“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?” That is the first in a set of questions that Hamilton, this season’s Broadway blockbuster, asks about individual excellence, American exceptionalism, and democratic memory.
Hamilton is the brainchild of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a composer, playwright, and polymath performer who, at 35, has already racked up an Emmy, a Grammy, some Tonys, and a MacArthur “genius” grant. A few years ago, he picked up for a little beach reading a copy of Ron Chernow’s 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton, whose tumultuous life and times suggested songs and scenes that Miranda ultimately assembled into a fully staged musical. Hamilton sold out months in advance, the cast recording has set sales records, and there is already talk of a film.
Miranda himself stars in the title role, depicting major episodes in Alexander Hamilton’s life—from his childhood on the island of Nevis to his service in the revolution to his support for the new Constitution to his time as the first secretary of the Treasury—all the way to the infamous duel that killed him in his 50th year. These are interwoven with the lives of other Founders, including George Washington (Christopher Jackson as Hamilton’s indispensable mentor, boss, and shield), Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Daveed Diggs and Okieriete Onaodowan playing Hamilton’s greatest political rivals on the national stage), and Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) as Hamilton’s frenemy and opponent in that fatal duel.
Matters of statecraft and honor intersect with matters of the heart. The ladies’ man Hamilton sets his sights on New York’s most eligible bachelorettes, the glamorous Schuyler sisters. He courts and marries Eliza Schuyler (Phillipa Soo), but her older sister Angelica (Renée Elise Goldsberry) loves him, too. Historians have long read between the lines of the letters Angelica and Alexander exchanged; Miranda puts their flirtation, and feelings, center stage. Meanwhile, another relationship—a messy affair that leads to blackmail—is kept quiet for years until it finally blows up his political career.
Hamilton takes a handful of liberties with the factual record to simplify and dramatize the story, but evidently none that Chernow, a historical consultant for the show, couldn’t live with. (The paperback edition of Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is sold alongside other swag at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, and Miranda has been known to exhort his social media followers to “get thee to Chernow.”)
Hamilton has been deservedly praised for its innovative use of rap. The rapid-fire pacing and the live-fast/die-young ethos of hip hop culture gives Hamilton a drive that befits the circumstances of the new nation and its Founders. As Miranda put it in 2009, when he was just beginning work on the project, Alexander Hamilton “embodies hip-hop,” from his chaotic childhood to his meteoric rise, and the way he “caught beef with every other Founding Father,” clashing over ideas as well as reputations and personalities.
Moreover, as another Alexander once remarked, “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.” The sheer wordiness of rap is a good match for the subject matter. According to an analysis by Leah Libresco for the website FiveThirtyEight, Hamilton stuffs up to an order of magnitude more words into the soundtrack than your standard musical. The torrent of clever verbosity—not since Cole Porter has a Broadway lyricist demonstrated such mastery of internal rhyme—is well suited to our Founders’ lively exchanges of ideas and insults. Hamilton and Jefferson didn’t really settle their cabinet disputes through rap battles, but one almost wishes they had.
Still, the label “hip-hop musical” does not do justice to Hamilton’s mashup of genres. Phillipa Soo’s solos as Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, concerned with themes of love and family life, have a timeless Broadway feel. The adulterous liaison is given a steamy rhythm-and-blues treatment that makes the foot-tapping audience complicit in Hamilton’s betrayal. Daveed Diggs’s debonair Jefferson gets a jazzy entrance; a drinking song has a touch of reggae. George III, played in the cast recording (and until recently on the stage) by Jonathan Groff, sings a campy love-and-loss tune—“You’ll Be Back”—worthy of Freddie Mercury.
The score is not only absurdly catchy, but rewards careful attention. Allusions to other stage productions—including 1776, South Pacific, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Last Five Years—are tucked next to elements borrowed from Biggie Smalls and Eminem. The lyrics and motifs are layered with a complexity that recalls Les Misérables—a show that gets its own passing nod in Hamilton and shares with it any number of other similarities in composition, scope, and moral seriousness.
The recurring and compounding motifs contribute to a sense of foreshadowing in a story whose end we know before the first notes are sung. (A young Hamilton, desperate to make his mark, insists, “I’m not throwing away my shot!” Over the course of three duels he’s involved with, he plays on the literal meaning of this phrase and ultimately turns against it in the last one, throwing away his shot on purpose while Aaron Burr fails to do the same.) This sense of destiny is reinforced by a writhing Greek chorus of backup singers. So, paradoxically, the lives of Hamilton and his cohort are presented as all but predestined, even though Hamilton is all about inventing a new country in which a person’s past does not define his future. And though the success of the Founders’ democratic experiment may be easy to take for granted now, as if predestined itself, Hamilton reminds us how uncertain and contingent it was then.
Which brings us to the questions that animate the plot. Starting with its opening lines, the show asks how Alexander Hamilton could “rise up” and achieve what he did despite his social handicaps: illegitimacy, poverty, rootlessness. The answer, implicit throughout the show, is that there is something exceptional about his adopted nation—or rather, the nation that adopted him. In America, the miracle of a nobody becoming a somebody is an everyday occurrence. To underline this point, all the principal roles in the Broadway production (with the exception of King George) are played by nonwhite actors—a casting decision that sends the message that the ideals of the “dead white males” of the American Founding belong to everyone, and that the energy and aspirations of the immigrants attracted to those ideals is one of their liveliest expressions.
Hamilton ends by asking two questions: “Will they tell your story?” and “Who tells your story?” On the surface, these allude to the fact that Hamilton’s political opponents outlived him. The dying Hamilton wonders whether he has built a lasting legacy, saying, “I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me. America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me.”
More deeply, however, these questions point to a central challenge of democratic politics: the need to remember and transmit the ideals that sustain our republic, even as future generations reshape what came before—continuing the symphony. If our democratic republic is to thrive, we must tell and retell the story of its Founding—the story that, in all its messy complexity, is itself one of our Founders’ greatest gifts.
Caitrin Keiper is editor of Philanthropy. Adam Keiper is editor of the New Atlantis.
