Why Hamilton’s the Hottest ticket in town
It hardly sounds like box office gold — a rap musical about one of America’s founding fathers. But tickets for the London show are already selling for £6,000 each ..
THE STATESMAN
ALTHOuGH he is played by a mixed-race actor in the sell-out, blockbuster show, which opens at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre next Thursday, Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804, pictured below) was in fact white, Jane Fryer writes.
He was one of the founding fathers of the united States and the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, whose face still appears on the $10 bill.
In 2015, plans to replace his face on the $10 bill with a woman’s face were shelved, thanks to the success of the musical, which was a Broadway smash before its switch to Britain.
Born out of wedlock on the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean, he was orphaned as a child, then taken in by a wealthy family and lived a life of astonishingly social mobility — with a good dollop of illicit sex thrown in, when he betrayed his wife and had an affair — to end up as President George Washington’s right-hand man.
He never became president himself, but was instrumental in outlawing the international slave trade, which perhaps helps explain his appeal to liberal America, which has championed the musical. He was killed by his bitter rival, Vice President Aaron Burr, in a duel.
THE PYTHON FAN
LIN-MANueL Miranda, a 37year-old American-born, Puerto Rican-blooded lyricist-performer (and now global megastar) not only wrote the book, music and lyrics but also took on the title role in the original Broadway run, which began in 2015.
He grew up in New York, where he was taught how to rap by his school bus driver. He is a huge fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ricky Gervais’s The Office.
Before Hamilton, he wrote the music and lyrics for Broadway hit In The Heights, and will star in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns. He is married to lawyer Vanessa Nadal and they have one son.
HOW IT STARTED . . .
IN 2008, Miranda was pottering around a bookshop, looking for a bit of holiday reading, and Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton caught his eye. He remembered the name from school history classes.
‘All I knew was that he was the dead white guy on the $10 bill,’ he has said. ‘I knew his son had died in a duel and he, too, died in a duel.’
The book would not be everyone’s choice — 800-plus pages about America’s historical equivalent of Philip Hammond (Spreadsheet Phil The Musical, anyone?).
Yet Miranda found it ‘riveting’ and started re-imagining Hamilton’s life — an outsider, illegitimate, hailing from the Caribbean and one of the first American politicians to be hit by a sex scandal — as a hip-hop musical celebrating the birth of modern America. His extraordinary creation started with one rap about Hamilton — called Alexander Hamilton — which took a year to write. Miranda was already a rising star and performed it for the Obamas at the White House in 2009. His second, My Shot, took another year and was meant to be part of a concept album. But after rave reviews he was spurred on to write an entire musical, complete with multi-racial casting, just to mix things up a bit. The whole thing took six years.
AWARDS GALORE
LAST year, Hamilton was nominated for a record 16 Tony awards, winning 11, including best musical, best score, best actress in a featured role, best actor in a leading role and best book.
It didn’t quite beat Mel Brooks’s The Producers, which scooped 12 Tonys in 2001. But then Brooks didn’t also win a Grammy for best musical theatre album, the Pulitzer Prize for drama for the script and a £500,000 MacArthur ‘genius grant’, as Miranda did
STREET SENSATION
ON ticket lottery outside the theatre before every show — initially 21 frontrow seats and occasionally standing tickets — which attracted enormous crowds. Conscious of his fans’ commitment, he also started giving outdoor mini-performances — called ‘Ham4Ham’ shows — before each draw, so unlucky lottery participants at least got a taste of the show. But soon the crowds became dangerously large and in, January 2016, the lottery went online. On the first day, more than 50,000 logged on and the website crashed.
BRITISH STARS
GIVEN that Pulitzer-Grammy-Emmy-Tony prizewinning Miranda