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(05/06/16 8:09am)
The first blog post I wrote was terrible, a 4,000-word dramatic analysis of Hamilton, which you have definitely heard of by now. Based on the cast album, released in September 2015, I gave it a glowing review.
Months later, Hamilton is a force of insane ticket sales and politicized power. Months later, I've been a second gen immigrant away at college in the Midwest for two semesters. Months later, Hamilton has been nominated for 16 Tony Awards -- the most in Broadway history, and in every category possible for a new musical.
But in terms of its seemingly radical social message and the realities of history and identity, Hamilton is a disaster.
In theory, in the bounds of theater, Hamilton is a good musical. I don't know enough about music theory and definitely know next to nothing about rap, but as a student of theater and a writer, I can recognize the craft of Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics. In terms of the musical's book, Hamilton isn't fantastic, but no one expected 30 years of AP U.S. history to make a riveting stage show to begin with.
In practice, as a force for social change, Hamilton is dangerous.
Its primary flaw is in its premise, which I praised to the high heavens back in October: people of color reclaiming American history.
Black and Latino actors play the founding fathers, black and Latino actors populate the ensemble. One Asian actress plays Hamilton's wife, Elizabeth Schuyler. This is the first time in living memory that a cast this large and diverse has succeeded on a Broadway stage.
It's a diverse cast, sure. Is it a diverse cast of characters?
Absolutely not.
In casting black men as Jefferson and Washington, you're casting black men as white men and using black bodies to tell white stories. And isn't it more than a little suspect, to cast a black man as an actual slaveowner and slave-rapist? Maybe, if bodies could roll in graves, Jefferson would be upset by that. Maybe. But casting the oppressed in the role of the violent oppressor does not read as empowerment. It's more a form of cannibalism.
The concept of reclamation itself is dubious. I gave a nauseating affirmation of the idea at the end of my earlier analysis. But who are we reclaiming history from? Was it taken from us? What does taking it back mean?
Is it the place of a non-black Latino man to tell white history with black music?
Probably not.
The principal players of Hamilton are mostly black, the exceptions being Miranda as Hamilton and Phillipa Soo as Eliza -- curiously, the two people with "Hamilton" in their names.
As a non-black person, as a fellow child of immigrants, I am not comfortable with Hamilton. I feel like an interloper. The Philippines has its own rap, but Filipino rap is only a recent addition to our long history of anti-black racism and appropriation of black culture. I believe Miranda can claim some right to rap, some small degree of ownership, and I think he respects it. But he cannot claim to write a musical for all Americans of color when his score borrows from rap, hip hop, R&B and jazz.
He and I are both interlopers, in my view. I myself make no claim to American revolutionary history. My family's American identity started when my parents separately came to America in the '80s. I don't feel a need to "reclaim" a portion of history fraught with anti-black racism. It's not mine. My blood was not on this soil at the time, and I don't have a place in a slave narrative. Neither does Miranda.
Miranda's libretto insists on reminding us that Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant, but Hamilton's immigrant experience was different from that of my and Miranda's parents.
Beyond conceptual flaws, the Hamilton fandom is repulsive and largely responsible for its political might.
Hamilton luxuriates in praise, with all criticism buried under accolades and sound bites. Questions of historical accuracy crumble under the force of #Ham4Ham videos, questions of morality are lost amidst a cast road trip to the White House, questions of revolutionary legitimacy are forgotten because Miranda was on Last Week Tonight, and every levelheaded critic of Hamilton's political agenda is drowned out by kids on Tumblr drawing fan art.
The Hamilton fandom is more than white kids on Tumblr and in dorm rooms who have every word of the score memorized. It's the long line of white celebrities and white politicians who make seeing Hamilton a social and moral achievement. It's white theater critics like Ben Brantley affirming Hamilton as a history-making piece of theater.
The first whispers of discontent I heard came from black people. Black non-theater people, who aren't doe-eyed for Miranda or insulated in white culture. These were tweets and Tumblr posts lost to me now, and critics as merciless as theater scholar James McMaster and mild as NPR Code Switch's Gene Demby are also lost because Hamilton has made Tony Awards history.
In Michael Paulson's NYT piece, I saw something I thought I'd never see: a defeated Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
Backstory: I hate Andrew Lloyd-Webber, the man behind Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. Not only are his shows the very essence of Cameron Mackintosh's commercialized, money cow theater, they're mostly ridiculous, and his credibility as a composer has decreased rapidly. He's a running joke to my circle of elitist theater friends. He's also ideologically repugnant, as a Conservative peer of the House of Lords who voted to cut taxes that fund low-income subsidies.
His School of Rock musical, other than being an embarrassment, stands no chance against Hamilton, and he knows it. "We call it the HamilTonys, and we know this is as far as we can go, but it’s great to have got this far," he said over the phone. I actually fell off my bed reading that. He's given up. The unsinkable Baron Lloyd-Webber. It's like watching a villain die in the least satisfying way.
I don't care about School of Rock, though. I know our friend Alex Brightman is up for lead actor. He's a delight, but he doesn't stand a chance. No one does, least of all shows and performers that deserve recognition. Not even the plays, exposure-wise. Viewership of the CBS Tonys broadcast is suffering, and Hamilton will resurrect it, but a Tonys ceremony where Hamilton sweeps is boring, low-stakes and a disservice to the greater theater world.
Awards ceremonies, on principle, are stupid. But the Tonys have a much more dramatic sway in terms of its commercial power because dowdy white couples in the Midwest plan their trips to New York around Tony wins. Hamilton does not need the help. It's sold out for the forseeable century.
For instance, the Sara Bareilles musical Waitress is, based on her Songs from Waitress album, close to perfection. It’s Hamilton’s only real competitor in the Best Musical category. This Broadway season has been blessed with excellent musical and play revivals, like Fiddler on the Roof with a politically relevant framing device on the refugee crisis and Deaf West’s Spring Awakening. There’s two avant-garde revivals of Arthur Miller plays directed by Ivo van Hove, who directed my man David Bowie’s musical Lazarus. The new play The Humans, featuring IU alum Arian Moayed, was egregiously snubbed for the Pulitzer for drama, and the London transfer of the very British, politically ballsy, #edgy King Charles III stands as a strange imperial neighbor to Hamilton.
All of these shows will be ignored.
Hamilton boasts multiple nominations in the male actors' categories, including Jonathan Groff in his novelty role as an effeminate George III. The one white guy in Hamilton is nominated, but six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, statistically likely to give a Tony-worthy performance if she's on a stage, was not nominated for lead actress for Shuffle Along.
This is the most glaring bruise. Two other musicals got meager nods this season: Shuffle Along and The Color Purple. The Color Purple, of course, is the musical adaptation of Alice Walker's novel, a landmark of black lesbian literature. Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed is a new musical that's exactly what the title says. Both musicals are about black people, written mostly by black people and have almost all-black casts. Both musicals are black people telling their stories with black music. Both musicals are critically acclaimed by the same people who reviewed Hamilton.
And yet, theatergoers see Hamilton. As James McMaster said, "How many one-percenters walk away from Hamilton thinking that they are on the right side of history simply because they exchanged hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to sit through a racialized song and dance? My guess: too many."
Hamilton is not radical. It plays to white fantasy, to white America's weird fetishization of founding fathers and helps white people plagued by white guilt sleep at night, absolved of their part in the institution of racism. Its claim to represent all Americans of color prescribes a relationship to history that is not universal. It's far from perfect and far from the pinnacle of progress, and it does not deserve its social gravitas, political power or credit for artistic revolution, least of all Tony Awards or a Pulitzer Prize.
