Hurrah for Hamilton
Miranda’s tour de force finally opens in Toronto.
Hamilton
K (out of 4) Book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Directed by Thomas Kail. Until May 17 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria Avenue. Mirvish.com or 416-872-1212.
How does a bastard, orphan Broadway record-breaker Fare in its Canuck debut Five years later? Lin-Manuel made a sensation About the founding of his nation But can the sheen of his creation Beat 2020’s political frustration?
Ahem. It’s not as easy as it looks. “Hamilton” is that once-in-a-generation musical theatre blockbuster — winner of 11 Tonys, it made Lin-Manuel Miranda a household name and spawned two albums, a bestselling making-of book, a documentary and a recently announced film version to be released by Disney. It hypnotized fans with a (at the time) radical race-conscious casting of the U.S. founding fathers and a revolutionary score mixing Broadway styles with hip-hop, R&B, rap, the Beatles, and even bluesy folk into radio-ready earworms.
In fact, Miranda’s finesse with words gave the mid-2010s several taglines to define that period’s late-Obama administration sense of hope. “Work!” from “The Schuyler Sisters” was a feminist reclamation of women’s overlooked influence in history. “I am not throwing away my shot” described the hustle culture of millennials with professional ambition. “Immigrants, we get the job done” became an audience favourite, finally recognizing the value of a persecuted group of Americans. The cast is ready for applause breaks, whether or not they come.
But allow this understatement — a lot has changed since 2015. Google “The Room Where It Happened” and you get results about a new memoir from Trump national security adviser John Bolton. In that song in the stage show, audiences titter at the use of “quid pro quo” in the lyrics. The only real villain in “Hamilton,” Britain’s King George, sounds prescient instead of petty when he sings “What comes next? You’ve been freed, do you know how hard it is to lead?” and “They will tear each other into pieces, Jesus Christ this will be fun” (of course, now it’s also a pot-kettle accusation).
The context in which Toronto is now finally receiving its stop on the “Hamilton” national tour of Thomas Kail’s production with Mirvish Productions (on until May 17 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre) is nearly the polar opposite to the one that celebrated its birth.
Millennials are burnt out, illegal immigrants are villainized more than ever and women are still trying to be heard in court proceedings and presidential elections. Even for this ardent fan — confident enough in my knowledge of the lyrics that I could sub in for any charac
ter, given an unprecedented catastrophe — it made for some awkward moments. Its centring of a single man and his work ethic in the creation of a country, with no mention of the systems that made it possible for him to do so (nor of any woman in his orbit that isn’t begging for his attention when he has Very Important Work To Do) sends alarm bells ringing, even when this story of the past is recast to look like the present.
That said, “Hamilton” is still a non-stop jam. Miranda’s music, with layered orchestrations by music director Alex Lacamoire, transcends the topicality that launched its buzz and the slogans that turned into memes. The score, virtually entirely sung-through, is in perpetual motion, shifting in style depending on the national or personal mood (cabinet meetings as rap battles, duels conducted along to Biggie Smalls’ “Ten Crack Commandments”).
It’s no mystery how the musical’s cast recording, which went platinum multiple times over, hooked an audience far greater than any single run could reach. It’s undeniable, even when the live version inevitably differs with new voices.
Joseph Morales has the difficult job of stepping into Miranda’s breaches as Alexander Hamilton, who immigrates to New York City from a small Caribbean island in 1776 and joins the revolution alongside the man who will eventually shoot him dead, Aaron Burr (Jared Dixon, making the show’s emcee — and best part — his own with two electrifying performances of “Wait For It” and “The Room Where It Happens”) and a boy band of three comrades, John Laurens (Elijah Malcomb), Hercules Mulligan (Desmond Sean Ellington), and the Marquis de Lafayette (Warren Egypt Franklin, struggling with the French accent).
Morales is an antidote to Miranda’s Energizer Bunny portrayal of the soldier-turnedfinancier — throaty to Miranda’s nasal, laid back to his spitfire. It’s encouraging not to see an impression, but sometimes makes his laser-focused rise to the top less believable.
After winning the war against King George (Neil Haskell, leaning into a clownish monarch) under the leadership of George Washington (Marcus Choi), this band of bros becomes Hamilton’s foils in governance — Ellington and Franklin find their stride as the odd couple of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and help pull the second act out of its several lulls in comparison to the rapid-fire first act.
Unfortunately, Stephanie Jae Park as Eliza (Hamilton’s suffering wife), Ta’rea Campbell as Angelica (Eliza’s sister and Hamilton’s intellectual paramour), and Dariyln Castillo as the seductress Maria Reynolds can’t lift the show’s female characters out of their allotments as side players, getting in the way of male greatness. In fact, it’s even more apparent without the voices of Phillipa Soo or Renée Elise Goldsberry.
Nevertheless, the tour of “Hamilton” shines light on its impressive features that a cast recording can’t convey — Andy Blankenbuehler’s jaw-dropping choreography, low and smooth and hard all at the same time, and one gorgeous revolve in David Korins’s set design.
History had its eyes on “Hamilton,” and though we wish it could have arrived sooner, witnessing its continued legacy beyond the buzz is a testament to good art that’s worthy of criticism too.