• Hamilton

11/29/17 (Wed), LA Pantages

I hadn’t felt overly compelled to see Hamilton because of the insane pricing and the rap or hip-hop music (I’m not sure I know the difference). Still, it’s gone beyond musical to bona fide cultural phenomenon and a mega-hit on a scale I’ve never seen. As with Avatar way back when, I was curious to catch it at some point just to see what the fuss was about. I was happy when a friend said she managed to get a ticket when I visited LA, but was shocked when I learned that she had paid through the nose and only got one ticket. I wouldn’t have let her do that if I had known, not wanting to leave her behind or give that kind of money to greedy producers. But it was done, and I accepted her generosity. It turned out that four tickets were available at the box office at normal prices just before the show, but I thought it better not to mention that to my friend.

The show proved to be enormously entertaining if rather silly. It famously uses a largely black and Hispanic cast and the language of today’s streets, which I’m going to call hip-hop, to tell the story of one of America’s key founding fathers from his arrival in New York as a Caribbean immigrant to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. It is widely felt that Hamilton, despite his indispensable contributions to forging the young nation, hasn’t gotten his due compared to other Revolutionary Era biggies like Washington, Franklin and Jefferson (though I remember my high school teacher pointing out that he’s on the currency rather than presidents for a reason). This musical, based on a well regarded biography, has single-handedly changed that, though in ways that seem somewhat distorting.

First, the show is rousing good fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda has dispensed with facts or personalities that get in his way and writes his own modern Fractured Fairy Tales, eager mainly it seems to celebrate diversity and immigrants (see below). He offers not only the big events with its wide-ranging cast of characters but even pithy presentations of policy debates in song and dance. His lyrics in the nearly all-sung show are fiendishly clever (despite horrific rhyming), with scattered references to South Pacific, Pirates of Penzance and 1776, among others, as well as a clear nod to Pacific Overtures (which I happened to see a few days later) in the evening’s best number, “The Room Where It Happened”. My favorite character was King George III, both of whose numbers were riotous, but the characterizations were all sharply drawn. The music fortunately extended beyond hip hop to an eclectic range of styles, giving a kinetic feel to the whole. The sound was urban and contemporary with no attempt at all to reflect 18th-century sensibility as in 1776. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing – this won’t be contemporary in 20 years, as the withered Rent has shown – but it’s a great ride. Special kudos to the sound engineer, who delivered immaculate sound that made every word audible.

Thomas Kail’s dynamic staging employs a single set with adept use of a revolving stage and shifting staircases, keeping events moving forward at a rapid clip. It practically demands that we get on board or be left behind, which fits just right with the relentless drive of the material. The vibrant choreography is perfectly attuned to the text if rather overdone. The older gentleman sitting next to me loved the show but thought there were too many people on stage and overly frantic movement; he felt the witty text hardly needed that, and I see his point. Still, the energy was contagious.

At the same time, the author, though following the events closely enough, seems to be manipulating much of the material to his own ends. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was famously reticent and standoffish, but here (reticence not being easy for a rap musical) he is portrayed as a sashaying Prince-type blowhard. It’s a hoot, but does this really serve Hamilton’s memory? How are we supposed to trust any of the portrayals here? It works fine in the context of the show, which in the end is just one big cartoon anyway and impossible to take seriously. But I got the impression here of a writer bringing history down to the level of his audiences rather than raising his audiences to the level of history.

Most notably, the show made a big deal of the title character as an immigrant and how that status affected his actions and the course of US history (“Immigrants – we get the job done!”). If I understand, Hamilton was three-quarters British (one-quarter French), born in a British colony and raised in another colony that, though nominally Danish, was largely run by British colonists. He was presumably steeped in British thinking and tradition – things like the Magna Carta and all that. In going to New York, he was basically moving to another British colony, which would have been much closer to his experience than, say, Latin America. It’s like an “immigrant” moving from the Virgin Islands to Guam. In that sense, someone from Alabama would have been as much an immigrant at the time in faraway New York. Also, Hamilton may have been poor, but he came to the country with enough education and sponsorship to put him through a leading school (today’s Columbia University) and doesn’t seem to have experienced any great difficulty other than enduring some political mudslinging. So what was the problem? The word “immigrant” seems political and highly misleading in the musical, and I was skeptical at the view that the author was trying to promote. The controversy in recent years has been over illegal immigration, not immigration itself, which America has always welcomed. Hamilton ironically adopted some anti-immigrant views himself once he got into power, a contradiction the musical doesn’t address.

The use of non-whites to play the main characters is perfectly fine, especially in the hands of this cast, and almost necessary given the music. The entire LA cast was tremendous, especially Michael Luwoye (Hamilton), Jordan Donica (Lafayette/Jefferson) and a fabulous Rory O’Malley (King George III). Solea Pfeiffer and Emmy Raver-Lampman also did good work in the Schuyler sister roles. I presume all the actors are American given the famously anti-immigrant stance of Actor’s Equity (which I’ve experienced firsthand), so they will have come from exactly the same tradition as the founding fathers. But the point isn’t that the characters they’re portraying were white; it’s that they were raised primarily in a British political culture. Non-white audiences are reportedly delighted to see people on stage looking like them, which is cool, but the idea that any other cultures had a hand in shaping America in its early days amounts to wishful thinking, whatever their ethnicity (for an example of what Spanish whites might have done, for instance, look south). The big question posed in the show is “who gets to write our history” (Orwell said much the same), and on the evidence here, I can only hope Miranda isn’t working on a rap history of Teddy Roosevelt or JFK. The show is apparently being used in schools as a history lesson, which is depressing given its distorted picture (as opposed to the far superior 1776).

Still, we’ve come to see theater, and while the hype is way excessive, it is fantastic as a no-holds-barred parody of history. I’d see it again in a second if the price comes down to earth. I’m unsure what its success means for Broadway given the patchy influences of other supposed pioneers like Hair and Rent, though the interesting The Great Comet seemed similar in its irreverent approach. Time will tell.

P.S. I coincidentally saw a mini production of Pacific Overtures in LA just a few days later (which oddly used the original Broadway book rather than the later revised versions). That show also twists history, in this case implying that America was to blame for upending Japan’s peaceful, placid existence in the mid 19th century and propelling it into the modern era. Historical events were considerably more complex from a Japanese viewpoint, but I’m not sure if the authors purposely aimed to send a message about American incursions overseas in the wake of Vietnam or if they were just clueless. Hamilton seemed more deliberate in its celebration of what it sees as the immigrant influence on America’s founding, whatever the reality.