In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy. And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony. One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children. One would be wrong.
Hamilton (with book, music, and lyrics written by and lead role played by Lin-Manuel Miranda), is an unabashed celebration of the American Revolution, as patriotic as the Disney movie of Johnny Tremain; one that makes 1776 (to which there is a hilarious allusion in Hamilton – “Sit down, John, you fat motherfucker”) seem like scathing satire. Slavery is only mentioned in one specific context – Hamilton and one of his brothers-in-arms (I believe the Marquis de Lafayette) say that their friend John Laurens, who died fighting the British in Georgia, was trying to liberate the slaves in that colony. Sally Hemmings’ name is spoken once, and the three-fifths clause raised not at all. Alexander Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens, and Hercules Mulligan are unambiguously revolutionaries as exuberantly anti-establishment as the drum-pounding nincompoops of the late, unlamented Occupy Wall Street. Like 1776 and Johnny Tremain, Hamilton makes the American Revolution less politically complex than it actually was, portraying George III as absolute ruler of the British Empire (by the time of the American Revolution – post-Glorious-Revolution –the elected – albeit only by property owners and not by the American colonists –, parliament was supreme. However, it must be said that Jonathan Groff’s performance as the king and the scorned lover’s ballad that Miranda has written for him are laugh-outloud funny).
The flippant previous paragraph does not accurately represent my reaction to Hamilton. From the opening song, it grabbed me by the guts and held me until the end.
That Hamilton is unconflicted about the revolutionary nature and justice of the American Revolution does not mean that the play itself is not revolutionary in the context of the Twenty-teens. (I will not discuss how revolutionary it is as a Broadway musical, since I am not qualified to discuss music). Having Latino-Americans and African Americans portray the founding fathers, often speaking in contemporary slang, is a revolutionary act. It claims the American Revolution for a large portion of the American population who may have been alienated from it by the injustices mentioned above and decades of history books focusing on the white, propertied leadership of the Revolution; not to mention the fact that they might be alienated by the recent phenomenon of Tea Party loons prancing about in powdered wigs and knee-breeches. That the portrayal of Hamilton, Lafayette, their friends, and George Washington (though not Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and James Madison) is heroic, renders this reclamation even more bold.
Hamilton takes on one current hot-button issue: immigration. Miranda emphasizes the fact that Hamilton was an immigrant from the Caribbean, and, at the Battle of Yorktown, he and Lafayette proclaim “Immigrants/We get the job done.”
Based on Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda’s play addresses, albeit glancingly, the major American political parties’ complex relationship with their antecedents. During Ronald Reagan’s first year as president, my eighth grade social studies class was studying the early days of the American Republic, and its first two political parties, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists. A student wrote an essay titled “Ronald Reagan as a Democratic Republican.” The student was both right and wrong. The Democratic-Republicans are the direct ancestors of the modern Democratic Party, and the Federalists were succeeded first by the Whigs and then by the Republicans. On the other hand, like the Republican Party of Reagan and today, the Democratic-Republicans were the party of small government, and the Federalists, like the Democratic Party (at least from FDR onward) were the party of a strong central government. To my knowledge (though I am not an expert on American history), neither party represented small farmers, the working class, or the poor: the Republican-Democrats represented large Southern planters and the Federalists represented Northern manufacturers and financiers. In Hamilton, there are brief but pointed allusions to the fact that what are today conflicting positions (large government and support for the financial industry) were, in the early days of the U.S., the positions of one and the same party. The Democratic-Republicans Thomas Jefferson and James Madison rail against both Hamilton’s desire for big government and his being in the pocket of Wall Street, perhaps fomenting some constructively provocative confusion in the minds of the audience.
Based on my own experience, I would say that Hamilton is the latest is a series of revisions of attitudes toward the founders. Throughout my childhood in the 1970s, I remember Jefferson being lionized as the most brilliant, idealistic, and freedom-loving of the lot. Washington was the white plaster saint of apple-pie-Joe-McCarthy America, and people enjoyed chipping away at him. Adams was the hero of 1776, leading the charge for independence, and was one of the subjects of The Adams Chronicles on PBS. Hamilton was barely mentioned, and I had never heard of Burr. In the early 80s, Adams disappeared from popular culture and was portrayed negatively in my history textbooks for the Alien and Sedition Acts. In the late 80s and early 90s, I started to hear more about Jefferson’s hypocrisy as a slave owner and his relationship with Sally Hemmings. In the same time period, Washington’s stock seemed to go up – he was recognized in several surveys of historians as one of our three greatest presidents. Then in the early 2000s, I read Gore Vidal’s Burr (originally published in 1973). Vidal depicts Burr as a charmingly iconoclastic cynic, and tears down most of the other founding fathers. He singles out Jefferson for special treatment as a hypocrite who opposed the expansion of government power but whose purchase of Louisiana was the greatest expansion of such power in, what was then, the brief history of the U.S. Vidal’s Hamilton is self-serving and sinister. I did not read David McCullough’s John Adams but saw the television adaptation. McCullough rehabilitated Adams, and the movie (and I assume the book) presented Adams as being in the right in his disagreements with Jefferson. Towards the end of the movie, Adams recognized Jefferson as a kindred spirit and Hamilton as a malign force.
Now comes Ron Chernow’s and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rehabilitation of Alexander Hamilton. Miranda gives Jefferson much the same treatment as Vidal did: Jefferson is vain and self-aggrandizing – though, other than recognizing the genius of Hamilton’s centralized financial system – Miranda sides with neither Hamilton nor Jefferson in the central government vs. states’ rights debate. Washington is presented as the noble, modest, and self-sacrificing figure per the the current historical consensus.
Miranda’s Burr, played by Leslie Odom, Jr., brings me back to my actual review of the show. In the play, Burr is such a cautious opportunist that he is almost a cipher, never taking a stand on anything, and Odom’s performance is, for much of the play, accordingly unremarkable. This is a disappointment to anyone whose image of Burr is Vidal’s urbane mischief-maker.
Odom, however, rocks the house when he sings the jazz-influenced “The Room Where It Happens.” This last number makes it clear that labeling Hamilton a hip-hop musical is an over-simplification. The songs range from the jazz, to classic show-tunes, to 60s pop, to contemporary R & B.
Surprisingly, considering that hip-hop is more spoken than sung – and crisply spoken –, the hip-hop songs early on in the production, “Alexander Hamilton” and “My Shot,” are hard to understand. This is due to their fast tempos and the density of information packed into them. Nonetheless, the songs have a visceral power that, as I said before, along with Andy Blankenbuehler’s thrilling, athletic choreography, seized me by the kishkas.
Also exciting is director Thomas Kail’s fluid staging, aided by David Korin’s warehouse-like set, that includes a movable stair case, shuttling actors about the stage.
I saw the play on a Sunday, when Lin-Manuel Miranda is regularly replaced by Javier Muñoz, who also performed for the President – if he’s good enough for Barack, he’s good enough for me. Muñoz is a strong, charismatic performer. With the exception of Odom, the cast is, on the whole, excellent. The most striking performance is given by Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law and intellectual soul-mate. Other standouts are Groff, Daveed Diggs as Jefferson and Lafayette, and Christopher Jackson and George Washington.
Nothing could live up to the hype of Hamilton, but this simultaneously patriotic and revolutionary play comes pretty close.