Dec 14

Hamilton

HAMILTON
 
 
Hamilton: An American Musical  is a sung- and rapped-through musical about the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, with music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda, inspired by the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by historian Ron Chernow.  Incorporating hip-hop, rhythm and blues, pop music, soul music, traditional-style show tunes, and color-conscious casting of non-white actors as the Founding Fathers and other historical figures, the musical achieved both critical acclaim and box office success.  The musical made its Off-Broadway debut at The Public Theater in February 2015, where its engagement was sold out.  The show transferred to Broadway in August 2015 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.  On Broadway, it received enthusiastic critical reception and unprecedented advance box office sales.  In 2016, Hamilton received a record-setting 16 Tony nominations, winning 11, including Best Musical, and was also the recipient of the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
 
 
Hit Broadway shows come and go, but there is something special about Hamilton, the current hit musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda.  The show opened on Broadway about a year ago (August 6, 2015) after an acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier in the year, and it remains the hottest ticket in town.  Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast album for Hamilton was released the month following the move to Broadway and debuted at #12 on the Billboard Hot 200 Albums chart – remarkably, that is the highest placement for a cast album in more than 50 years.  Also, the Tony Awards broadcast this year had its best ratings in 15 years. 
 
Alexander Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and was also the founder of the country’s first political party in the modern sense, the Federalist Party.  In honor of his being the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of President George Washington, his portrait has graced the front of the $10 bill since 1929.  Before Hamilton became such a hit, that was about to change in the recent drive to put a woman on some of our folding money – word now is that President Andrew Jackson will soon be removed from the $20 bill. 
 
Previously, Alexander Hamilton had become an aide-de-camp of General George Washington and had a key military role in winning the Revolutionary War.  Succeeding administrations were from the Democratic-Republican Party, in opposition to the Federalist Party.  I think it was on 60 Minutes when I heard that those who sought to downplay Hamilton’s legacy included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe; these men were the second through fifth Presidents. 
 
And then there was the famous duel that Alexander Hamilton lost with Vice-President Aaron Burr.  There is no question that his story is long on drama.  I did a book report in school once that featured the story of the duel, and frankly, that is about all I had remembered about him from my schoolboy days. 
 
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Fresh from his success with his earlier musical In the Heights (set in the mostly Dominican-American communities in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan), Lin-Manuel Miranda began reading the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.  Once he saw echoes of his own life there, he started envisioning the idea of Alexander Hamilton’s story as a Broadway musical.
 
The first any of us knew about it was at the nationally televised White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009.  Instead of performing songs from In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda told the audience:  “I’m thrilled the White House called me here tonight because I’m actually working on a hip hop album.  It’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip hop:  Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.”
 
Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted this statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end.  On its face, the idea is absurd:  The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries.  But Miranda has connected the dots:  Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age.  Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience.  And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
 
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772.  His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, ‘Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons:  For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto.  Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’  The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
 
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In a post entitled “How Eloquence Made History Class Cool Again” in the blog Rhetoric, Media and the Civic Life, Samantha Biel notes that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance at the White House in 2009 was almost word-for-word from the opening song “Alexander Hamilton” in Hamilton:
 
     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?
 
     . . .
  
     Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned
     Our man saw his future drip, dripping down the drain
     Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
     And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain
 
     Well, the word got around, they said, this kid is insane, man
     Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
     Get your education, don’t forget from whence you came and
     The world is gonna know your name, what’s your name, man?
 
     Alexander Hamilton
 
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In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the period costumes and the history, but he changed just about everything else.  Miranda, who is a Puerto-Rican–American, played the title role of Alexander Hamilton; he also inserted African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans into other major roles in the play so that this story about the founding of the USA would look like our nation does today.
 
At least as bold as this move was his decision to tell the stories of the Founding Mothers who are usually relegated to set pieces on the gowns that they were wearing.  Four of the 14 principal roles listed in the Wikipedia article are women, all tied closely to Alexander Hamilton:  Hamilton’s wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton; her sisters Angelica Schuyler Church and Peggy Schuyler Van Rensselaer; and Maria Reynolds, with whom Hamilton had a two-year affair in the 1790’s in one of the nation’s first sex scandals.
 
From Wikipedia:  “Hamilton has received unanimous acclaim from professional critics, being deemed a cultural phenomenon by many.”
 
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Those unusual names Schuyler and Van Rensselaer are Dutch, by the way; the Dutch heritage of our nation in general and of New York in particular – New York City was originally named New Amsterdam – is, shall we say, under-appreciated today.  It was hard for me to miss when we moved to New York in 1990, however, because Gansevoort Street was right around the corner from where we lived in Greenwich Village.
 
On This Week with George Stephanopoulos one morning a few years ago, the question of the day for the panel was, Which American President was not a native English language speaker?  I don’t think anyone got it, but the answer was Martin Van Buren, the nation’s eighth President.  That clicked in my mind immediately as soon as I heard the name; as a fellow “Martin”, I had long admired him.  He came from upstate New York and, on December 15, 1782, was baptized “Maarten Van Buren”, in the original Dutch spelling.  His family spoke Dutch at home, as many did in the isolated communities in that part of the state.
 
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Although the celebratory mood was muted due to the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando that had just taken place, this year’s Tony Awards ceremony was expected to be a rout for Hamilton; the Off-Broadway production had already racked up 27 awards in 2015 from all quarters.  The number of Tony nominations for Hamilton (16) had already set a record.
 
USA Today reported:  “The ultra-popular musical Hamilton had a big night, winning 11 honors including best musical, leading actor for Leslie Odom, Jr., featured actress for Renée Elise Goldsberry, and featured actor for Daveed Diggs.  It fell one short of The Producers’ record 12 wins in 2001. . . .  It was definitely a historical night for diversity:  For the first time in the Tonys’ 70 years, all four musical acting honors were awarded to people of color.”
 
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Just because a hip hop musical made this big a splash doesn’t mean that rock musicals have gone away.  Broadway titan Andrew Lloyd Webber returned to his roots with his current show, School of Rock that opened on Broadway four months after Hamilton, on December 6, 2015.  The musical is based on the delightful Jack Black film from 2003, School of Rock that follows a washed-up rock musician who conceives the idea of masquerading as a substitute teacher and pressing a group of fourth graders into backing him at the local Battle of the Bands in order to get his career back on track.
 
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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first major show was the audacious Jesus Christ Superstar (1970); this rock opera actually did start out as an album, Jesus Christ Superstar, with Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan in the title role, while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical went straight to the stage.
 
(September 2016)
 
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
 
(Year 7 Review)
Last edited: April 8, 2021