(01/24/16 3:18pm)
The X-Files is coming back to FOX on Jan. for a "limited series event" of six hour-long episodes, and I've been in a fragile emotional state for months. The original series ran from 1993-2002, starting four years before and ending five years after I was born. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson star as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, two FBI agents sequestered in the basement of the Hoover building in D.C. as the sole investigators of the titular X-Files -- the FBI's throwaway division for unsolved cases that could be read as paranormal. Mulder and Scully's distinctive dichotomy, the idealistic male believer and no-nonsense, female skeptic, influenced boring network crime dramas with will-they-or-won't-they straight couples for years to come.
The show ran for nine seasons, with a big-budget feature film sandwiched between seasons five and six. A number of older fans jumped ship after the movie, when the show's production moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles and took a turn for the light-hearted. In the first half of its life, The X-Files signature was constant gloom, courtesy of the Pacific Northwest, and the brooding isolation of Mulder and Scully's solitary quest. They were steely faces etched by long shadows of conspiracy, "two flashlight beams crossed in the dark." It was a show that proved it could bring legitimate horror fiction to primetime television and trickle insidious doubt into a Clinton-era public conscious. Two-thirds of the show was "Monster-of-the-Week" episodes, where Mulder and Scully crossed America to investigate sleepy, death-laden towns, and the other third was dedicated to its ongoing "mythology" arc focused on an alien colonization conspiracy. That moody paranoia borrowed from All the President's Men arrived at the heels of the Cold War, and in our post-9/11, Edward Snowden, UFOs over Los Angeles world, The X-Files is in top form to make a comeback.
I only ever caught snatches of episodes at a time, and since I was barely cognizant, they were from the show's period of steady decline. Episodes characterized by David Duchovny's absence, two new agents, and a ridiculous alien Messiah plot line. I would pass, uncomprehending, through the living room as my mother played The X-Files for white noise and steal glimpses of Dana Scully, one of my first crushes. I've had ample time to binge it on Netflix since, so here are 10 of my favorite episodes.
Baby Vince Gilligan: Soft Light (2.23), Bad Blood (5.12), Drive (6.02)
Vince Gilligan, the man behind Breaking Bad, got his start as a nerdy NYU film student who, by familial coincidence, dumb luck, and a lot of talent, joined the writing staff of The X-Files in season 3. His first contribution was a freelance script called "Soft Light", starring Tony Shaloub as a tormented scientist who's literally afraid of his own shadow, which moves independently and kills people.
Gilligan was 27 at the time and the baby of the team, often bringing odd, borderline ridiculous ideas to the table. His comedic vampire episode "Bad Blood" is a fan favorite for its unreliably-narrated exploration of Mulder and Scully's working relationship. and memorable guest appearances from Luke Wilson and Ham from The Sandlot.
But Gilligan's greatest episode, or at least most historically significant, is season six's "Drive", starring Bryan Cranston. It was Cranston's performance in "Drive" that remained in Gilligan's memory when creating Breaking Bad. Season six and everything onward is frustratingly light on conspiracy, but some stand-alone episodes are worth it. "Drive" originated from a long-standing episode idea that Gilligan pitched for years, wherein a man holds a hostage on a Tilt-a-Whirl. Other writers laughed at him and told him it wasn't an X-File, but he persisted. The Tilt-a-Whirl became a car, the hostage became Mulder, and Cranston's character became a tragic figure. Years before Breaking Bad and before Malcolm in the Middle, Cranston proved his dramatic aptitude as an unlikable, feral man driven by desperation.
Monster-of-the-Week: Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (3.04), Oubliette (3.08), The Post-Modern Prometheus (5.05)
"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" is often tapped as the best episode of The X-Files episode ever, and I'm not about to argue. Frank from Everybody Loves Raymond guest stars as a life insurance salesman who can predict the exact circumstances of anyone's death. The episode approaches the topic lightly before arriving at a bittersweet end.
However, I've never seen "Oubliette" on any popular source's list of favorites. It's striking, not for any creative feat, but for its emotional core. Mulder's belief in the paranormal is derived from the disappearance of his sister Samantha when he was 10 years old, which he attributed to alien abduction. "Oubliette" deals with a woman who shares a psychic connection to a kidnapped schoolgirl. She'd been kidnapped by the same man years before, and her link is of special interest to Mulder and Scully. Her interactions with Mulder reveal a great deal about the interior life of our protagonist, and David Duchovny's performance is breathtaking.
"The Post-Modern Prometheus" isn't a fantastic episode. As the title implies, its script incorporates post-modern narrative technique, such as genre parody and breaking the fourth wall. The episode is shot in black-and-white in an affectionate tribute to James Whale's Frankenstein, the cast apart from Mulder and Scully is bland, but it's all worth it for the questionably necessary Cher concert at the end.
Mythology: Pilot (1.01), Deep Throat (1.02), The Erlenmeyer Flask (1.24)
The X-Files lost sight of its conspiracy vibe after four or five seasons, but it remains one of my favorite things about the show, and it was at full force all through season 1. The pilot's tracking shots of 5'3" Scully navigating the FBI recall Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, and Mulder and Scully's fateful first case brings them to rainy Oregon, where someone is methodically killing alien abductees. We're introduced to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the most visible member of the series' shadow government conspiracy. In the second episode, we meet Deep Throat, a mysterious man named for the Watergate source's pseudonym who leaks information to Mulder with Obi-Wan-level vagueness. Throughout season one, we see Scully slowly dragged into Mulder's quest until it becomes her own, and the series finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask" boasts a high body count and enough unanswered questions to frustrate fans for the next decade and beyond.
The X-Files revival series will feature four Monster-of-the-Week episodes bookended by two mythology episodes. Early critic's reactions have been mixed, but slanted by nostalgia. I don't predict any satisfying resolution the the disaster that the mythology plot became in later seasons, but as long as Mulder and Scully are together, I'll be fine.
(01/11/16 3:13pm)
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976[/caption]
The first David Bowie song I fell in love with was "Life on Mars?". I was a morose 14-year-old entering a retrospectively irritating age of nihilism, and morose 24-year-old David reached to me across the years with Hunky Dory. He echoed and held me through friendless lunches and existential confusion. To me, he was everything. A constant outsider, an anomaly, perfectly alien and content to be. An unattainable perfect. I was a gay brown atheist in a Catholic school, but that was fine, because David Bowie wore a dress and one legged jumpsuit and spent 1974-1976 higher than a kite and turned out okay.
But above all, he was untouchable. I grasped at his wide and wild discography, trying to bring it all into my being like manna, precious and impossible. I was starving. The jazzy and artful Black Tie White Noise slipped from me, and his green and soft face on the cover of the self-entitled David Bowie was almost a stranger, like a god had shrank. I wrote tributes to him in clumsy adolescent poetry and evoked him in my thoughts, wondering about his day and wishing him well from the middle of America.
I fell in love with him long after he stopped performing live, long after the release of Reality in 2003. My US release of Station to Station, which came with a two-disc live recording of a 1976 Nassau Coliseum concert, was sweet nectar. I can't begin to compress his gigantic soul into a single favorite album, but I listened to Station to Station the most. I resisted listening to it for the longest time, due to a combination of revulsion and fear. He was the Thin White Duke, a frightening and skeletal non-man I could not reconcile with Ziggy or the David of "Modern Love". On the Nassau tracks, though, he was a corpse revived, breathing color into cold studio recordings, with a lightness to his rich, crooning baritone that I missed wretchedly.
