‘I have never seen anything like Hamilton’
Cameron Mackintosh tells Dominic Cavendish why the Broadway musical that’s expected to clean up at the Tonys tonight will be a hit here
Sir Cameron Mackintosh, arguably the most powerful and successful theatre impresario in the world, won’t be at the Tony Awards in New York this evening. Awards ceremonies – even the most prestigious of the lot – aren’t really his scene, he affably confesses while taking time out from attending rehearsals in London for a major upand-coming revival of Half a Sixpence at Chichester. One thing he can readily say, however, without even setting foot on the red carpet at the Beacon Theatre, where the US theatre awards take place, is that Hamilton, the most talked-about and adulated American musical of the millennium, is going to do “incredibly well. I’m sure it’s going to be an historic evening for them.”
Coming from the man whose CV includes producing three of the longest-running musicals of all time – Cats, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera – that’s not a forecast to be sniffed at. Even so, given that it has been nominated 16 times – unprecedented in the awards’ 70-year history – the big surprise would be if it didn’t clean up. Near-hysteria Stateside surrounds this unlikely Broadway smash about the life and times of Alexander Hamilton (c17551804), the first United States Secretary of the Treasury and one of America’s “founding fathers”, as anachronistically re-enacted by a nonCaucasian cast, using fast-paced and intricately witty rap and hip-hop to tell his story.
Its composer and lyricist (also, currently, its lead star) Lin-Manuel Miranda, 36, was already on the rise thanks to his Tony Award-winning In the Heights (2008), set among the vivacious Hispanic community of his native Washington Heights (he’s of Puerto Rican descent). But Hamilton – which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in April – has decisively propelled him to fame and fortune.
Fans include President Obama, Jay Z, Béyonce, Dick Cheney and Star Wars director JJ Abrams. Last week, James Corden, who is hosting the Tonys tonight, featured Miranda in the “Carpool Karaoke” slot of his CBS chat-show The Late Late Show; the YouTube clip of the pair joyously belting out the show’s opening number while cruising through Manhattan has already been viewed nearly six million times. The New York Times critic has drolly urged his readers to “mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets”. The album of the show is the highestselling cast-recording for 50 years. The question, though, is will the same magic happen in London?
Tomorrow, Mackintosh, who wanted to mount the show in the UK as soon as he saw it off-Broadway in 2015, launches a new website where people can register for priority booking for Hamilton’s West End premiere in October 2017. Though casting will only be confirmed in due course, he confirms that, yes, Miranda definitely intends to reprise his acclaimed performance as Hamilton for London audiences, though not necessarily at the start of the run at the revamped Victoria Palace theatre. But will Miranda’s close involvement and, presumably, a clutch of Tony awards whip up a comparable frenzy over here?
The history of the West End is peppered with instances of copperbottomed Broadway shows that suffered a dropping-off somewhere in the transatlantic crossing. Perhaps the most directly relevant is Rent (1996), Jonathan Larson’s rock ’n’ roll, East Village revamp of La Bohème, which ran for 12 years on Broadway but only mustered a year and a half at its London premiere. Where the Tonyaward-winning City of Angels (1989) ran for just over two years in New York, it only managed a four-month run in London in 1993.
Some US blockbusters, such as The Book of Mormon, The Lion King and Wicked prove as in-demand here as in their homeland. Equally, UK-spawned hits such as Phantom (Broadway’s longest-running show), Mamma Mia! and to a lesser extent Matilda and Billy Elliot rake it in over there, too.
But by any reckoning, with songs bearing titles like Cabinet Battle, The Adams Administration and The Reynolds Pamphlet, Hamilton has all the signs of being “a tough sell”. Imagine, for a second, Britain trying to export a raved-about experimental, multi-ethnic retelling of the life of William Pitt the Younger to New York and you get some idea of the cultural hurdles the show still has to leap. London audiences can prove aloof in the face of ecstatic reviews about shows that touch on questions of racial identity and American history: Kander and Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys, lauded at the Young Vic in 2013, flopped at its West End transfer. The legendary Show Boat, revived to five-star reviews in Sheffield, is closing early after failing to find enough takers in town. It’s worth remembering a 1969 musical called 1776 – all about the Declaration of Independence; it won three Tonys and ran on Broadway for 1,217 performances. In London, a year later, it ran for just 168 performances. Mackintosh is adamant that Hamilton has the right credentials to cause a stir here. “No one can know how any show can work out. All I can say is this is one of the most brilliant and original shows I’ve seen in a long, long time. How big a success it will be only time will tell. People say: ‘But it’s about the American political system.’ I didn’t feel it was any more American than Les Misérables is Parisian. It feels entirely contemporary. You realise that nothing much has changed – a bunch of American politicians fighting to create a country are not so very different from a bunch of American politicians fighting to run it now, or indeed our own British politicians – there’s a whole mélange of characters. “What this isn’t,” he continues, “is someone coming out of the pop world and deciding to have a go at a modern musical. Miranda is a huge and knowledgeable admirer of the musical theatre tradition. There are properly fashioned, brilliantly lyricised songs. The music bears many repeat hearings – that’s the mark of greatness.”
But there is, all the same, a special kind of fervour being shown towards Hamilton in America that can’t be replicated here, isn’t there? “I don’t deny that you can get a furore in New York that’s unique,” he agrees. “But that’s partly to do with the history of Broadway and the yearning for the great American musical to continue. And the Obamas have endorsed it. We don’t have the equivalent of that. You won’t see the Queen ordering her subjects to see this! I can only go by my response and what I’ve seen, though. The reaction to the show is amazing. I’ve never encountered such a unanimous word of mouth.”
Always upbeat, Mackintosh extends his optimism to the future of the West End in the event of Brexit (which he supports) or a win for Remain. “Whatever happens people are going to come to London and will go to the theatre – the show will go on.”
And what about the future of the musical in general, Hamilton aside? “More people are writing musicals that are getting on than ever before,” he says cheerily. “But, look, there have never been that many really good musicals, ever. Hamilton came from somewhere left-field and has become a mainstream phenomenon. And that’s the basic rule – you never know where the next big thing is going to come from, or who is going to do it.”