Hamilton: Theater review by David Cote

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.