The closest I ever was to him was the Victoria & Albert Museum's touring David Bowie Is exhibition, where I wandered for nearly four hours at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This was a little over a year ago, and I morbidly wonder, why then? If an 18-month cancer battle brought him down, when did he start to give us more of himself, after a 10-year hiatus? The Next Day was a comforting art rock blanket, from its rehashed "Heroes" cover to its lead single, Berlin love letter "Where Are We Now?". It was followed by the exhibit, which was followed by the compilation album Nothing has changed, which was followed by the box set Five Years. He finally mounted a stage musical, Lazarus, as he had dreamed since he was a schoolboy in London. On his 69th birthday this past Friday, he released his twenty-fifth and last album, Blackstar -- in the words of Tony Visconti, "his parting gift". And now he's gone, after a glorious three years no one called anything but a comeback.
Did he map out a journey? A timeline in which to offer the last of himself to the the world, the unholy public that ripped Ziggy to pieces? In Chicago, I breathed the air around Kansai Yamamoto's Ziggy tour costumes, saw his and Iggy Pop's Berlin apartment key through a glass. His first instruments, a saxophone, a guitar. I laughed and smiled over two Diamond Dogs artifacts: "Tissue blotted with Bowie's lipstick, 1974" and "Cocaine spoon, 1974", and never once did I think of their meaning: a tour of a living legend's most personal effects that bore more than passing resemblance to Vatican treasures, aged and valued and taken after the deaths of saints. I can't stop thinking of it as a farewell tour, in absentia.
I stood in the exhibit's final gallery for an hour: three walls projecting three live performances amid David's Alexander McQueen-designed frock coats. Visitors were given sensitive Sennheiser headsets that corresponded to their location. You could walk the length of the room and see and hear "Bang Bang", "Five Years", and Jacques Brel's "My Death" in one go. But for one moment while I was there, those headsets went silent. The speakers in the room took over, and "'Heroes'" played, a triumphant and desperate swan song filtered through three performances. In this exhibition where patrons milled about and veered clear of one another, each immersed in their own orbit, we took off our headsets and really looked at each other for the first time. For the length of this one perennially popular song, we forgot ourselves and our little lives. Some of us cried. I certainly did. I imagine that's what it would've been like to be near David.
(12/07/15 12:39am)
Described as an "electropop opera", the original cast recording of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is a wild ride. It's a musical adaptation of a small section of War and Peace by New York-based composer and performer Dave Malloy, which opened off-Broadway in 2013. It was about as off-Broadway as you can get without getting off-off. Staged in the mobile, custom pop-up theater/restaurant Kazino, audience members were served Eastern European food and booze while actors weaved between tables to recount a slim section of Tolstoy's brick-sized classic.
This album has been saved in my Spotify for two years, back when the show was playing and had buzz. I finally gave it a listen because Natasha is played by Phillipa Soo, the love of my life, who is also currently on Broadway in Hamilton as Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. Having created the roles of both Natasha and Eliza, Phillipa is truly putting every young actress to shame. One year out of Juilliard, she headlined The Great Comet, and now her Tony for Best Lead Actress in a Musical is nearly secure.
I came for Phillipa, but I stayed for Dave Malloy. At the young age of 38, he's already written the music for 11 musicals, and The Great Comet was only the start. "Electropop opera" has to be one of the coolest descriptions I've ever heard in my life. The genres Malloy explores in his score may seem disparate, but his infusion is masterful, between opera, EDM, rock, indie pop, and East European folk music, like in the information-packed "The Duel" and deceptively titled "The Opera".
The libretto to The Great Comet is sung-through in the tradition of Les Miserables, but with the variation, novelty, and altogether superior conception to spare it that agony. Long stretches of lyric are quoted word-for-word from Aylmer and Louise Maude's popular English translation of War and Peace from 1922. The text is largely Romantic in vocabulary, and its absolute refusal to rhyme sets The Great Comet's book apart from every one of its peers. This makes for some weird moments where the characters narrate their own actions in third person, but it works. I haven't tried to read War and Peace because I love myself, but since finding The Great Comet, I've read corresponding excerpts, and this musical is truly a plain musical setting in moments.
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 covers Book VIII of War and Peace--the thwarted elopement of Natasha Rostov and Anatole Kuragin. I don't know how to summarize this plot, because it's nigh on impossible. Yes, War and Peace is a doorstopper, but a well-constructed, tightly-plotted doorstopper with intricacies that I shouldn't skip over. I linked to CliffsNotes, if anyone wants more detail. The gist: Natasha is engaged to Andrey, who's away fighting Napoleon. She goes to the opera in Moscow and is seduced by Anatole, whose sister is Helene, who is married to Natasha's childhood friend Pierre, a newly-rich, newlywed bastard going through a series of existential crises.
The "Prologue" attempts to ease the audience into the middle of War and Peace with "It's a complicated Russian novel / Everyone's got nine different names / So look it up in your programs / We appreciate it / Thanks a lot." The substantial cast is introduced cumulatively like the Twelve Days of Christmas. This is one of a handful of songs with completely original lyrics by Malloy, because I doubt Tolstoy described Andrey's family as "totally messed up."
A very conventional accordion ushers us into the Prologue, which I love, but I jam out hardest to the very long, very expository song "The Duel", which experiences some pretty intense genre mixing. EDM, Slavonic dances, what have you. "Gonna drink tonight / Gonna drink tonight / Gonna drink tonight gonna / Drink drink." Malloy lays a rousing Russian drinking chorus over the puncturing beat of house music, and it's glorious. Anatole is trying to get his brother-in-law Pierre to drink himself into oblivion while out with other people, instead of alone at home like usual.
As for other songs, the tempo marking in the score for "Natasha and Bolkonskys" describes it as a "dirty reggae groove." Another one of my favorite tracks is "The Ball," the act I finale, where Anatole seduces Natasha. It features a standard classical Russian waltz as they dance, and devolves into electro drums and sirens with Natasha's confusion and distress at her new, taboo feelings. I'm also a huge fan of "Balaga," a largely comic folk dance about its famous titular troika driver who "drives mad at 12 miles per hour." And the finale, "The Great Comet of 1812", is a gorgeous, conventional choral piece that, strangely, ends on a dissonant electronic tone, suggesting the rest of the story is yet to come.
Phillipa Soo's Natasha is one of few truly enviable soprano roles written in recent memory, and Lucas Steele's clear tenor reaches notes far above the staff that should sound ridiculous, but don't, much like Anatole's specifically mentioned swagger. Brittain Ashford, predominantly an indie musician, brings a peculiar, un-theatrical voice to Natasha's cousin Sonya. She seems to waver in mumbles that belong over nothing more powerful than an acoustic guitar, but breaks into a wonderfully dark, throaty belt that defies all expectations. What makes The Great Comet for me is Dave Malloy himself as Pierre. His gravelly voice matches "dear, bewildered, and awkward Pierre" to a tee, and the contrast between him and Steele's Anatole add even more character to the players of Tolstoy's epic.
Natasha, Pierrre & The Great Comet of 1812 never achieves the hummability of more traditional musicals, but it doesn't aspire to. It's a sprawling, dense, fast-paced narrative that never lets up, and the score combined with its unlyrical lyrics is a challenging vocal mammoth. The combination of apt casting and tight writing makes for a seamless and immersive listening experience. I don't have money or a time machine, but I feel confident in calling this one of my favorite musical scores based on its album alone.
