What's the Show?
If you have somehow escaped hearing about it, Hamilton is Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical about America's first Treasury Secretary. It opened on Broadway in 2015 and proceeded to collect eleven Tony Awards, seven Oliviers, a Grammy, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Michelle Obama called it "the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life."
In 2018 its principal creators received a Kennedy Center Honor — the first ever given to a team for a single work rather than to an artist for a lifetime. Decades younger than their fellow honorees, they stood as a quiet argument that musical theater can be popular and still merit serious artistic attention.
When Miranda first pitched a hip-hop treatment to Ron Chernow — whose biography of Hamilton had planted the idea — the historian wondered how the style could possibly carry so dense a story. Chernow later recalled the case Miranda made:
"with dense, rapid lyrics, you could pack an enormous amount of information into the songs. He also noted the use of rhyme, including internal rhyme, and all of the clever wordplay that was possible."
A caveat before the praise: if you come to the show fresh, as a non-native speaker with little grounding in the history, stretches of it will be hard to follow. Beyond reading an introduction like this one, I would suggest priming your ear for some of the show's hundred-mile-an-hour verses.
Who's the Man?
The show traces, fairly faithfully, the life of Alexander Hamilton: Founding Father, author of the majority of The Federalist Papers, and the first Secretary of the Treasury, who conjured a national bank for a country that barely had credit. His rise was so improbably fast that he can read like an Aaron Sorkin character — born poor in the Caribbean, orphaned at twelve, shipped to the mainland on local patronage at seventeen, in the revolution at nineteen, married to a general's daughter at twenty-three, leading a decisive assault at Yorktown at twenty-four. He raised eight children, saw an affair become the young republic's first national sex scandal, lost his eldest son to a duel, tipped a presidential election, and died in a duel of his own. None of this counts as a spoiler; the show announces his death eighteen seconds into its opening number.
That improbable life ran on intellect and an almost frightening industry — qualities that set him apart even among the most capable and opinionated men of his generation. Unlike Washington and Madison, he owned no plantation and joined New York's Manumission Society early; unlike Jefferson, he made no apology for his elitism. The show is right that he was obsessed with his legacy, and he secured several. He remains, as the saying goes, the patron saint of Wall Street: two centuries on, the institutions he built still stand, which is partly why his is one of only two non-presidential faces on American paper currency.
What to Expect?
The show took six years to write. With that level of care, something in it is bound to reward whatever you happen to be listening for.
Start with the allusions, which are not subtle. The cast album posted the second-biggest first-week sales ever recorded for a Broadway recording, behind only Rent — the show a seventeen-year-old Miranda saw and came away from thinking, "You are allowed to write musicals about now." Hamilton, for all its period dress, is exactly that: a reflection on the America of its own moment. As the country edges toward becoming minority-majority, a cast of Black, Hispanic, and Asian performers tells the story of the white men who founded it. And two years before #MeToo entered the language, the show's women were already drawn fierce and unapologetic — Angelica Schuyler's idea of a pickup line is "I'm looking for a mind at work."
The company's politics did not stay on the stage. When then-Vice-President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance in November 2016, the cast addressed him directly at the curtain call, voicing the anxieties of the diverse America the show embodies. Few works make a stronger case for the country as an incubator of immigrant talent; Hamilton's story and Hamilton's cast make it twice over.
Then the music. A sung-through musical lives or dies on its score — a bar that, for me, Les Misérables only intermittently clears — and this one radiates wit, compassion, and sheer vitality. From "My Shot," an "I want" song a year in the writing and dense with internal rhyme, to King George III's poisoned valentine "You'll Be Back," to Washington's shattering farewell in "One Last Time," the vocal writing gleams. Alex Lacamoire's orchestrations move through hip-hop, jazz, rock, and even a pass of baroque without losing the thread.
And the staging. Director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler use the ensemble as a narrative engine, most visibly in the rewound time-lapse that turns "Helpless" into "Satisfied." The creators are generous with homage — I hear West Side Story in the opening number, and the trio work of "The Schuyler Sisters" recalls "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from Sondheim's Company. Adultery, battalions, cabinets, and duels compete for the eye, and no modest budget would have sufficed for the spectacle that results.
I could go on; the piece outruns any praise I can assemble for it. At bottom, Hamilton's story embodies the swift upward movement that the American Dream promises and robust individualism makes possible — and Hamilton: An American Musical found the exact style and vocabulary to say so. In form and in substance, it is an American masterpiece.