‘Hamilton’ builds on, breaks with tradition
“Hamilton,” the blockbuster musical whose touring Broadway production opens Friday in San Francisco, is routinely lauded as not just a great show, but a trailblazer in musical theater history. That’s as it should be. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning masterpiece about the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury has helped shape national discussions on race and immigration, politics and history.
But “Hamilton” can wield that influence only because it stands on the shoulders of myriad other musical theater pioneers, from
“Shuffle Along” to “West Side Story” to “Rent.”
Though the musical form is frequently considered tuneful fluff — see “Hello, Dolly!” — many of its greatest works make radical, if subtle, political statements. We heed the musical partly because it has historically been a popular, democratic, accessible art form — an American art form — but also because its characters are like its country: If not all of us need to recruit a whole chorus line to express ourselves, Americans are nonetheless an earnest, belief-proclaiming people, and like it or not, musical theater captures that national trait as no other medium does.
Throughout the genre’s existence, especially as it has come to stand for America itself, even a device as seemingly innocent as bursting into song has political ramifications. Who gets to sing the song of our country, and how? How fully fleshed out, how three-dimensional, is that singer allowed to be?
Some of the first striking answers to those questions came when musical theater was still embryonic, still evolving out of musical revues and many other art forms, including the minstrel show. When “Shuffle Along” (music and lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake; book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles) premiered on Broadway in 1921 — as the first Broadway production to have an all-black cast and writing team — it certainly drew on the racist tropes of minstrelsy. But for the first time, it also allowed a pair of black lovers to sing about their feelings in a complex manner. The song “Love Will Find a Way,” for instance, begins with the lyrics, “Come, dear, and don’t let our faith weaken/Let’s keep our love fires burning bright.” If that doesn’t sound revolutionary, compare it to some of the show’s other song titles: “Sing Me to Sleep, Dear Mammy,” “Bandanna Days” and “Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe.”
Many of musical theater’s boldest assertions about civil rights and identity politics have come in the form of love stories. Does an author allow a particular character to love and be loved? And who can that character’s lover be? In hindsight, musical love stories can look cheesy, their plots foregone conclusions, but especially for their time, they dramatized, gave voice to and in a small way confronted and allayed Americans’ deep-rooted anxieties about race and sexuality.
Consider how depictions of interracial romance evolve from “Show Boat” (1927) to “South Pacific” (1949), “The King and I” (1951), “West Side Story” (1957) and “Golden Boy” (1964). In the back story of “Show Boat,” a woman of mixed race has fallen in love with and married a white man — but all audiences see of that story is her punishment for her crime. Not so with the later four. Though each of these musicals eventually punishes its couple with death, they all first allow audiences to feel — to different degrees, but onstage and in real time — sexual tension between members of different races, all this years before the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving vs. Virginia struck down antimiscegenation laws. “South Pacific” provides a rueful primer on how prejudices form, with “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” “West Side Story” contrasts the imperfect America of reality (“America”) with a perfect place of dreams (“Somewhere”), where ethnically star-crossed lovers might love in peace.
The mainspring of “Hamilton” isn’t the love story between Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler; in some respects, Miranda uses that plot thread in a traditional way, to help chart the rise of a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore” into the upper echelons of colonial American society of which the Schuylers were a part. Yet in other ways, the show’s love plot shows how far musical theater has come. In the original Broadway production, those roles were played by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican ancestry, and Phillipa Soo, who is half Asian — which was remarkable precisely for how unremarkable it was, given how scandalous it would have been in musical theater mere decades ago.
More unusual, though, is how Miranda concludes the love story. Unlike musicals of yore, “Hamilton” doesn’t end with a scene of suffering after Hamilton is killed in a duel with Aaron Burr (I presume that’s not a spoiler for anyone). Rather, Eliza leads the show’s coda, titled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”: “I put myself back in the narrative,” she sings, going on to detail the decades she lived, and worked, after her husband’s death. With this song, “Hamilton” doesn’t tell a “great man” history, but a more thoughtful one, one that places its title character within the sweep of larger cultural shifts, many of them led, sans credit, by women.
The love story is far from musical theater’s only tool for elevating America’s disenfranchised and oppressed. Throughout its history, it has marshaled an array of narrative structures to assert the full and uncompromising personhood of characters whom America denied that right, both de facto and de jure: unionizing workers in “Pins and Needles” and “The Cradle Will Rock” (both in 1937), black World War II veterans returning home to segregation in “Call Me Mister” (1946), a gay male dancer in “A Chorus Line” (1975), ordinary blue-collar workers in “Working” (1977, in Chicago), the genderqueer title character in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (1998 off-Broadway).
“Hamilton” both builds on and departs from that tradition. It’s radical not in who it puts onstage — the founding fathers and mothers — but in that actors of color portray them. In so doing, “Hamilton” complicates and broadens the notion of American history — specifically, who gets to claim ownership of it. Even that bold move, however, draws on a rich tradition of racial recasting in musical theater — as when a racist senator gets transformed into a black man in “Finian’s Rainbow” (1947) or when “The Wiz” (1978) re-envisions the dreams and imagination of “The Wizard of Oz” as coming from black characters.
Still, the San Francisco premiere of “Hamilton” comes, of course, at a time when the ownership of not just our past but our present is in hot dispute, with cries of “not my president” from the left and “build the wall” from the right. It’s a truism in theater that we get the shows we need when we need them — when we’re ready for them. Among its other accomplishments, “Hamilton,” though it premiered in 2015, offers a perspicacious — and ultimately hopeful — response to our current moment. If musical theater history is any guide, with each new generation of musicals, we get a little closer to the dreams of the previous crop — the “Somewhere” imagined by Maria and Tony, the myriad personae Hedwig imagines adopting in “Wig in a Box.”
Musical theater history and “Hamilton” also remind us, however, that each dream realized only breeds new dreams to work on.