The first Republican Presidential debate for the 2016 presidential campaign aired while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, a musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, celebrated its opening night on Broadway. While Bobby Jindal declared that “immigration without assimilation is invasion,” an opening night audience watched a musical about the Founding Fathers that rests on an ideal explicitly stated in the first act: "Immigrants / We get the job done."
Hamilton opens with the same lines that Miranda performed as Aaron Burr, unfinished, for President Obama in 2009: “How does a bastard, orphan / son of a whore and a Scotsman / dropped into the middle of a / forgotten spot in the Caribbean / by Providence, impoverished, in squalor / grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” But instead of standing alone, on Broadway, Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) is joined by Miranda and the rest of the cast. Imagine a stage filling slowly, populated by characters plucked directly from history: Aaron Burr, George Washington, Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette, Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, and others -- all white in historical reality, but here imagined as people of color. Imagine a Broadway stage where the only white featured lead is King George III, the one common enemy of everyone onstage telling this story about the struggle to first found and then succeed in America. None of them are dressed as lions, and that you're not sitting through yet another iteration of A Raisin in the Sun to find some diversity onstage -- Hamilton is new, fresh and original and, despite the fact that it’s set over two hundred years ago, it sounds decidedly like today.
You could spend weeks trying to pick out every single hip-hop and musical theatre reference Miranda deploys while he's weaving genres together to create Hamiton. Plenty of people spent their week doing just that when the cast album dropped early on NPR, asking about everything from a Parade homage to the meaning of a well-placed comma. There are enough influences and hat-tips that Miranda will be releasing his show notes in book form this March. Appropriate, given that an 800-page tome of a biography by Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2005), provided Miranda’s inspiration for the show in the first place.
Read more Race, Immigration, and Hamilton: The Relevance of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s New Musical at The Toast.
