In early 2015, soon after I retired, my hip-to-the-world daughter told me how excited she was about seeing a new production.
To be fair, she always seems to be excited about new productions. In part, because, well, she’s an aspiring playwright and TV writer.
But once she gets excited about an idea, she’s not going to let it go.
In that case, it was the oddity of taking Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and turning it into a musical – OK, right there that’s a little weird – featuring a multiracial cast and rapping – which puts it in another zone of strange.
Well, more than a few of you have seen the musical, “Hamilton,” either on stage or on the taped version of it that runs of Disney+.
But it took me more than 10 years to finally see it in person. Appropriately, with my daughter, who saw it for the third time and still found moments that moved her to tears.
You might have enjoyed watching “Hamilton” in the comfort of your home. But theater is meant to be seen live, in person. Because you can’t get the full impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece unless your living it, in the moment, with as talented a bunch of performers as you can imagine.
It’s watching it unfold, as if it is something you’re living through in the moment, to make you realize that you are actually living through it even after the three hours you spend in the room where it happens.
Like so many theatrical and cinematic portrayals of history, “Hamilton” takes liberties with the true story – and not just the fact that Hamilton wasn’t Hispanic and Aaron Burr wasn’t black. If your kid sees the show prior to taking an American History quiz on the Revolution, there’s a chance he or she might get some things wrong.
That doesn’t affect the power of what you see. Or the fact that “Hamilton” is an essential way – particularly now – to convey some important concepts.
First, it’s often said that history is written by the winners. Those of us who think this period of history will go down as a dark mark assume we will eventually triumph over the forces arrayed against us.
That might not happen. Maybe Steven Miller doesn’t melt when you throw a bucket on water on him.
In the case of Hamilton, he lost the duel with Burr. But Burr wasn’t all that popular to begin with – that’s probably how things escalated to the point of pistols in Weehawken. So if, as the musical portrays, Elizabeth Hamilton tried to protect her husband’s reputation after his death, it wasn’t without help from the powers that were, including his long-time political foe, Thomas Jefferson.
Second, while I loved history as a kid, it seems that it’s among the least popular subjects for younger people.
To its credit, “Hamilton” is drawing a young audience – the crowd I was with had lots of students and their enthusiasm seemed to further inspire the cast.
Miranda said he cast the musical the way he did because reflecting our nation’s current demography made it more relevant. In my eyes, and after seeing the show, he’s not wrong.
The actor who played George Washington, Tamar Greene, is a very tall Black man who looks nothing like Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of the Father of Our Country. It doesn’t matter – no actor I’ve seen captures the spirit of Washington as much as Greene did last night.
And that leads me to my third point: the saddest part of this show to me is when Washington tells Hamilton he will not seek a third term as president. That the country is bigger than one man, even one who is the pivotal figure in its very existence.
That doesn’t sound like 2025. I’d bet that if Trump saw the show, assuming he understood what was going on, that the whole idea of doing something for the good of the nation would be completely lost on him.
Greene made me feel all that. His passion and complex emotions – determination to do the right thing, anguish at leaving something he clearly enjoys – shine through. When I was over, I wished Greene was president instead of this cluck.
Of course, the point Miranda wanted to make was about immigration. Hamilton came to what became the United States from the West Indies. He was an orphan and felt he had to work harder to achieve anything.
That’s a constant theme in the musical. And I’m not sure it resonates as well on TV as it does in the confines of a theater on West 46th Street in Manhattan – outside which could very well be the 21st-century Gestapo called ICE looking to snatch 21st-century Hamiltons off the streets,
It’s a reminder – as if we needed it – that this is a country of immigrants, more so than any other nation in the world. It is our superpower, the roux in our gravy, the pulse of our pulmonary system.
The idiots who think immigration is weakness have no idea what makes America great. And I while I reveled in what I saw on stage, MAGA types would watch “Hamilton” and merely see ensemble performers in tight pants and guys in dopey costumes.
It took me 10 years to see “Hamilton” live. It didn’t change my view about anything except to reinforce what I already felt about what I saw on stage. And how I so wish everyone in America could see what I see in the power of this musical.
Maybe I’ll get my daughter to work on them.
SUBJECTISM 