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, nda, a 37year- old American-born, n-born, Puerto Rican-blooded oded lyricist-performer (and and now global megastar) ar) not only wrote the e 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 rern, and Ricky Gervais’s The Office.
Before Hamilton, he wrote the music and nd lyrics lyrit for Broadway hit In The Heights, and will star ar in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns. t H He i 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 be and one of the first Am American politicians ti to be hi hit by a sex sc scandal — as a hi hip-hop musical ca celebrating th the birth of modern Am America. Hi s extraordinary extr creation creati started with on one rap about Hamilton Hamilto — called Alexander Hamilton — which took a year y to write. Mi Miranda d was already l d 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 BROADWAY, Miranda offered a ticket lottery outside the theatre before every show — initially 21 front 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 atleast 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- Grammymmy-Tony prizewinning Miranda wrote and starred in Hamilton during its Broadway run, he has left some large breeches for his successor to fill. no wonder London auditions took over a year. But by all accounts 25-year-old Jamael westman is up to the task, despite Hamilton being his first starring role since he graduated from rAdA last year.
Half-Irish and half- Jamaican, he certainly looks like a star. He is 6ft 4in, handsome, scarred manfully on one cheek and raps ‘as easily as he breathes’.
Until the age of 14 he was training to become a professional football player, but a knee injury put paid to that and he changed tack (though he still wears a knee support on stage). His co-star rachel John, 37, who plays Angelica Schuyler, the very flirtatious sister of Hamilton’s wife eliza, is also a newcomer who still sings in her local church choir and is living with her parents in east London for the course of the run.
THE £6,000 TICKET
THe victoria Palace Theatre has recently undergone a multi-millionpound restoration and the official British opening night is on december 21.
The initial ticket allocation for London shows until April 2018, priced from £10 to £200, sold out within hours and some are now changing hands for thousands. The most expensive resale so far was £5,905, including vAT and booking fee of £1,500. As the show is two hours and 45 minutes long, that’s nearly £36 a minute.
Or, quite possibly, £ 5,905 for nothing, as production company delfont Mackintosh is trying to outwit touts by insisting that, instead of normal tickets, audience members have to produce their payment card, email confirmation and official Id to get in.
(For Miranda’s last few performances on Broadway last year, tickets were changing hands for $10,000 — £7,400 — each).
As on Broadway, London producer and theatrical impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh and U. S. producer Jeffrey Seller have also launched a daily lottery, run by the victoria Palace Theatre, where people can apply to be placed in a draw for tickets (for details, see hamiltonmusical.com/london).
A GOLDEN GOOSE
TOdAy, Hamilton is the golden goose that keeps on laying.
Before the show even opened on Broadway, the box office took more than £20 million in ticket sales and in november 2016 set a record for the most money grossed in one week in new york City by taking over £2.5 million.
It grosses more than £1.6 million a week, averaging £450,000 profit, and, in its first eight months, made more than £45 million.
Miranda reportedly makes 7 per cent in royalties and earns about £80,000 a week from ticket sales alone.
ron Chernow, the author of that 800-page Hamilton biography that inspired Miranda, became the show’s historical consultant, reviewing every draft and song for accuracy. He reportedly receives 1 per cent of the show’s profits.
THE SUPERFANS
An ArMy of Hamilton ‘superfans’ has sprung up around the world.
As well as queueing for hours for lottery tickets and discussing every detail of the show on social media, they devour regular ‘Hamilcast’ podcasts and pore over Hamilton The revolution, a beautiful leatherbound behind-the-scenes book.
It goes without saying there are endless Twitter exchanges and Facebook groups. This week Hamilton@ westend2017 — a Facebook group open only to people who correctly answer two biographical questions about Hamilton — was awash with fans worrying that the snow might get between them and their dream.
JOYOUS CRITICS
FOr once on Broadway, the public and critics were as one. ‘I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show,’ wrote The new york Times’s Ben Brantley. ‘But Hamilton might just about be worth it.’
Many others seemed to agree. Former First Lady Michelle Obama described it as ‘simply the best piece of art in any form I have ever seen in my life’.
Her husband Barack was just as excited, saying the musical was ‘the only thing dick Cheney and I agree on’ and tweeting: ‘Hamilton reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that’s at the heart of America.’
Hillary Clinton loved it so much that when she accepted the democratic nomination for President, she lifted lines from the musical for the finale of her speech.
President donald Trump, though, was rather less keen, dismissing it last year as ‘highly overrated’.
not that he’d actually seen it. He was just cross that his vice President Mike Pence had been jeered when he’d attended the show and, worse still, subjected to a political speech by cast members on behalf of ‘diverse America’.
PURE POETRY
MIrAndA is a brilliant poet who can make anything rhyme. ‘Socrates’ with ‘mediocrities’; ‘monarchy’ with ‘anarchy’ and ‘panicky’. He even finds a rhyme for ‘financial diuretic’ (‘a new line of credit’, if you’re interested).
everything is in rap and song. So Act II opens with Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson — another founding father — locked in battle over whether to establish a national bank, with Hamilton refusing to take lectures from a slave owner (Jefferson owned hundreds in his lifetime): ‘Hey neighbour/ your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labour’/ ‘we plant seeds in the South. we create’/ ‘yeah, keep ranting/ we know who’s really doing the planting!’
PC MESSAGE
SOMe — democrats, mostly — say it’s an immigrant tale to offer hope, diversity and social mobility in the age of Trump.
ETHNIC MIX
THe London transfer hasn’t been all smooth sailing.
Mackintosh described the restoration project of the victoria Palace Theatre as ‘an extraordinary undertaking, both thrilling and fraught’. It was certainly fraught for the 16,000 fans whose tickets were cancelled because building work finished two weeks late, delaying preview performances.
It finally opened for previews last week, with the popping of champagne corks almost distracting from the very strong smell of fresh paint.
Miranda’s ethnically diverse casting has ruffled a few feathers. despite all the founding fathers being white, he likes to use black, Hispanic and Asian actors to reflect the diversity of Amercian society today.
The original casting call for the American version’s national tour calling for ‘ non- white men and women’ was considered discriminatory by some and later updated to call for ‘ men and
women, ages 20s to 30s, for the non-white characters... performers of all ethnic and racial backgrounds are encouraged to attend.’
TUNING IN
DIsaPPoInteD fans who can’t get their hands on tickets can listen either to the grammy-winning soundtrack or the Hamilton Mixtape, a collection of remixes, covers and samples of the musical’s songs which was released last December and went straight to the top of the U.s. charts.
and they do, over and over again. the playlist has nearly 1.5 million monthly listeners on the music app spotify.
THE SPOOFS
tHe show is so popular it has already spawned at least two spoofs: spamilton, which mimics music from the show, sends up its characters, is full of the same hip-hop music and was just as hard to get tickets for, and Jeb! the Musical (an american Disappointment) which casts unsuccessful republican presidential nominee Jeb Bush in the role of Hamilton and Donald trump in a supporting role.
MEGHAN’S GOING
lUCKy Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will not have to join the lottery bunfight — Miranda put two tickets aside for them, as an engagement present. With luck, Harry won’t mind his great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather george III being portrayed as a burbling fool.
HISTORY LESSON
tHe show is being used in schools across the U.s. to inspire students about 18th-century history. two american universities are now offering coursework inspired by Hamilton and one community college has even started a Hamilton appreciation movement.
SO WHAT’S NEXT?
a FIlM adaptation is in the pipeline — a slew of oscars is surely a-given — along with a 2018 U.s. tour and, in 2019, a performance at the University of Puerto rico’s teatro UPr in san Juan, with lin-Manuel Miranda back in the title role.