Alexander Hamilton, My Shot, Helpless, Satisfied, Wait For It, The Room Where It Happens, Dear Theodosia, You’ll Be Back, One Last Time, Burn, It’s Quiet Uptown, Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story. From The Hamilton Mixtape: Wrote My Way Out, Who Tells Your Story, Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman
Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean
By providence impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
With those lines from the opening song Alexander Hamilton, sung live on CBS at the GRAMMY Awards 2016, beamed over from New York, the world had a musical theatre equivalent of Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar.
I often think to myself, on hearing a great song or seeing a great film, ‘This is dangerously good.’ What I mean is that the creator and the created thing have the power to win awards, influence other artists and become a yardstick for that genre. The musical’s name in full is ‘Hamilton: An American Musical’, and not just because it is about the Founding Fathers of the American constitution; it’s about hope, friendship, career opportunism, graft and dreams. And, for all of this, every character except King George was played on Broadway by a non-white actor.
I first read about the musical Hamilton in a piece written by author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker magazine that seemed to run to about 15,000 words, but felt too short. The piece was effusive in its praise for the writer, lead performer and maverick Lin-Manuel Miranda (henceforth ‘Lin’). Lin had created his first work as an undergrad. In The Heights updated West Side Story to incorporate Latin rhythms from someone in whose blood Latin music was. In the show, the characters are three-dimensional, rap and sing and dance all at once and drive the story forward with panache. It came to the UK in 2015 where thousands saw it in a tiny venue in Kings Cross.
Hamilton, at the time, had been off-Broadway but was due to move up to the main thoroughfare in August 2015. It was an immigrant’s story which seemed perfect to tell using the idiom of hip-hop, America’s peerless late-twentieth-century export. It might also prompt a slew of musicals inspired by weighty biographies of historical figures; the musical is based on Ron Chernow’s doorstop of a book which Lin took with him on holiday. Originally a mixtape, he spent six years working it into a stage musical, which won 11 TONY Awards and stands above any other musical in the 2010s, including The Book of Mormon and Come From Away. (These, and Moana, will be discussed in the project.)
It was when the musical’s soundtrack was released in autumn 2015 that the local phenomenon went global. The smallish theatre sold out its 1300 seats months in advance, but a nightly raffle ensured the proles could see it at a low price. While the queue formed, and before the cast got into costume, Lin and his cast entertained the crowds with Ham4Ham, a five-minute improvised or planned set. Filmed by keen punters, the world had a free show from the hottest ticket in town, which promoted the show around the world. In winter 2015 they brought the show inside to film Ham4Hams themselves; guests included Weird Al Yankovic, Barack Obama and Jimmy Fallon, and in ‘Groff Week’, Jonathan Groff (who was King George) took centre stage.
The story of Hamilton is actually three stories. In fact, it could easily be a trilogy split over six hours of drama, rather than condensed into three in one night: Alexander Hamilton is the man who founded the Treasury; Thomas Jefferson is the renowned President who succeeds George Washington; Aaron Burr is the scheming VPOTUS, the US Vice-President trying to influence things and win power for himself.
Burr and Hamilton are orphans. Both are educated, driven and hungry to be at the vanguard of this new nation. In an act of charity, Lin has written the score’s best songs – Wait for It and The Room Where It Happens – for Burr. The former, Lin has said in interviews, was written in a hurry after he had to excuse himself from a friend’s party; he got to the shindig, quickly said hello and goodbye, and wrote the line ‘death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints’, which forms the basis of the song. In it, Burr tells his story – he’s a preacher’s son who is ‘inimitable, I am an original’ – to an r’n’b backing; Usher performed a version on 2016’s The Hamilton Mixtape. It is a sort of Salieri’s aria, with Mozart substitute Hamilton (‘he exhibits no restraint...changes the game’) on Burr’s mind while he plots his own path to success.
Later, in another a ‘behind the arras’ moment, Burr sings how ‘no-one else was in the room where it happened’ when the deal to award New York the Treasury and Washington the country’s capital is agreed. Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington are there, but Burr is locked out. Political machinations fit for a play are instead set to music, with a banjo poking out in the earworm of a chorus. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to ‘build something that’s gonna outlive me’, a noble endeavour.
‘Burr hangs back while Hamilton charges forward,’ Lin said in the New Yorker profile. Ultimately the message is bigger than the characters, something Lin makes clear in his script, which is ‘sung through’ in the manner of an opera. The line ‘Immigrants, we get the job done!’ always gets applause on Broadway; ‘If you got nothing to stand for then what will you fall for?’ and ‘I am not throwing away my shot’ are motivational quotes rooted in universalism and ripe, in this day and age, for fitting in a small box on social media.
My Shot comes within the first ten minutes of the musical. The title puns on the inevitable duel that occurs at the end of the play where Hamilton throws his shot and Burr doesn’t. It’s a stirring summation of Hamilton’s aims with echoes of Lose Yourself by Eminem; it’s his ‘I Want’ song which also spells out his grievances with King George. There’s a three-bar soliloquy in the middle of the number where Hamilton fears he’s ‘talking too loud’, the orphan loner finally finding his crowd, and encouraging them to ‘shout it to the rooftops’. The second half of the number takes the theme of ‘Rise Up’, as Hamilton’s cohorts also realise anarchy and dissent is the way to change things. At all times, Lin is juggling wordplay, rhyme, melody, plot, character and subtext, all the while keeping the audience alert and foreshadowing any character flaws.
