I held out a whole year before finally succumbing to the Hamilton bug, but succumb I did. I had no idea what to expect going into it—from my perspective, this was a musical about early U.S.A. history written by the guy who was House’s roommate for a couple episodes. What I got was a masterfully crafted and surprisingly emotional story of triumph and tragedy, love and loss, the thrill of ambition and the cost of pride.
And it would be easy to stop there. But there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to this show, and it would be lazy and disingenuous of me not to at least attempt to address some of it.
First, before I get into the criticisms that I’m going to end up defending Hamilton against, I want to point out one that I think is absolutely fair: the women could have been better served. And I don’t just mean because every song they sing is about men; the show’s called Hamilton, every character is singing about him all the time. But their parts also tend to be not great. Let’s focus on just the female-led songs as our primary examples. Arguably the worst song in the whole show is “The Schuyler Sisters,” so that’s a bad start. “Helpless” is decent and “Satisfied” is pretty good, but “That Would Be Enough,” while thematically important, is kind of boring. “Burn” doesn’t really get good until well over halfway through, and then more because of Phillipa Soo’s excellent performance than because of the writing. “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” has some of the musical chaos and thematic inexactitude that make “The Schuyler Sisters” so bad, but also has some of the prosaic, wholly narrative-driven lyrics from which “That Would Be Enough” and “Burn” suffer. When you also take into account the female supporting parts, many of which have the same problems, it makes for a pretty clear picture: Lin-Manuel Miranda does not write for the women as well as for the men.
So, that being said, what follows is a defence of Hamilton against three other major criticisms.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: this is a show with an almost all-POC cast playing historical characters who, if they didn’t hold slaves themselves (and, to be clear, some of them did) were at best complicit in building a supposedly free nation on the foundations of slavery, a legacy that still affects us to this day. So that’s…complicated. Broadly, the symbolism here is pretty powerful: by having Hamilton et al. be portrayed by people of color, it’s in a way redirecting credit from those white men to the Black slaves whose lives and labor they exploited, and indeed the Black people and people of color who have, throughout American history, disproportionately contributed to the economic and cultural prosperity of this country, often through coercion and without acknowledgement.
But what is the symbolism of having a Black man play Thomas Jefferson, a man so invested in the paradigm of slavery that he had no problem writing that “all men are created equal” and have the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” while going on to hold around 600 slaves over the course of his lifetime? For that matter, it’s also noticeable that Jefferson stands in for all slaveholders in the show, while the issue of Washington’s slaves never comes up, nor Hamilton’s own ambivalent attitudes towards the institution of slavery.
What it comes down to is that a Broadway musical isn’t really built to tackle these sorts of questions, and it would’ve suffered as a show had it tried. In the case of casting, I think overall the intention pays off, and if the symbolism gets a bit messy, well, that’s America. But, more to the point, the show isn’t about race, and while it’s debatable whether or not it should be, these choices make sense given the actual narrative. Lin-Manuel Miranda doesn’t avoid Hamilton’s flaws; rather, he focuses on those of his flaws which are relevant to the themes of the play.
This brings us to the characterization issue. While something could probably be said about all of the characters, I want to focus here on our two stars, Hamilton and Burr. Hamilton, as I said, is a complicated protagonist, but the Hamilton of the show is by no means a full portrait of the real man. Likewise, Burr is a complicated antagonist, given much more emotional depth in the show than one might expect, culminating in his moving elegy in “The World Was Wide Enough,” which still gives me shivers. But what of the real Burr? Though that phrase comes from Burr’s letters, it is the only evidence a quick Google search could turn up that Burr actually regretted killing Hamilton for reasons other than the effects on his political and personal life (and as this Quora poster points out, it’s ambiguous evidence at best). Where the picture we get of Hamilton is cropped, the one we get of Burr is Photoshopped to add in details that may not have been there. Again, though, this makes for a much more compelling narrative than one in which Burr is merely the power-hungry career politician Hamilton paints him as. One of the most beautiful songs of the show is “Dear Theodosia,” and we don’t get that song if Burr is just a 2-dimensional villain.
Finally, I want to talk about the music. Aside from being “a musical about early U.S.A. history written by the guy who was House’s roommate for a couple episodes,” the other primary marketing buzz for Hamilton was that it was bringing hip-hop to Broadway (ignoring the fact that, from what I understand, In the Heights had already done that). In the wake of Hamilton‘s success, some have called into question the actual degree of its achievement in this regard, suggesting that it has profited off the ignorance of the largely white, upper-class Broadway audience when it comes to hip-hop. This, to me, is an unfortunate case of confusing the claims made by those covering a work for the intentions of the work itself. Sure, Hamilton’s no Kendrick, but he’s also not trying to be.
And so we come to my conclusion: Hamilton should be seen as a Broadway musical, not a historical text or hip-hopera or whatever. There are plenty of arguments to be made that it’s inaccurate, that it’s problematic, that it’s not “real hip-hop,” and there is value in all of these criticisms, especially insofar as they relate to the public perception of the show, but at their worst they ignore what the work is actually attempting to accomplish. Hamilton incorporates historical figures and events, political commentary, and the music of hip-hop (not to mention 90’s R&B), but these are still filtered through a Broadway musical structure and aesthetic, and the result is incredibly effective in that context. It’s a great story, and deserves to be appreciated for what it is—nothing more, nothing less. (But also the women deserve better writing.)
Certain of Eventual Failure 