Loving America on Broadway

When Lin-Manuel Miranda, an up-and-coming songwriter, took a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton along on a vacation to Mexico, he was not expecting his career to take a dramatic turn. But a few chapters into the book, he was enthralled by the life of a penniless orphan who wrote his way out of desperate circumstances to become one of America’s Founding Fathers. An obvious question occurred to him: Why isn’t this story a hip-hop musical? Not obvious to most of us, but Miranda had already made a name for himself on Broadway for In the Heights, a (largely) hip-hop musical set in his home neighborhood in New York City, Washington Heights.

Miranda was inspired to write a rap ballad that encapsulated Hamilton’s life, spoken in the person of archrival Aaron Burr—a song bursting with sprung rhythms and offbeat rhymes that took, he said, a year to write. “Alexander Hamilton,” performed by Miranda in 2009 at the White House Poetry Slam, brought down the house. Three years later, Miranda was staging a “Hamilton Mixtape” of set pieces at various venues around New York. The full-dress musical, Hamilton, with 28 cast members headed by Miranda himself, began generating positive buzz during its off-Broadway run last winter. Its present run at the Richard Rogers Theatre, after arriving on a cloud of $30 million in advance ticket sales, is a smash of historic proportions. Tickets, going for $57 minimum at the box office and many times that on resale, are sold out through January 2016. (Those prices may be out of reach for most of us, but the cast recording is available online for free.)

Over the last half-century, the Broadway musical—an original American art form—has become cynical and calculating, not to mention derivative (10 out of 24 award-winning musicals since 2010 are movie adaptations). Hamilton is not only original, it is also sincere. Reading the life of an immigrant orphan (“I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy, and hungry”), Miranda developed a genuine admiration for the man—and for his country. Where we would expect cynical jibes about slaveholding Virginians declaiming the “rights of man” (and, admittedly, Jefferson doesn’t come off well), Miranda acknowledges their shortcomings but also the standard they set for a nation that would grope its way toward justice. The colorful cast (only one major character is white), contemporary vernacular, and occasional four-letter word might be off-putting at first, but this is a production that requires close listening. The amount of history Miranda manages to cram into almost three hours is astounding: historic events, issues, and personalities converge on a single man’s providential gifts and tragic weaknesses.

The Founding Fathers were not saints. But they’re not demons either. They were real, and remarkable, men, finally given their due in a contemporary art form that’s enthusiastically applauded by liberals and conservatives alike. Some view its success as new hope for American culture. That may be a long shot, but a popular play that loves America is cause for celebration.