Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2018

Hamilton (2015) celebrates rap as the discursively dense, incandescent language of American revolution, democracy and individuality, but the musical also, in its tragic course, portrays rap’s limits, especially when post-revolutionary problems of governance and family life arise. In giving these dual fates to the show’s central musical language, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda draws on the history of hip hop in general and gangsta rap in particular, offering an implicit critique of vengeful violence through allusions to the allegedly linked murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. In its close readings of lyrics, this essay focuses on Alexander and Philip Hamilton and John Laurens and draws connections between these characters’ development and Miranda’s use of abolitionist and revolutionary history. The essay also explores the show’s many allegorical attempts to link positions on the political spectrum with different styles of music, from pop and jazz to the increasingly intricate rhyme schemes of hip hop.

Based on author and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s cultural background as a New York-born Puerto Rican (i.e. Nuyorican) artist, this article develops a reading of Hamilton as a transcultural Nuyorican text. As part of this process, the article contextualizes Hamilton in relationship to the United States’ history of colonialism in Puerto Rico, showing how this history has informed the representation of Puerto Rican cultural identity on Broadway and in the US popular consciousness as subordinate to and distinct from hegemonic US nationalism. By analysing Miranda’s deployment of Broadway musical conventions alongside Nuyorican cultural aesthetics, the article argues for a reading of Hamilton as a site of resistance against the imperialist appropriation and subjugation of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican culture on Broadway.

This article explores the female characters in Hamilton and argues that the musical puts women on the sidelines and relegates them to the most obvious and time-worn stereotypes of wife, muse and whore. Hamilton’s cleverness, its engaging music and vibrant energy, and its occasional nod to the societal constraints experienced by women seduce spectators into looking away from the musical’s own demeaning representation of women. This article analyses the characters of Eliza, Angelica and Maria through their musical numbers and choreography and their function in the story. It tracks each woman’s journey through the narrative and her relationship to Hamilton and her purpose in his life. In the end, I argue that Eliza’s being given the last word in the musical, with the actor who plays her standing centre stage, does not compensate for her limited and stereotypical role through the show.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015) find their inspiration in a generative conflict between individualism and community, freedom and property, whiteness and blackness, and empathy and complicity. The contradictory thematic pressures organizing Miranda’s musicals are the product of a complex negotiation with the institution of Broadway and its historic (mis)representation of people of colour. The musicals ambivalently balance a counter-narrative to a history of stereotype on the Broadway stage with the goal of convincing the predominantly white, highly educated tourists in attendance that the other is one of us. The musicals showcase different sets of Others and therefore have divergent goals in educating the audience, with In the Heights focused on countering stereotypes of Latinx criminality and Hamilton on affirming the immigrant’s centrality to the American nation. Nevertheless, both musicals display an ambivalence about the efficacy of the affective strategies used to educate the spectator. The stories of In the Heights and Hamilton share an investment in private property as a defining facet of the American Dream and, by extension, national belonging. At the same time, both musicals are fractured by an anxiety about the terms of such belonging, namely, who is silenced or excluded. The themes of acquisition and dispossession in terms of property ownership are fractured by the constant plea for forgiveness, for who gets sacrificed by the purportedly free market in order to facilitate the upward mobility of the rest.

This study examines the significance of both John Gay and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s most famous works, where the form is as essential to telling the story as is the story itself, and conventional racial and gender restrictions are defied as a matter of rhetoric. Utilizing working-class music forms as well as the similarly pedigreed, boundary-defying characters of Macheath and Hamilton, Gay and Miranda redefine performance, poetics, patriotism and cultural power. Hamilton follows in the tradition of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Polly as a tipping point in cultural history by which subcultures may challenge and reshape prevailing understandings of performance, identity and national mythology.

