Hamilton
Opening Night: August 6, 2015
Theater: Richard Rodgers
Website: hamiltonmusical.com
Lin-Manuel Miranda takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on the new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is. From bastard orphan to Washington’s right hand man, rebel to war hero, a loving husband caught in the country’s first sex scandal, to the Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy. George Washington, Eliza Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton’s lifelong friend/foil Aaron Burr all make their mark in this astonishing new musical exploration of a political mastermind.
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August 6, 2015
With “Hamilton,” Broadway is officially the coolest place on the planet. And the smartest. And most exhilarating. Yes, composer, lyricist, author and leading man Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magical musical tour of the life of the “10-dollar Founding Father,” Alexander Hamilton, is that great. It’s even richer and more eloquent since its run earlier this year at the Public Theater. The star of this show is the show itself. And it begins with a simple yet intriguing question: How did a nobody — in this case Hamilton, a penniless, illegitimate immigrant orphan — become a somebody, rising to become the right-hand man to George Washington (Christopher Jackson, excellent), a Revolutionary War hero and founder of the banking system? And how did someone of such intellect and respect fall for a messy sextortion plot and then end up in a fatal duel with longtime frenemy Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr., commanding in the villain role)?
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August 6, 2015
A typical musical might list 18 numbers in its program; Hamilton, with 34, is more in the range of operatic works like Porgy and Bess. Ambition is part of it, no less for Lin-Manuel Miranda today than for George Gershwin in 1935. So is scope. The true-life tale of the orphan immigrant turned architect of American federalism (with sidelines in battle, banking, bedding, and duels) could not be told, at least not with depth to counterweight its breadth, in a few ditties and choruses. Nor could Miranda’s overarching point — that the doors of history must especially be opened to those traditionally excluded from it — be made in the traditional forms. When Hamilton debuted Off Broadway at the Public Theater in February, the rapturous reviews, including mine, all hailed its “groundbreaking” incorporation of contemporary musical genres, especially rap and various forms of hip-hop, as a way of refurbishing and selling an old story. A second look, as the slightly revised musical opens on Broadway for what will no doubt be a long and profitable run, suggests that something even more significant is going on. The breakthrough isn’t so much the incorporation of those contemporary genres; after all, Miranda already did that, throwing in Latin music to boot, in the charming In the Heights. But Hamilton not only incorporates newish-to-Broadway song forms; it requires and advances them, in the process opening up new territory for exploitation. It’s the musical theater, not just American history, that gets refurbished. And perhaps popular music, too. Call it Miranda’s manifest destiny, though one dreads the caravans of poor imitators that will surely trail behind.
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August 6, 2015
Every great musical improves on second (and third, and fourth) hearing; Hamilton, which opened Thursday night at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre after an extended run last winter at the Public, is no exception. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s electrifying adaptation of Ron Chernow’s celebrated biography of the least-known U.S. Founding Father is not, to use that cliché, a game-changer. It is, in truth, the quintessence of a Broadway musical destined for the record books: Of-the-moment in its rolling, roiling waves of rap used to tell its tale yet timeless in its unembarrassed detours into the sentimental ballads and roof-levitating choral numbers that are Broadway’s stock-in-trade. Like Rent 20 years ago and A Chorus Line 40 years so, Hamilton is accessible without pandering and inspirational in sneaky ways that permeate a skeptic’s shell. Miranda has used well the interregnum between downtown and up, sharpening lyrics, shifting some of the relationships to achieve greater balance and, happily, ignoring suggestions that he trim the show (it clocks in at about two-and-three-quarters hours yet never feels long).
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August 6, 2015
What is left to say? After Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s prodigious quill scratched out 12 volumes of nation-building fiscal and military policy; after Lin-Manuel Miranda turned that titanic achievement (via Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography) into the greatest American musical in decades; after every critic in town (including me) praised the Public Theater world premiere to high heaven; and after seeing this language-drunk, rhyme-crazy dynamo a second time, I can only marvel: They used up all the damn words. Wait, here are three stragglers, straight from the heart: I love Hamilton. I love it like I love New York, or Broadway when it gets it right. And this is so right. A sublime conjunction of radio-ready hip-hop (as well as R&B, Britpop and trad showstoppers), under-dramatized American history and Miranda’s uniquely personal focus as a son of immigrants and as an inexhaustible wordsmith, Hamilton hits multilevel culture buttons, hard. No wonder the show was anointed a sensation before even opening.
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August 6, 2015
Yes, it really is that good. At this point, it would be almost a relief to report that “Hamilton” — the musical that opened at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Thursday night — has shrunk beneath the bloat of its hype. Since it was first staged at the Public Theater this year, this brave new show about America’s founding fathers has been given the kind of worshipful press usually reserved for the appearances of once-in-a-lifetime comets or the births of little royal celebrities. During the past several months, while it was being pumped up and trimmed down for its move from the East Village to Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rap-driven portrait of the rise and fall of Alexander Hamilton (this country’s first secretary of the Treasury) has been the stuff of encomiums in both fashion magazines and op-ed columns. A friend of mine recently said that there were three subjects she never wanted to see in a newspaper again: Caitlyn Jenner, the Harper Lee novel “Go Set a Watchman” and “Hamilton.”
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 17, 2015
History ticks to a syncopated beat in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s jubilant, overflowingly rich Hamilton. And just as syncopation achieves its energizing effect by disturbing the expected flow, so Miranda’s biomusical on founding father Alexander Hamilton is a rhythm-and-rhyme intervention for American iconography and ideology. This populist throwdown to the way we tell our stories and spin our songs is about the Revolution, and it is a revolution: hip-hop grooves stuffed with political critique, heroes of color taking over the old house and throwing a party. You’re invited, but you’ve got to learn new moves. Miranda based this epic-yet-personal pageant on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, which clued in the prodigious composer-lyricist to the fact that Hamilton was, as his opening lines have it, “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a / Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten / Spot in the Caribbean.” Casting himself in the title role, Miranda claims Hamilton for the immigrant dissident.
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