The show is driven by the brilliance of Hamilton. His passions for government and his wife Eliza and son are undercut by an affair which drags down his reputation. In the first act, Eliza wants him to ‘take a break’ but Hamilton seems on a mission. The pair’s ‘meet cute’ happens in Helpless, where Angelica Schuyler introduces him to her sister Eliza (‘Look into your eyes and the sky’s the limit/ Down for the count and I’m drowning in ‘em’) and they end up married by the end of the number.
Angelica gets an aria immediately with Satisfied, a wedding toast, in which she tells of her pride but also irritation that the one she spotted has gotten away from her. The song breaks into a rap halfway through which ends with a tender proclamation: ‘At least my dear Eliza’s his wife/ At least I keep his eyes in my life…’ At which point Angelica snaps back into the bridal toast. Eliza has her own aria in the second half: Burn is her lament at being let down by Hamilton, who is a worse husband than a statesman. ‘You build me palaces out of paragraphs’ is Eliza’s sorrowful words, as the letters she kept from him and her entire world are primed to be burned.
The show’s most beautiful song is the lullaby Dear Theodosia, in which Burr and Hamilton both sing to their children (‘I’m dedicating every day to you’, as Burr sings to his daughter). Placed just before the interval, it is a breath of calm air after some stormy warfare where the world is ‘turned upside down’. The most comic song comes from the fool, King George III. You’ll Be Back, with an addictive ‘da-da’ post-chorus, is a lot of fun that takes musical inspiration from British music from the 1960s; strangely, George is cheered on the West End (one of our own!) but hissed at in America since he plans to ‘kill your friends and family to remind you of my love’.
The narrative puts the audience through the ringer emotionally, as with It’s Quiet Uptown, where Eliza and Hamilton mourn the death of their son, Phillip. With a chorus of voices begging people to ‘have pity…He is working through the unimaginable’, Hamilton is a tragic figure who cannot ‘trade his [son’s] life for mine’. The strings and piano on the track, scored by Alex Lacamoire who arranges the soundtrack superbly, again offer peace amid the noise of the politicking.
Lin and the cast visited the White House to celebrate the continuation of Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill; Obama’s patronage helped the reputation of Hamilton. The main cast entered ‘the room where it happens’ to deliver a spoken-word version of the famous Cabinet Rap Battle. At a visit to honour the Obamas in the final year of the Presidency, the cast performed four songs, one of which was One Last Time.
Chris Jackson as Washington and Lin as Hamilton performed it as a duet; in the musical it is sung when President George Washington announces he is stepping down as President to Hamilton’s dismay (‘The nation learns to move on, it outlives me when I’m gone’). As they read the words from real letters, the pair end up speaking in unison in a dramatic moment which sets up the musical’s third act, when Burr and Hamilton move to the inevitable duel.
After the duel comes the musical’s finale, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. Eliza starts an orphanage while Angelica is a public servant too, wondering ‘Have I done enough?’ The audience can’t help themselves from reflecting on their own story, having seen a brilliant piece of theatre which has already run on Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre for four years and in London’s Apollo Victoria for two. It will go to Sydney in 2021, joining Chicago as a longterm place where Hamilton’s story is told.
The point of the show is legacy, though America as an immigrant nation is also a major theme. Two centuries on, the Treasury still holds strong and Hamilton’s face still adorns the ten-dollar bill which, amusingly, rappers refer to as Hamiltons. ‘He took our country from bankruptcy to prosperity’ are Washington’s words on him.
In 2016, The Hamilton Mixtape brought songs inspired by the musical as well as other versions (Sia doing Satisfied, Andra Day singing Burn, comedian Jimmy Fallon taking on You’ll Be Back). Wrote My Way Out has Nas and Dave East joining Lin himself (‘Oversensitive, defenceless…I’m relentless’) in taking personal verses about their own origin stories with Aloe Blacc singing the hook; Who Tells Your Story has Common and The Roots meditating on legacy while Ingrid Michaelson takes the hook.
K'naan, Snow Tha Product, Riz MC & Residente (a Puerto Rican rapper) take verses on Immigrants (We Get The Job Done), which is the most striking original track on the album. Feasibly Riz Ahmed, aka Riz MC, could play Hamilton in London; the Englishman of Pakistani heritage has been a stage and screen actor from humble beginnings at Merchant Taylors’ School, which also counts me as a former student (he left just before I joined).
This is a musical that will go hand-in-hand with history as documenting The Obama Years of America, a point hammered home when Vice-President Mike Pence was booed when he saw the production, since he was part of an administration that was very unkind to immigrants. ‘It is rare,’ said President Obama, ‘where a piece of art can remind us about what’s best in ourself.’
Books and articles will be written in future about The Hamilton Effect, if more sung-through musicals inspired by rap are staged in the post-Lin era of musical theatre. Someone has said Sondheim and Gershwin changed musical theatre and to those two Lin-Manuel Miranda should be added. In terms of the 2010s, however, there is no contest about the show of the decade.