What’s wrong with ‘Hamilton’
We must observe that talent isn’t scarce; if the so-called “Angelica” company of “Hamilton” isn’t, in its aggregate, quite the equal of the Broadway cast who got their closeups on Disney+ last year, it should at least be observed that there’s no member of this cast— which set up shop in Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall earlier this month—who wouldn’t fit seamlessly in with the varsity.
It’s nearly as stunning a show in person as it is on TV; a work of uncommon intelligence and wit that should stir anyone with the vaguest of patriotic feelings.
Yet if one is to criticize “Hamilton,” it wouldn’t be hard to point out some things that might be true.
First of all, “Hamilton” presents to some hip hop fans as ersatz and/or lite. (Fair enough; it’s not Kendrick Lamar or Wu Tang. It’s not supposed to be.) You could say it’s a superficial civics lesson, a fairly straightforward precis of the life of Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the most famous founding father never to become president.
You could, if you were particularly vulgar-minded and slow to catch on, note that few of the actors look like the real people they portray.
But to make that last argument would put you in the same dull category as Facebook commentators who insist Superman be white and straight and American, or the “historian” reviewing Hulu’s “The Great” for the Russia Beyond website who couldn’t get over the casting of a Black actor as Count Rostov.
It is entirely possible to resent the idea of “Hamilton”— it has become so big that it obscures much that is worthy. It presents us with a prefab idea of Hamilton the man and the still-young country he helped conceive and realize, a kind of Classics Illustrated nutshell version we can pull out at parties. It is pop history, and the kind of hip hop that civics teachers can nod along to—a “Schoolhouse Rock” for the 21st century.
But then, what’s wrong with Classics Illustrated or “Schoolhouse Rock”?
It is not Lin-Manuel Miranda’s fault that his art has become popular; it’s not hard to imagine a universe where “Hamilton” did not catch on, or where its success is only middle-grade, like, say, Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins,” a musical about the murderers and attempted murderers of American presidents.
Were that the case, were “Hamilton” not something most of us waited years to see, had its creator and original cast not been propelled to stardom, we would receive it as a quirky wonder, a remarkable and lovingly crafted product of nerdish obsession.
Miranda read Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton and caught in its up-from-the-bottom immigrant narrative echoes of the stories of striving rappers, writing themselves out of poverty and into the mainstream of the American cultural conversation.
What he made isn’t exactly a hip hop musical, it is a musical that injects a hip hop sensibility into a traditional Broadway structure. Miranda not only acknowledged and quoted hip hop sources, but also alludes to Gilbert & Sullivan (as when George Washington introduces himself as “the model of a modern major general”) and Rodgers and Hammerstein (when Aaron Burr counsels caution at joining the revolution: “You’ve got to be carefully taught”).
It’s not rigorous history; it’s myth-minting, which has always been an artist’s prerogative. If you get your history from movies or musicals you get the history you deserve, but if all you know of Hamilton and Burr is what “Hamilton” tells you, at least you get the gist.
There are some poetic liberties, but probably less than Gore Vidal took in his 1973 novel “Burr,” which painted Hamilton’s oft-demonized frenemy and killer as an honorable man undone by the opportunistic Hamilton, who only succeeded because he was promoted by the corrupt George Washington.
Hamilton had worked with and was socially cordial with the Republican Burr for more than 20 years after the Revolution, though he thought him a rash and dangerous man who might join with Northern secessionist leaders to set up a new nation.
Despite pledging neutrality, behind the scenes Hamilton took extraordinary measures to keep Burr out of office. The 1804 New York gubernatorial campaign was filled with invective and slander, and in the end Burr was on the wrong side of a massive landslide.
In reality, Hamilton probably did not have much to do with Burr’s losing the race, but—as “Hamilton” depicts—Burr had long resented his rival and may have been looking for a pretext to challenge him.
When a letter appeared in the Albany Register in which Hamilton was described as expressing a “more despicable opinion” of Burr during a dinner party, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. (In “Burr,” Vidal speculates that Hamilton accused Burr of an incestuous affair.)
Hamilton demurred, saying he couldn’t remember the remarks in question, and subtly inferred that he’d heaped abuse on Burr so often he couldn’t be expected to recall exactly what he’d said when.
I don’t believe Vidal’s “Burr,” but can countenance it. It is fiction, informed by the observed appetites and conceits of the human animal. “Burr” might well have been close to the version the real Burr would have argued. History is art, not science; history is literature. Works like “Hamilton” and “Burr” allow us the chance to understand what people might have thought and why they might have acted rather than just what they did.
Miranda takes a few poetic liberties, but musical theater isn’t supposed to be constrained by rigor in historical analysis. Its first duty is to entertain, if not enthrall.
Still, there is a lot of information in “Hamilton.” The libretto consists of some 20,000 words, many of them catchphrases and hooks, that we can use to fill out our bluffer’s history.
If those words were delivered at a rate typical to the Broadway musical, the show would last “12 hours,” according to Miranda. (Website FiveThirtyEight fact-checked that statement, concluding that if it “were sung at the pace of the other Broadway shows . . . it would take four to six hours.”)
In the Broadway show, Daveed Diggs, an actual rapper who’d never before performed in a theatrical production, approached the syllablesper-second rates of the world’s fastest rapper contenders Eminem and Twista. Audiences unused to the rapid-fire patois of hip hop might long for subtitles. (It’s like Shakespeare; it takes a while to get used to, but most people start to catch on after a few minutes.)
Miranda packs into a four-minute opening number what took up 40 pages in Chernow’s book. His playful magpie mind pulls from all corners of our popular culture, offering us a vision of America that never was, but maybe should have been, a polyglot cast of Americans who would hold a nation to its highest expressed ideals.