‘I really got my Les Miz on in this score, like being really smart about where to reintroduce a theme’, noted Lin-Manuel Miranda soon after Hamilton’s off-Broadway opening in early 2015. Indeed, both in its techniques of thematic recurrence and in its continuous musicalization, Miranda’s approach follows his acknowledged model. Yet, Les Misérables more deeply pervades Hamilton’s dramaturgy than even Miranda has noted, as can be seen in several remarkable parallels between plot, characters and dramatic structure. Taken together, these and other analogies between the shows suggest that Hamilton retraces the dramatic and emotional arcs of Les Misérables, which Miranda has described as one member of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Broadway shows.

The fact that Hamilton’s music expresses history largely through hip-hop verse only scratches the surface of its potential impact to change the lives and perspectives of today’s students. Teachers all over the country have engaged in interdisciplinary, meaningful, personal and curriculum-based work based on Hamilton. More than just a source of highly entertaining rap songs about American history, Hamilton provides powerful opportunities to apply the practices and philosophies of the flourishing field of hip-hop pedagogy. This article explores compelling possible links between Hamilton and hip-hop pedagogy. A brief overview of hip-hop culture and the development of hip-hop pedagogy, including roots, values and aims, provides background for three standards-based activities for high school students.

The article discusses teaching the libretto of Miranda’s Hamilton as a uniquely American text (to undergraduate literature students in the United States). It details approaching the rap opera as a clash of ideologies known as versions of the American Dream. It touches upon genre distinctions from chronicle play (as adaptation), to the adversarial plot, to the American immigrant narrative.

This article discusses how Miranda distinguishes among the truth claims made by myth, legend and history. In Hamilton, he dramatizes how the founding myth meant to assure a nation’s greatness can actually limit a nation’s future. Having identified and critiqued the conventions of myth, Miranda makes self-conscious use of those elements in order to rewrite the story of America’s founding. He presents a ‘metamyth’ meant to prefigure an America that might fully embrace equality for all.

This article explores the material and metaphorical uses of firearms in Hamilton: An American Musical. From the chaotic depictions of Revolutionary War armed combat to the ritualized triptych of duels, Hamilton’s plot pivots around the conspicuous foregrounding of guns and gunplay as instruments of war and conflict resolution, but also as deliverers of social prestige, politico-cultural leverage and even American immortality. This article also interrogates the firearm’s influence on the musical’s signature rhythms, gestures and metaphors, as well as contemplates the ways Hamilton both confirms and resists gendered and raced tropes imbedded within American gun culture.

Using an intersectional Marxist analysis, this brief article surveys issues of, and related to, class in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, including questions of aesthetics, race, narrative, politics and history, as well as how class impacts access to the musical. Sekellick argues that, through its use of hip hop and colour-conscious casting, Hamilton deploys the affects and aesthetics of people of colour, as well as of revolution, to give an otherwise conservative bootstraps narrative about a white founding father a progressive feeling sheen. The author reads Hamilton as a neo-liberal version of America’s founding myths, a retelling of the American dream to suit diversified capitalist and political classes.

The authors of this article, two educators and immigrants situated in the United States, consider the exigencies of listening to Hamilton: An American Musical. Shaped as dialogue, this article follows a previous piece where the authors processed their experience seeing Hamilton performed live. The current conversation shifts to the act of listening; it examines the ways in which the soundtrack embeds the audience into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s narrative, reinscribing the racialized immigrant body onto both Alexander Hamilton’s story, and Hamilton, the musical. Additionally, this article asks how the fictional Hamilton’s message to rise up and take a shot grants audience members a sense of agency and compels them to become present/future protagonists of a political story that seeks to write them off.

Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, Todd S. Purdum (2018)

New York: Henry Holt, 386 pp.,

ISBN: 162779834X, h/bk, $32.00

Must Close Saturday: The Decline and Fall of the British Musical Flop, Adrian Wright (2017)

Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 351 pp.,

ISBN: 9781783272358, h/bk, ca. £20.95

Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song, Dominic Symonds (2017)

Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 312 pp.,

ISBN: 9780472130597, h/bk, $80.00