(12/06/15 6:50pm)
Released: 12/04/15, Knitting Factory
Rating: 6/7
I've been madly in love with Lauren Worsham for nearly two years now, ever since her performance at the 2014 Tony Awards for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Hearing classical voices on Broadway that aren't being butchered to death by Andrew Lloyd Webber is a big deal in this day and age. A Gentleman's Guide was a charming and fun Best Musical winner that didn't particularly capture my attention, except through its vocalist-friendly score and the performers who sang it. A quick Google search of Lauren Worsham introduced her to me as a musical theatre actress, a legitimate operatic soprano, and the frontwoman of an indie rock band.
That band is Sky-Pony, the Brooklyn-based brainchild of Lauren and her husband, composer Kyle Jarrow. She won a Drama Desk for playing Phoebe in Gentleman's Guide; he won an Obie for writing A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. I've grown familiar with Sky-Pony through their three EPs and YouTube channel, which has unfortunately been cleaned out a bit. To me, they're a band meant to be seen live. I haven't seen them myself because I'm poor, but their filmed appearances in New York have been performance art as much as musical performance at theatre-affiliated venues like 54 Below and Joe's Pub. Lauren Worsham, Jessi Suzuki, and Kristin Piacentile line up downstage like a '60s girl group in matching garters and false lashes the weight of feather dusters, singing at mic stands with light choreography that recalls the Ronettes, all lit by trippy projections.
Sky-Pony features exactly the sort of instruments you would find in any fringe chamber musical. Kyle Jarrow holds together the whole operation on keyboards and occasionally sings, with Perry Silver and Kevin Wunderlich on drums and guitar. Bassist Eric Day also arranges music for horns and strings, and as a child of string orchestra, his additions make the band for me. But as a professional cellist*, Sky-Pony's cellist David Blasher is my favorite.
Sky-Pony started out with a 6-song EP released in 2012, Say You Love Me Like You Mean It. They're inseparable from the theatrical origins of their founding couple, and Sky-Pony's undoubtedly thrilling live performances and now albums are interspersed with musicals—or rather, "concert-theatrical hybrid experiences." In 2013, they wrote and performed a musical called Raptured, released as a live album called Raptured Live. Their next EP was a short acoustic treat released for free on SoundCloud called Songs of Love and Misery, and they're currently working on their next quasi-musical, due to premiere in February 2016 at Ars Nova.
Beautiful Monster is an eleven-track LP released by Knitting Factory Records, an experimental indie label based in Brooklyn. It features three brand new songs and eight familiar but reworked tracks from their existing catalog. The main question in my mind when listening to Beautiful Monster is of how it compares to their live shows. Two of their three prior releases have been live albums, and I've heard countless variations of almost all of their songs performed through the years. Backing bands and arrangements change, lyrics are tweaked, Lauren may lean toward classical or belting on one day or another, and the production of a studio recording is obviously different from the stage at 54 Below.
"The Watcher" has been on Sky-Pony setlists since 2013 and leads Beautiful Monster as a single. It's a refreshing installment in rock's long and proud tradition of stalker love songs, and its music video made my morning by revealing the subject as a woman. The gayer the better, in my book.
"Regret It in the Morning" and "Beautiful Monster" both made their first recorded appearances on the live acoustic EP Songs of Love and Misery, and I've been looking forward to hearing their studio treatments ever since the track listing for Beautiful Monster was announced. I was most taken aback by the vocal mixing in "Regret It in the Morning." "Sky-Pony" and "girl group" have long gone hand-in-hand in my mind, and hearing Lauren so prominently center stage compared to Jessi and Kristin was jarring. It also features a techno-ish keyboard unusual to the band's live sound, as well as what may be a xylophone.
"Beautiful Monster" was the perfect choice for title track of this record, in my opinion. Thematically, it sums up Sky-Pony's interest in viewing dark subjects through a cheekily romantic lens. Lauren delivers some of her best work on this song, and David Blasher absolutely kills it, especially on the tremolo that underscores Lauren's final "If you leave me / I will tear your heart out / Of your chest." On Songs of Love and Misery, audience laughter and casual instrumentation makes "Beautiful Monster" comic, but in studio, it straddles the line perfectly, much like the balancing act of Sky-Pony's identity.
Of every track on this record, I'm most familiar with "Rapture". It appears on their studio EP, Say You Love Me Like You Mean It, and is the centerpiece of Raptured Live. I confess that its religious overtones were off-putting to me for a while, but it's since become essential to Sky-Pony's repertoire. On Beautiful Monster, Lauren steps back and coos, as opposed to the in-your-face disillusionment of Say You Love Me Like You Mean It and opening number theatrics of Raptured Live.
"Doctor" has been one of my favorites in their arsenal for a long time, and I'm thrilled to have a studio version of it. It's a biting criticism of suburban ennui. In studio, Lauren sounds most at home belting her soul out, and the bridge is a knockout. I would sell a limb to take David Blasher's place, and the girls spit the consonance of"doctor" in the final chorus with extra venom, which is thrilling for the classical singer in me.
As far as I know, "Action Movie" is 100% new, or at the very least written for the album. It's a dreamy ride-or-die love song following a generic action movie plot, featuring a thick wall of strings courtesy of Eric Day, and it's driven toward climax and conclusion by urgent percussion from Perry Silver. Kyle Jarrow makes a prominent guest vocal appearance with Lauren on the chorus, and I've always found his forays into singing especially sweet.
"Seems So Strange" can be heard in its earlier incarnation, "Doesn't It Seem Strange", as early as 2013. On Beautiful Monster, it starts with the string quartet of my dreams. I found "Doesn't It Seem Strange" pretty underwhelming, but the addition of such a lush string section has made it into a gem. The vocalists takes an airier approach to this track, fully flattering the instrumentation.
"Steal Tonight" might be my favorite track, featuring cutesy accompaniment under criminal date propositions. It's adorable: "That's how you make me feel / Like nothing else is real / Like the world is mine / To steal tonight with you." Lauren's vocals are cloying and bright. But the song takes a different, darker turn, with the slightly creepy mantra "I've been waiting such a long time" (an echo of the opening line of "Rapture") repeated over increasingly classic rock-ish guitar, à la "Sweet Child o' Mine". The final "time" ends on a strange, stretched out downward glissando, which I can't say I've ever heard in vocal music. It sounds more like they're mimicking glissando on a violin.
"Vampire" features some more of the girl group vocal dynamics that made me love "Regret It in the Morning", but it isn't a track on this album that I particularly like. Maybe I'm biased, but I have an aversion un-ironic allusions to vampirism. The production is lovely, but I can't get behind the lyrics, which I personally feel are a little cliche, especially the chorus. The rest of it is fine. Maybe it's just my thing about vampires; I was embarrassingly into Twilight in sixth grade.
"Run Away" and "Everyone Will Die" are both nothing new. "Runaway" is the "Rock 'n Roll Suicide" to the Messianic plot of Raptured Live, and features some of the best acting on the album despite the track's extraction from its source material. For Beautiful Monster, Eric Day and Kyle Jarrow have added a stunning string interlude for the bridge. The morbidly optimistic "Everyone Will Die" has long been a staple of the Sky-Pony brand, and Lauren does away with any doubt there may have been as to her ability to front a bona fide rock band as the album crashes to a chaotic brass and guitar finish.
