenzies and are also felt to have changed the form in some way. Examples are Oklahoma!, Hair, A Chorus Line, Rent, with honourable mentions to My Fair Lady, which was nobody’s idea of a game- changer but which conquered the world by doing the expected things with extraordinary grace and assurance, and to West Side Story, which really did shift the ground under Broadway’s feet but was only a modest commercial success on its first run.
Phenomena don’ t necessarily endure. Hair has proved to be ephemeral and the same may well prove true for Rent. On the other hand, take Guys and Dolls and Gypsy, two shows that bookend a decade (Guys and Dolls was first staged in 1950 and Gypsy in 1959). When they first appeared they were greeted merely as good shows, at a time when good shows seemed plentiful; they have turned out to be the most revivable musicals of all. They’re classics.
Commercially, Hamilton, the hip- hop show about a Founding Father, is clearly a phenomenon. To call it a hit is almost to insult it; tickets for its New York run are changing hands at thousands of dollars apiece. ( The cheapest unscalped seats go for US$130.) Could it become a classic? I think it might. Like Hair and Rent, its rock predecessors, it uses a cur- rent pop style; unlike them, it doesn’t give the impression that its creators decided on the style and then went looking for a story on which to hang it. (Hair never found one.) Hamilton feels as if the story came first. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music and lyrics — and stars in it, says in interviews that he read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and knew i mmediately that he wanted to musicalize it. He also says that hip- hop (“my generation’s music — it’s only a little bit older than me”) was the way to do it, because it’s an outpouring of words, and that Hamilton’s life and career, his whole energy, were built on words. They made him and they destroyed him.
Here it seems obligatory to quote the first words of the score:
“How does a bastard, or- phan, son of a whore and a/ Scotsman, 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?”
The lines are sung, spoken, rapped by Aaron Burr, the man destined to kill Hamilton in a duel. They convey information, in packed but comprehensible form, about their subject and also about the man who says them. Burr was vice- president; Hamilton had been secretary of the treasury, founder of the American financial system, George Washington’s righthand man in peace and war. Burr and Hamilton had been occasional allies and lifelong rivals. The biographical number is taken up by two more of Hamilton’s enemies, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as by Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, and by George Washington himself. Love him or hate him, they all speak his language. We don’t hear from the man himself until Burr asks “What’s your name, man?” and Miranda himself steps forward and says, with unassuming confidence, “Alexander Hamilton.” The night I saw the show, a week after the opening, we all broke into applause. Partly this was because the moment, built up so cunningly, was so quiet yet so devastating: an anticlimax that was also a climax. Partly it was because the buzz around the show had prompted us to cheer the man who created it. He deserved it.
The moment still comes through on the CD, which makes up in presence and clarity for what it loses in visual appeal. ( Hamilton is an exceptionally well-staged show, economically spectacular.) It will probably still be a good show without Miranda, but it will not be quite the same show. His charm and his energy suffuse it. Still, the most important part of that energy is its passion for its own narrative, and that will survive. Every number forwards the story. In this very important way, Hamilton is not so much an innovation as a return to first principles; it’s a rebuke to the pop- operas like Les Miserables, in which the songs solemnly tell us things we already know and the story has to be conveyed in the tuneless bits of quasirecitative that come between them. Another thing Hamilton has, that those shows lack, is humour.
This is most obviously present in the three solo appearances of King George III, singing in carefree early-Beatles style, at first about how much the rebellious colonials will miss him when he’s gone, and later about his reaction to President Washington’s retirement: “I wasn’t aware,” sings the hereditary monarch “that was something a person could do.” And he concludes “They will tear each other into pieces. Jesus Christ, this will be fun!” (I suspect a hattip here to Sondheim’s Com- pany: “It’s not so hard to be married/And, Jesus Christ, is it fun.”). George’s numbers are set pieces, but other laughout- loud moments come, in the musical’s best tradition, from apparently innocuous lines dropped into the right context: Hamilton’s first flights of oratory elicit the deadpan response: “Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd.”
There’s great wit, too, in the casting; with the notable exceptions of the Hispanic Miranda, and of Jonathan Groff who plays the king, this show about the beginning of America has a black cast. Jefferson, the slave- owning founder recently returned from ambassadorial duties in France, has the most infectious R&B number in the show, What’d I Miss (“I’ve been in Paris meeting lots of different ladies/ I guess I basic’ lly missed the late eighties”).
The score, contrary to some of the composer’s assertions, is at most only 50 per cent hip hop; it can even change styles within a single song. Daveed Diggs, who plays Jefferson, doubles as Lafayette whose “immigrants: we get the job done” may be the show’s most heartfelt line. Its greatest traditional theatre number, surging and torrential, is The Room Where It Happens, the outsider Burr’s jealous diatribe against the political deals that get made behind closed doors. It’s a perennially topical subject, and Leslie Odom Jr.’s Burr actually comes over better on disc than on stage. So do the more romantic or contemplative songs involving the hero’s wife, mistress and adored sister-in-law; or maybe it’s just that they’ve grown on me.
Other fine and adventurous composer- lyricists have appeared in the past couple of decades ( Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown) but none has broken through in the way Miranda has. A Chicago production is currently in the works, but there’s no word on when we might expect to see the show in Canada. The CD is great but it isn’t the same. You wanna be in the room where it happens.
TO CALL IT A HIT IS ALMOST TO INSULT IT; TICKETS ARE CHANGING HANDS AT THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS