Hamilton: The Revolution

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And let’s talk about content. Are you a Hamiltonian? What’s your fave? While Quiet Uptown makes water leak out my face errrrrrry dang time I hear it, I can’t ever get enough of King George . . . . . Lin-Manuel Miranda's groundbreaking musical Hamilton is as revolutionary as its subject, the poor kid from the Caribbean who fought the British, defended the Constitution, and helped to found the United States. Fusing hip-hop, pop, R&B, and the best traditions of theater, this once-in-a-generation show broadens the sound of Broadway, reveals the storytelling power of rap, and claims our country's origins for a diverse new generation. There's a chapter on the book that explores the impact the play is already having on kids, many of whom before seeing Hamilton had not interest in learning American history and are now, like my own kids, thoroughly engaged and fascinated by it. Granted, I'm the sort of person who loves talking and reading about the process of creating art, and why certain words were chosen, and rhyme schemes, etcetera, so I'm always going to want as much of that as possible. There were lyrics and moments that I'm dying from curiosity to know how he came up with them, and why he wrote them a certain way, that nothing was said about.

I think is difficult to overstate the importance of having a second generation Puerto Rican drawing attention to the story of Hamilton, himself an immigrant from the Caribbean. The reaction from the people on the audience that night should have given us a hint of what was to come.

Probably American

It is now less than 2 months until we see Hamilton. It will be about 1 year after they moved into the Rogers Theatre and most likely right after Hamilton cleans up at the Tony Awards. I bought this book which, btw, is beautifully made and organized and a sort of cheat-sheet, uber playbill for the musical. It is organized into 32 chapters and two acts. It roughly follows the Musical and history of the musical. It tells the story of the production. Each chapter contains a detail about the musical, written like a review or online article. One chapter discusses the choreography, another discusses the album, another discusses Daveed Diggs, another Ron Chernow. Each of these chapters gives a little bit more insight into the development of the Musical from one song played at the White House, to a Mix Tape of songs, to the Public Theatre, to the Richard Rogers Theatre. This is a book definitely for fans. Then on November 2009, a newly minted President Obama and First Lady Michele Obama welcomed Miranda and his collaborator Alex Lacamoire to the White House's "Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word". At the last minute Miranda decided to sing the first song from the Hamilton Mixtape, his performance that night is already on the history books. You can watch the video here. Perhaps Miranda's greatest achievement might be helping a new generation to see the history of America as part of an overarching narrative and these historical figures as fallible human beings that did something extraordinary.

And in the passage about Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, we learn that when Chernow's wife passed away in 2006, he chose for her headstone the line "Best of wives and best of women" from Hamilton's actual goodbye letter to Eliza. Sobs.And, honestly, I didn’t think much about it until September when I saw that NPR was streaming the album. I immediately grabbed my earbuds and hopped into the bathtub to listen to it, and that was really the first time I actually started to pay attention to the show’s content: researching the cast; trying to understand the historical context for the song’s lyrics; trying to find interviews with anyone who was involved in it. My appreciation grew, and I began to realize just how buzzy and sensational it was for everyone else, too. I suppose that's not fair of me. If I had it my way, at least every other line of the musical would have a footnote, if not a paragraph, accompanying it. But it is what it is. Each chapter also contains a libretto from one of the musical's songs AND Lin-Maneul Miranda's notes on the song/lyrics/music.