Beautiful Monster is a stunning recording debut which I feel is only held back by incidentally uneven production and the strange transition from intimate New York cabarets to a fully-equipped studio. There's one weird hiccup around the 1:35 mark of "Beautiful Monster" where it seems that a millisecond or two in the word "you" have been skipped, revealing the classical singer's trick of pronouncing vowels weirdly so they sound better. It's super minor, but to me it's a display of Lauren Worsham's vocal flexibility, bringing tried and true technique to a rock album. And Kyle Jarrow's roots in theatrical storytelling run through this album's lifeblood, from the classically-patterned backing band to the narrative undercurrent of each track. It's the sort of genre blending that brings musical theatre to the rest of the world and vice versa.
Website: www.sky-pony.com
Lauren Worsham: laurenworsham.com
Kyle Jarrow: landoftrust.com
Track Listing**:
The Watcher
Regret It in the Morning
Beautiful Monster
Rapture
Doctor
Action Movie
Seems So Strange
Steal Tonight
Vampire
Run Away
Everyone Will Die
* I was once paid $5 to play at a Stephen Sondheim-themed garden party thrown by a kindly old interior designer who went to my church called "Sunday in the Garden with Bill".
** For some reason, there seems to be two versions of the album on Spotify. It's all the same music, with some incorrectly named tracks. This is the right one.
(11/08/15 3:08am)
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Master of None on Netflix, 11/06/15[/caption]
Netflix's latest venture into original television takes the from of Master of None, a New York-set comedy on the travails of growing up. It's a tired trope freshened by leading man and co-creator Aziz Ansari, but it makes its mark with its smart take on millennial culture, in our technological dependency and this age of social discourse.
Master of None is helmed by Parks and Recreation alumni Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari. Aziz plays Dev Shah, an actor attempting to break into film whose resume is mostly commercials. The supporting cast varies from episode to episode, usually made of his friends and coworkers: Kelvin Yu as Brian, Lena Waithe as Denise, Eric Wareheim as Arnold, and Dev's more experienced costar on the film he hopes will launch his career, Benjamin, played by H. Jon Benjamin of Archer and Bob's Burgers fame. Dev's romantic interest, Rachel, is played by SNL alum Noel Wells.
Master of None's promising 10-episode first season follows a strange pattern that balances romantic comedy with more "everyman" elements, while never prioritizing one over the other. The premiere, "Plan B", blends the two perfectly: Rachel is slyly introduced in a one-night stand barely saved from going awry, and Dev spends the episode contemplating marriage, children, and what the future holds. The episode lineup seamlessly alternates between slick social commentary and Dev and Rachel's romantic arc with natural overlap. Blatant discussions of race & gender politics and modern etiquette headline the episodes "Indians on TV" and "Ladies and Gentlemen". "Nashville" and "Mornings" are pure romance, while "Old People", "Hot Ticket", and "Ladies and Gentlemen" incorporate both.
But above all, Master of None stands apart for its fearless diversity. "Fearless" to differentiate from unnaturally diverse groups of women in yogurt commercials, from models on SAT prep info packets. In token diversity, action is stilted, infected by the truth of every person's presence: that they're there to fill a quota. Like Aziz Ansari, Dev is a second generation Indian-American immigrant from South Carolina. His friend Denise is a black lesbian, like Lena Waithe, and Brian is Taiwanese-American, like Kelvin Yu. The only white friend in their circle is Arnold. Unlike in tokenism, these friends are unashamed about and open to discussing their experiences and, more importantly, learning from each other. Not to say every one of their nights out at bars has the same dynamic as a campus support group, though those are great, too. It can be as candid as the pilot's condom conversation, when Dev asks Arnold "Did you ever have a condom break?" and naturally turns to Denise with, "So, Denise, for lesbians, is there like, no protection?" It's not meant in any derogatory way; he's genuinely curious. In a conversation on safe sex, Denise's viewpoint is just as valuable.
Master of None addresses these current, serious topics with humor and sensitivity not seen in much of comedy. For example, in episode 7, "Ladies and Gentlemen", Dev becomes aware of the difference between his life and the lives of women around him: Denise, Rachel, and Dev's costar in a commercial, Diana (Condola Rashad). This episode in particular has a very to-the-point opener, wherein Dev and Arnold walk home from the same bar as Diana. Dev steps in dog feces and his night is ruined; Diana calls the cops on a man from the bar who followed her home. The sequence switches between their two journeys, and the real fear and paranoia on Diana's side of things makes Dev's overreaction infuriating. Aziz Ansari freely identifies as a feminist, and this episode follows Dev's education on the topic. Arnold already identifies as feminist, and his spelling out the definition could well be the first time that many people hear it: "A feminist is a person that thinks men and women should be treated equally. And I fully support that. So, my good sir, I'm a feminist."
Crossing demographics and power structures isn't where it ends. The second episode, "Parents", in which Dev and Brian make efforts to get to know their immigrant parents and appreciate their sacrifices, had me sobbing. Aziz Ansari has long been one of my favorite comedians since his Madison Square Garden comedy special which had this gem: "My life is super easy 'cause you did all the struggling." This episode is about connection. Brian and Dev identify in each other similar experiences of second generation immigrant guilt, and their clumsy attempt to go out to dinner with their parents yields some powerful identification between these older strangers, in their seemingly disparate experiences as Indian and Taiwanese immigrants.
As seen in episode 7, Master of None juxtaposes privilege with disadvantage. Dev and Brian's daily struggles, like seeing disappointing X-Men movies, are intercut with truly harrowing flashbacks of how their parents fought to come here and give them a life where they have enough time and money to see disappointing X-Men movies. Beyond the 'gratitude for their suffering' angle, this episode humanizes immigrant parents beyond romantic simplification. Brian reconciles his father's journey with "My dad used to bathe in a river, and now he drives a car that talks to him." Their dads are introduced as dotty middle-aged men with funny old people problems and interests, like malfunctioning iPads and reading The Economist. It's how Dev and Brian know them daily, and it's as much a part of their identities as any Oscar bait ethnic suffering movie they lived in intervening years.
My parents are both Filipino immigrants, who came separately from different parts of the Philippines and met in New York in the 90s. The experiences of Dev's parents and Brian's dad are so familiar to me. Aziz Ansari's parents play Dev's parents, and I recognized his mother's account of her first day in America from his Madison Square Garden show: "I was scared to answer the telephone because nobody would understand me because of my accent." Brian's father, in a rare display of emotion, says "I was scared of answering the phone, too. They yell so much. 'What?' 'Huh?' I just got to this country. Why are they so mad?" Dev's mother complains that he never shows her the products of his photography hobby. I've been avoiding telling my mom when to stream my radio show. Brian's father had to kill his pet chicken because his family was running out of food. I swear I'm not making this up, but my grandfather killed my dad's pet chicken and served it to him. My dad doesn't eat chicken to this day. Watching this episode, I cried ugly, dry heaving sobs. I barely call my parents every two weeks, but I've called home three times in the past day since this show went live on Netflix.
Diversity is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, but Master of None makes it anything but. Unlike Louie with the oft "everyman"-marketed Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari as Dev and his crew of realistically diverse friends are everymen for this generation. The "everyman" experience is no longer the dating struggles of an average-looking white guy. Everymen are gay. Everymen are lesbians. Everymen are black and Asian, and immigrants and the children of immigrants. Everymen are women. Master of None belongs to the millennial generation not only because of its currency, not only because we do invest 45 minutes research into finding the best taco in our vicinity (episode 10's cold open), but because our identities are more valuable and more respected than ever, especially in intersections. Master of None is sweet without being twee, funny without being mean, and it's paving way for our visibility like television was always meant to.
