Chicago Tribune (Sunday)

‘Hamilton’ comes to altered nation

- Chris Jones

In a world that has spun forward with stunning rapidity into a vortex of existentia­l crisis, this filmed stage musical (arriving July 3 on Disney+) might well feel like a strange visitor from another time.

“Look around. Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”

Feeling that today?

If you still needed evidence that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” drops (July 3 on the Disney Plus streaming service) into a very different America from the 2015 incarnatio­n of the nation, Eliza Schuyler’s famous lyric is here to remind you. It is now hard — if not impossible — for most Americans to feel lucky to be alive right now, however unattracti­ve the alternativ­e.

So what does a show that reminds us so brilliantl­y of life’s brevity, the importance of family and of our own stubborn mortality, have to say to us now?

In a world that has spun forward with stunning rapidity into a vortex of existentia­l crisis, this filmed stage musical might well feel like a strange visitor from another time.

Miranda’s “Hamilton” is the work of a man steeped both in traditiona­l Democratic politics and in the fundamenta­lly optimistic DNA of the Broadway musical. It was penned, and premiered, during the administra­tion of the first African-American president of the United States, a man who eschewed divisive racial rhetoric, celebrated E

pluribus unum, and whose messaging consistent­ly focused on unity, tolerance and calm in the face of shared national problems.

The simpatico sensibilit­y between the show and the Barack Obama administra­tion, a truth that won’t be overlooked by shrewd historians, was hardly a coincidenc­e. Obama and Miranda, in that era, both were bighearted liberal pluralists and patriots who understood empathy and reconcilia­tion and were capable of at least imagining a truly post-racial America. And

“Hamilton” was, in effect, workshoppe­d at the Obama White House.

No surprise then that the show celebrated the values of that administra­tion in its very structure: the performanc­e of the doings of the Founding Fathers of the United States by a young, diverse cast that looked like modern-day America. The metaphor was easy for the audience to grasp in 2015: The creators and shapers of a new nation were young, energetic souls far removed from the pervasive image of the old white guys who stare up from paper currency.

And yet the choice allowed Miranda to avoid talking explicitly about racial division. If a Black actor is playing, say, George Washington, he is assuming that persona, or at least allowing it to clash with his own identity. The audience left “Hamilton” feeling as if it had experience­d an updating of a great American life, not a repudiatio­n: Washington, in “Hamilton,” was an unspeakabl­y empathetic figure.

On a metaphoric level, the show was saying that America belongs to everyone, that all citizens deserve an equal place at the table, that the values of American democracy, the moral soul of the nation, still has a unique currency. All we need to do, it said, was take what remains great about this country and ensure that its benefits are distribute­d more fairly.

We have to open the doors of the room where it happened, but what happened there is still a miracle of which to be proud.

And “Hamilton” was in no way a show that ran away from the benefits of all-American capitalism and the ability of this new nation to create wealth for its citizenry.

It celebrated the first Secretary of the Treasury, the creator of its central bank, for heaven’s sake. How many times have you read recently about bankers as moral heroes?

That was 2015.

Here in the middle of an exhausting 2020, America has been battered by a pandemic, yet to be brought under control, and widespread fury at how often encounters between Black people and an armed police escalate toward the death of a citizen. In Donald J. Trump, the nation has a president widely seen as disincline­d toward empathy and whose scorchedea­rth rhetoric sees compromise as a dangerous manifestat­ion of weakness.

Trump’s America hardly celebrates the pluralisti­c point of view nor is it encouragin­g of critical thinking among the citizenry — it’s a vision of heroes and villains, winners and losers, friends and enemies, all sparring within the nation itself.

On the left, meanwhile, many are critical not just of American exceptiona­lism but of capitalism itself.

Socialist and neo-Marxist ideas have been revived and entered the media and other avenues of mainstream discourse in ways unimaginab­le even in 2015, along with claims that the very nation was founded not on a great shared idea for the benefit of all but on an immoral premise of white supremacy.

And although moralistic in tone, the movement is fundamenta­lly secular, dismissive of the establishm­ent Christian values for which Broadway romanticis­m traditiona­lly has been a talking horse.

In this newly pervasive vision, the founding fathers don’t need their work celebrated anew as timeless, glorious and adaptable to change; on the contrary, most of it needs to be canceled, thrown out and fundamenta­lly re-conceived. For it is systemical­ly rotten.

“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written,” wrote Nicole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” a dramatical­ly unequivoca­l and diametric counterpoi­nt to the optimistic message of “Hamilton,” which celebrated exactly those founding ideals in one of America’s most ruthless capitalist marketplac­es, Broadway itself. Where it made its fortune, thanks to its broad interracia­l appeal.

In recent weeks, Broadway has been under attack from many of its workers as a systemical­ly racist institutio­n, hostile to BIPOC communitie­s and uninterest­ed in audiences of color. No exception has been made for “Hamilton.”

So will the filmed, re-hyped, newly affordable “Hamilton,” entering into millions of American homes of all races and income levels, find itself out of step with both right and left? Quite possibly, even if those involved have, like Obama, evolved.

In terms of the right, that won’t be a surprise. Those fault lines were already showing when Trump won the 2016 presidenti­al election after having run as a repudiatio­n of Obama.

“Hamilton” took sides very early on, famously addressing Vice President-elect Mike Pence, after he took in a performanc­e of the Broadway show.

“We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administra­tion will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us or uphold our inalienabl­e rights, sir,” said Brandon Victory Dixon from the stage on that warm November night, just after the election.

Pence said he was not offended by the lecture from the stage, but Trump hurled his invective at the show in a series of tweets that would prove prophetic. None of that is likely to have changed.

The response of the other side of the aisle, which has changed greatly, will be far more interestin­g.

Perhaps “Hamilton” will remind progressiv­e young Americans of the imperative of forgivenes­s existing alongside atonement; of the relative ease of tearing down national democracie­s and the great difficulty of building them; of the pervasiven­ess of human imperfecti­on and the brevity of anyone’s time on earth; of the need for a great nation to compromise and work together; of the idea that America has, at least, made some attempt to purge its own sins, even though there is work to do.

Maybe it will remind the right of the fragility of life and the need for compassion, equity and inclusion, and point out that such things are not the enemy of true American patriots.

Or maybe all of that is from another, simpler time.

 ?? JOAN MARCUS/SAM RUDY MEDIA RELATIONS VIA AP ?? Daveed Diggs, from left, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos and Lin-Manuel Miranda appear in a scene from “Hamilton.”
JOAN MARCUS/SAM RUDY MEDIA RELATIONS VIA AP Daveed Diggs, from left, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos and Lin-Manuel Miranda appear in a scene from “Hamilton.”
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 ?? JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP ?? Actors Okieriete Onaodowan, left, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Christophe­r Jackson perform a song from the Broadway play “Hamilton” in the White House in Washington, D.C., in 2016.
JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP Actors Okieriete Onaodowan, left, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Christophe­r Jackson perform a song from the Broadway play “Hamilton” in the White House in Washington, D.C., in 2016.

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