How did we get to ‘Hamilton’ — and what comes next?
Groundbreaking shows rarely get an early home on Broadway
It’s hard to overstate the impact of “Hamilton.” Now settling into San Francisco’s SHN Orpheum Theatre for an open-ended stay after a sold-out run of nearly five months last year, LinManuel Miranda’s 2015 hiphop musical about American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton has proved to be a phenomenon and a seeming game changer for American musical theater.
Whatever the next “Hamilton” may be still lies in the future — or, more likely, is already percolating under the radar at smaller theaters around the country, with a one in a million shot of making it to Broadway.
Miranda’s Tony-, Grammy-, Olivier- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical hit upon a bewitchingly unconventional combination: a sung-through musical employing hip-hop, R&B, jazz and traditional show tunes set amid the Revolutionary War era featuring nonwhite actors as the Founding Fathers.
Hamilton himself — the first secretary of the treasury and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers — was an unlikely hero for any sort of musical. But Miranda got inspired when he happened to read Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography
of Hamilton on vacation in 2008. That said, the choice of subject may have seemed slightly less strange after the success of Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers’ “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” in 2010, depicting the notorious seventh president of the United States as an emo rock star.
It’s fairly remarkable how rare hip-hop musicals have been on Broadway in the first place, considering that the genre has been popular for more than 40 years, and has been dominating American popular music for a while now.
“Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk” made a splash back in 1996, and there was a blink-and-you’d-miss-it Broadway run in 2014 of a Tupac Shakur jukebox musical, “Holler If Ya Hear Me.” But previous to the rise of Miranda with his 2008 hit “In the Heights” — which employed Latin and hiphop music — you’d mostly have look elsewhere than the aptly nicknamed Great White Way for examples of hip-hop pushing a story narrative.
Broadway has never exactly had its finger on the pulse of musical trends. At
best it sometimes points a finger at them. “Bye Bye Birdie” in 1960 was more lamenting and lampooning the rise of rock ’n’ roll than celebrating it, and 1967’s “Hair” isn’t exactly a rock musical either despite all its hippie kitsch. Similarly, “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s 1984 off-Broadway Reagan spoof “Rap Master Ronnie” wouldn’t exactly count as a rap musical.
Still, ever since early ’90s off-Broadway shows like “So! What Happens Now?” and “Jam on the Groove,” there have been any number of “hip-hoperas” or “raparettas”
happening here and there around the country. It’s just that they haven’t had that Broadway boost into nationwide ubiquity.
The San Francisco Bay Area itself has long been a breeding ground for hip-hop theater artists such as Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Will Power, Aya de Leon, Tim Barsky, Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd, and of course Oakland native Daveed Diggs, who shot into the national spotlight as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the original cast of “Hamilton.”
Even on local stages, however, shows by such luminaries
are infrequently staged compared to, say, a zillion productions of “The Little Mermaid” or “Mamma Mia!” The fact that “In the Heights” became similarly popular at local theaters once the rights became available should be an indicator that there’s an audience for groundbreaking fare if there’s a platform for it.
While it’s always exciting when something like “Hamilton” breaks out into the spotlight, and all the more remarkable when it debuts there, large-scale commercial theater isn’t usually the place to look for breaking new ground. For that you’ve got to look to the grassroots, to the vital new theater blossoming in your own backyard, and it really depends on theatergoers to embrace and support it and help it grow.
In the meantime, though, if you haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet, now’s the time to try to score tickets while it, too, is parked in your neighborhood.