Master of None Season 1 (Netflix 11/06/15):
Plan B
Parents
Hot Ticket
Indians on TV
The Other Man
Nashville
Ladies and Gentlemen
Old People
Mornings
Finale
(10/29/15 12:27am)
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Hamilton began Broadway previews on Jul. 13 and opened on Aug. 6; the cast album dropped on Sept. 25.[/caption]
At 35 years old, Lin-Manuel Miranda is a two time Pulitzer for Drama finalist, a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, and a Tony and Grammy winner well on his way to EGOT status. He crashed onto the New York theatre scene with the 2008 Best Musical winner In the Heights, a semi-autobiographical slice of life musical set in the Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights. Asides from an underwhelming stage adaptation of Bring it On, he’s been fairly quiet due to his true sophomore work: a hip hop musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton.
Lin-Manuel has distinguished himself in the world of musical theatre for everything that sets him apart. He’s the son of Puerto-Rican immigrants. His grounding in “low brow”, populist genres is a striking difference from his contemporaries. He’s a writing-composing-rapping-acting-singing-dancing sextuple threat who’s starred and written in both his major shows, without the mixed result of Tarantino stepping in front of the camera.
He’s also an angel.
Lin's audience engagement is legendary. Every evening in New York outside the Richard Rodgers Theater, the Broadway home of Hamilton and, years earlier, In the Heights, he organizes free performances for hopefuls entering the Hamilton ticket lottery and anyone walking by, titled #Ham4Ham— $10 to see Hamilton (a Hamilton for Hamilton). These shows have featured a number of other recognizable theatre personalities, including Kelli O’Hara, visitors from Fun Home, and the late Kyle-Jean Baptiste.
He navigates social media with ease. The hashtags he’s used to promote and share Hamilton have created a web culture surrounding what would otherwise be another remote, inaccessible addition to New York theatre. This is especially shown in his use of #Hamiltunes on NPR’s early release of cast album's entire radio edit, effectively throwing a global social media listening party in which he was fully engaged. Many of the insights in this review are taken from his Twitter, from his interactions with fans who are fully encouraged to give feedback. He shares his thoughts and the ‘secrets of the trade’ with a refreshingly simple joy.
Very few people in the world, much less composers, have the humility to interact so closely with audiences, whether they can afford tickets or not.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1250"] The cast of Hamilton takes their first bows on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theater.[/caption]
Lin-Manuel doesn’t live in an ivory tower. The first musical he fell in love with was Les Miserables. Rent made him realize how relatable the medium could potentially be. He can drop as much obscure Sondheim trivia as the best of us, but these two shows formed him (and the rest of us).
In the Heights could be about anyone in Washington Heights today, much like Rent would be familiar to denizens of Greenwich Village with or without AIDS. Les Miserables is spectacular and unabashedly Romantic, an optimistic offering from Victor Hugo. But it’s remote. It frames a minor, failed episode in French republicanism preceding the revolutions of 1848, and is, paradoxically, most popular with English speaking audiences with no connection to French history.
This is not the case with Hamilton.
Like In the Heights, Hamilton was developed at the Public Theater in New York City, a non-profit arts organization that has housed earlier incarnations of some of the greatest American musicals before they hit Broadway. Musical theatre has a rocky track record with race. Our grandfathers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein have each worked on the iffiest classics in South Pacific, The King and I, and Show Boat. Every time a regional or national company tries to put on Miss Saigon, outrage follows. Even if works aren’t inherently racist, theatrical practice historically is; see the use of brownface in West Side Story.
We’re getting better, though. The current Broadway production of The King and I, for which Kelli O’Hara nabbed the Tony for Best Actress, features a number of alumni of Public Theater’s Here Lies Love—essentially Evita, except about Imelda Marcos, by the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, and about a thousand times better. One of Lin’s distractions between In the Heights and Hamilton was translating some of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for West Side Story into Spanish, in a production mounted with cast members of the previous season’s In the Heights.
In the Heights was revolutionary, as a new musical written for Latino Americans with no pantomime or caricature, just portrayal. Hamilton has a very deliberate subtitle: An American Musical.
Lin-Manuel stars at Alexander Hamilton, “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman.” He’s clearly none of these things, least of all Scottish. But a bit like Lin-Manuel’s parents, Alexander emigrated from “a forgotten spot in the Caribbean”. (A bit like the parents of Lin’s In the Heights character Usnavi; “the single little greatest place in the Caribbean”.)
The casting suspends disbelief. The only white actor with major billing is Jonathan Groff (Spring Awakening, Glee, Frozen) as King George III, who has all of 3 songs with the same, recycled melody. The audience is introduced to Christopher Jackson’s black Washington, to Leslie Odom Jr.’s black Burr, to Renee Elise Goldsberry’s black Angelica Schuyler, to Daveed Diggs’ black Jefferson (and Lafayette), to Okierete Onaodowan’s black Madison (and Hercules Mulligan). Chinese-American Phillipa Soo plays Alexander’s wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and Anthony Ramos doubles up as John Laurens and little Philip Hamilton.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1180"] Lin-Manuel Miranda takes his first bow as Alexander Hamilton on Broadway.[/caption]
Lin-Manuel said, “Our cast looks like America looks now. […] We're telling the story of old, dead white men but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience.” From a New York Times interview:
Odom Jr. In the first two minutes of this show, Lin-Manuel steps forward and introduces himself as Alexander Hamilton, and Chris steps forward and says he’s George Washington, and you never question it again. When I think about what it would mean to me as a 13-, 14-year-old kid, to get this album or see this show — it can make me very emotional. And I so look forward to the day I get to see an Asian-American Burr.
Miranda That’ll be the note that goes with the school productions: If this show ends up looking like the actual founding fathers, you messed up.
Diggs I have to say, the dollar bill looked wrong after that first workshop. I was like, “That really should be Chris Jackson.”
Miranda I’ve taken to calling the bridge near where I live the Chris Jackson Bridge.
On top of casting, Hamilton sounds like America now. One of my few pet peeves is the use of "show tunes" or "musical" as a genre. Oklahoma! and Next to Normal sound nothing alike. Within our theatrical canon, genre is as varied as the other side of music. And within Hamilton, Lin-Manuel jumps from hip hop to classic belted Broadway anthems, to R&B and 1950s rock-n-roll.
Most of the tracks in Hamilton could be played on the radio exactly as they appear on the album. It's unnecessary to appeal to the masses, or perhaps condescend to them by writing "pop-friendly" orchestrations and finding a more mainstream artist to bring the archness of theatre to a plebeian public. The masses aren't stupid. This condescension only reinforces barriers.
Live theatre carries class connotations. Broadway's most reliable audience members are middle aged, upper middle class tourists from the Midwest, who buy tickets to revivals of South Pacific and Anything Goes, maybe Wicked or Phantom for their young relatives. It's not at the same public reputation as opera, but it's similar. Three years ago, Tom Huizenga wrote an essay for NPR Classical called "Why Do People Hate Rap and Opera?" It's classism. It's racism. It's distaste for rap and, implicitly, "lower" black culture, and for opera and, implicitly, bourgeois whiteness. Hamilton marries theatre to rap. It's a meeting we need. Lin-Manuel makes deliberate references to musical theatre and hip hop history; they're printed in the show's playbill. He quotes the Notorious B.I.G. and Jason Robert Brown, recognizable to the snobbiest theatre-goer and to most dedicated hip hop fan.
Before we continue, I need to make it clear that this is a review of Hamilton's cast album. I haven't seen the show and can't afford to see the show. I'm reviewing only what can be heard on this recording, with historical fact I should've learned in high school but had to Google and trivia from Lin-Manuel's Twitter.
Like Les Miserables, Hamilton is sung through. It’s the recitative of opera, but rapped. Almost every word of Hamilton is on this recording. I like to think Lin-Manuel and I were alike in our love for Les Mis; we could sing the whole score, me with my parents’ original London cast album and him with the Broadway recording he bought after seeing the show.
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
— Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), “Alexander Hamilton"
Lin-Manuel performed an early version of this song at the White House in 2009.
Anyone who made it through U.S. history in high school knows the basics: Alexander Hamilton was the baby of the Founding Fathers, barely 20 at the start of the war. He was the first Secretary of Treasury. He and Jefferson hated each other. He built our first national bank. He was killed by Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr, in a duel. He’s the hottest face on our currency. The Treasury wants to get rid of that beautiful face.
This is Lin’s first attempt at writing the book to a musical. In the Heights’ earliest drafts, written while he was in undergrad at Wesleyan, were all him, but the version nominated for a Pulitzer was written by Quiara Hudes. Lin-Manuel has been working on Hamilton since as early as 2009. On vacation during In the Heights’ Broadway run, he picked up Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, as dry a biography as can be. He couldn’t very well use a historian as a framing device. I don’t think Chernow would’ve enjoyed being incarnated as a narrator. And so our guide through these three decades of Alexander Hamilton’s life is “the damn fool that shot him”: Aaron Burr.
The opener, “Alexander Hamilton”, follows the tradition of Romeo & Juliet: tell, then show. To quote Ben Brantley’s review of Hamilton at the Public, “five minutes into the show […] the lyrics had already covered, rather thoroughly, the first 100 pages of Mr. Chernow’s book.” Every major player besides our man himself summarizes Alexander’s childhood in St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the events that brought him to New York City in 1776 at the age of 19. They also explain their connection to him, as we will see/hear played in the next two hours:
Burr The ship is in the harbor now,
see if you can spot him.
Another immigrant, comin’ up from the bottom.
His enemies destroyed his rep,
America forgot him.
Mulligan & Lafeyette (Madison & Jefferson?) We fought with him.
Laurens Me? I died for him.
Washington Me? I trusted him.
Eliza, Angelica, & Maria Me? I loved him.
Burr And me? I’m the damn fool that shot him.
— "Alexander Hamilton"
And in a handful of seconds, Lin-Manuel has summarized the rest of Chernow’s doorstopper. Much of the action in this show is history book material—events that can be placed on a timeline, with obvious relevance to the formation of this country. Most of us know the major players in Hamilton's life as a politician. They feature heavily in act II, with Alexander as Washington's Secretary of Treasury. But Hamilton had a substantial hand in the War itself. Act I spans 1776 to 1789, roughly the War to Washington's presidency, while act II covers Hamilton's political career through our first three presidents until his death.
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
when I was young and dreamed of glory:
You have no control:
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
— George Washington (Christopher Jackson) to Hamilton, "History Has Its Eyes on You"
Central to Hamilton is a meta awareness of history as a narrative. George Washington, played by In the Heights' Christopher Jackson, introduces three heavy questions in the song "History Has Its Eyes On You", which were heavily featured on Hamilton's promotional material during its premiere run at the Public.
Hamilton's story is as much defined by his accomplishments as it is by those who supported and opposed him, which is why he is not the star of the show. They're the "who's" who fill these roles in Hamilton's life and death.
Lin-Manuel's casting call has a number of very apt "x meets y" descriptors for each character, to describe their narrative role and their musical flavor. Hamilton is "Sweeney Todd meets Eminem." The former is especially seen in the manner of Hamilton's arrival in America. He washes up in New York Harbor with a mission, and the 6-minute showstopper "My Shot" that Lin took a year to write is his calling card:
Hamilton
I’m past patiently waitin’. I’m passionately
smashin’ every expectation,
every action’s an act of creation!
I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow,
for the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow,
Hamilton and Company
And I am not throwing away my shot.
I am not throwing away my shot.
Hey yo, I’m just like my country,
I’m young, scrappy and hungry
and I’m not throwing away my shot.
— Alexander Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda), "My Shot"
Unlike Sweeney, Hamilton isn't on a roaring rampage of revenge. While Hamilton and his cohorts stand in glorious spotlight for this song, Hamilton doesn't address the audience again for such introspection until Act II.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1050"] "Right Hand Man"; George Washington (Christopher Jackson) and Alexander Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda)[/caption]
George Washington is "John Legend meets Mufasa." Before serving in Washington's cabinet, Hamilton was his aide-de-camp—one level up from a batman, but with the fancy title of lieutenant colonel. He was essentially Washington's secretary. The relationship between Hamilton and Washington is complicated by their military environment and by Hamilton's staggeringly obvious paternal abandonment issues. Hamilton's Washington is something of a memetic badass. Aaron Burr hypes up his arrival in "Right Hand Man" to WWE arena spectacle:
Burr
Ladies and gentlemen!The moment you've been waiting for!The pride of Mount Vernon:George Washington!
Company
Here comes the general!Here comes the general!Here comes the general!Here comes the general!
— Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Company, "Right Hand Man"
Washington's Chuck Norris-esque elevation to godliness is one of the more fantastical things about Hamilton—in a show with a rapping black Thomas Jefferson, this is fantastical. Washington himself quotes The Pirates of Penzance ("Now I'm the model of a modern major general / The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up, to put me up on a pedestal"), and one song later, Aaron Burr quotes a little book called the Bible, saying that Hamilton's been "seated at the right hand of the father." The founding father, of course, but setting Washington on par with God is no joke.
Christopher Jackson is as competent a rapper as anyone on this album, but he really shines on his R&B numbers: the aforementioned "History Has Its Eyes on You" and the conversation with Hamilton that morphs into his famous farewell address, "One Last Time."This song in particular is one of a handful of speculative moments in this show, tackling the somewhat obscure Washington farewell address authorship issue. Chernow and Lin-Manuel support the theory that Hamilton cowrote a bulk of it. He was something of a Rob Lowe to Washington's Martin Sheen on The West Wing. "One Last Time" oozes John Legend, right down to the piano foundation and Chris Jackson's delivery. Bible quotes strike again with actual lines from the actual farewell address from Micah:
"Like the scripture says:
'Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
and no one shall make them afraid.'
They’ll be safe in the nation we’ve made.
I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree.
A moment alone in the shade,
at home in this nation we’ve made.
One last time."
— George Washington (Christopher Jackson)
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1200"] "The Story of Tonight - Reprise"; Lafayette (Diggs), Mulligan (Onaodowan), Laurens (Ramos), and Hamilton (Miranda) in Act I.[/caption]
Hamilton's friends the Marquis de Lafayette and our spy Hercules Mulligan are played by Daveed Diggs and Okierete Onoadowan in act I. In act II, they play his partisan rivals Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Okierete "Oak" Onaodowan stands out in Act I as boisterous, foul mouthed Mulligan in an anachronistic bandanna. According to the casting call, Hercules Mulligan is "Busta Rhymes meets Donald O'Connor." As act II's James Madison, he's relegated to being Jefferson's timid supporter, and comically collateral in Hamilton's personal attacks on the Democratic Republicans. Madison is "Rza meets Zach from A Chorus Line", and the latter is very true, in that he weakly mediates interactions between parties like A Chorus Line's omnipresent director.
Act I's word count is truly monstrous, and it's motormouth rapping by Oak and Daveed that gives it the pace and spirit of revolution, especially heard in "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)" and "Guns and Ships". Daveed Diggs is a rapper in his own right, and as Lafayette, "America's favorite fighting Frenchman", he spits fabulous French-accented fire; see "Guns and Ships". Lin-Manuel calls him "Lancelot meets Ludacris", and Lafayette calls himself Lancelot and quotes Camelot: "Oui oui, mon ami, je m’appelle Lafayette! / The Lancelot of the revolutionary set! / I came from afar just to say “Bonsoir!” Tell the King “Casse-toi!” Who’s the best? / C’est moi!"
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1050"] "Cabinet Battle"; Jefferson (Diggs, again) and Hamilton (Miranda) in Act II.[/caption]
Daveed comes into glorious, foppish spotlight in act II, starting with the opener "What'd I Miss?", when Jefferson returns from France to be Secretary of State. It's a drastic contrast on Lin's part to differentiate between Daveed's two roles. Hamilton and Lafayette existed on a similar 1990s hip hop plane, but Jefferson had almost two decades on their generation. He's distant in age and in ideological leaning. "What'd I Miss?" is a genre outcast on this album, featuring elements of rock 'n roll and boogie woogie; its piano line resembles "Rockin' Robin". It's the perfect introduction to Jefferson and to the next 2 decades covered in the show ("Headfirst into a a political abyss"). While this musical is unique in its liberal use of its chorus, the staging seen in the B-roll reveals that they're his slaves, waiting on him as he arrives home like servants on Downton Abbey. He even namedrops Sally Hemings:
There’s a letter on my desk from the President.
Haven’t even put my bags down yet.
Sally be a lamb, darlin’, won’tcha open it?
It says the President’s assembling a cabinet
and that I am to be the Secretary of State, great!
And that I’m already Senate-approved...
I just got home and now I’m headed up to New York.
— Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs), "What'd I Miss?"
Lin-Manuel has pretty strong feelings about Jefferson and his hypocrisy. and Hamilton's digs at him are savage.
I grinned so hard when I saw Andy’s staging for this at first, and they introduced Jefferson and he’s walking down the staircase and everyone’s scrubbing the floor. They got it, before I even had to say anything. Like, yep — there’s Jefferson, talking eloquently about freedom while a slave shakes his hand and he goes like this [looks disgusted]. That’s Jefferson, write more eloquently about freedom than anybody, but didn’t live it.
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Genius: A Conversation With ‘Hamilton’ Maestro Lin-Manuel Miranda"
And from "Cabinet Battle #1":
A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor,
Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.
“We plant seeds in the South. We create.”
Yeah, keep ranting,
we know who’s really doing the planting.
— Alexander Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda), "Cabinet Battle #1"
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1717"] "The Schuyler Sisters"; Eliza (Soo), Angelica (Goldsberry), Peggy (Jones)[/caption]
In act I, Mulligan and Lafayette are just half of a merry quartet, rounded off by Hamilton and his gay lover John Laurens, played by Anthony Ramos. When I say "gay lovers", they were very much that. Hamilton was a raging bisexual. Sadly, their relationship never gets the spotlight it deserves, though Lin shared a heartbreaking scene not included on the recording on his Tumblr.
John Laurens was probably Hamilton's first love, fresh off the boat in America. Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, and by all accounts loved her deeply. But Hamilton's love life, like many other things, was a mess. Remember the first track, "Alexander Hamilton"?
Eliza, Angelica, & Maria Me? I loved him.
Angelica, Eliza, and their sister Peggy are introduced in the song "The Schuyler Sisters". They're the daughters of the crazy rich Dutch planter, Revolutionary War general, and eventual New York senator Philip Schuyler. In real life, he had 15 children, but most of them died, and the stakes of male preference primogeniture adds a layer of drama.
Angelica leads "The Schuyler Sisters" in a pre-pre-feminist power anthem which touches on the characters' awareness of the times: "History is happening in Manhattan / And we just happen to be / In the greatest city in the world." They're three fifths of Destiny's Child for the most part, but Angelica, who Lin calls "Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt", raps about her love and criticism of intelligent men while rejecting Aaron Burr's romantic overtures. She's played by Renee Elise Goldsberry, who closed Rent on Broadway as Mimi, my uncontested pick for the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical this year. Here, Eliza and Peggy are essentially her back up singers.
Eliza gets her moment with her meet cute/wedding song with Alexander, "Helpless", which is straight Alicia Keys; as Lin says, she's "Alicia Keys meets Elphaba". She and Alexander met at a soldier's ball in 1780. introduced by Angelica. This song covers their three week courtship, cheekily throwing in Wagner's bridal chorus from Lohengrin as they marry. There's a fair amount of wordplay here: the realization that Eliza's quasi "scatting" has been "I do" the whole time makes this song a gem, and Hamilton recognizes their class difference by riffing on the song's title:
Hamilton
I’ve been livin’ without a family since I was a child.
My father left, my mother died, I grew up buckwild.
But I’ll never forget my mother’s face, that was real,
and long as I’m alive, Eliza, swear to God,
you’ll never feel so…
Eliza
I do! I do! I do! I do!
Company
Helpless!
— "Helpless"
With the wedding, "Helpless" transitions smoothly into the next song. "Satisfied", which I hesitantly call the most difficult female solo ever written for theatre, for the sheer amount of rapping Lin demands. Of "Satisifed", he said:
The lyrics to “Satisfied” — in which Angelica Schuyler recounts how Hamilton and her sister Eliza met and married — are some of the most intricate I’ve ever written. I can’t even rap them, but Renee Elise Goldsberry, who plays Angelica — that’s her conversational speed. That’s how fast she thinks. You really get the sense that Angelica’s the smartest person in the room, and she reads Hamilton within a moment of meeting him.
— Lin-Manuel Miranda for The Hollywood Reporter
"Satisfied" is one of my favorite tracks because, as a narrative device, it's something I've never seen in a musical. Angelica, Eliza's maid of honor, gives a speech at the Hamilton-Schuyler wedding, and literally "rewinds" to the events Eliza sees from across the ballroom in "Helpless". Lin-Manuel quotes several bars the audience has heard just a few minutes ago, this time with commentary from Angelica and the appropriate synthetic underscoring that matches her Nicki Minaj designation. She falls in love with Alexander almost on sight, and he with her, but he's a poor bastard orphan who would do little good married to Philip Schuyler's eldest daughter, explained in this insane alliteration:
Cause I'm the oldest and the wittiest
And the gossip in New York City is
Insidious
And Alexander's penniless
That doesn't mean I want him any less
— Angelica Schuyler (Renee Elise Goldsberry), "Satisfied"
So she introduces him to Eliza. "At least my dear Eliza's his wife," she sings. "At least I keep his eyes in my life." Musically, she's Nicki, but in a theatrical context, she's straight Desiree Armfeldt—the glamorous actress from Sondheim's A Little Night Music who let the love of her life get away and lives to regret it.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="763"] "Helpless"; Angelica Schuyler (Goldsberry), Alexander Hamilton (Miranda), and Elizabeth Schuyler (Soo)[/caption]
Angelica marries a member of the British Parliament, John Baker Church, and moves to London, but maintains a close friendship with Alexander through letter writing. This is shown in the Act II song "Take a Break", which frames the curious not-quite love triangle that ties Alexander to the two older Schuyler sisters. It's the summer of 1791, and Angelica has come over from London to visit her family; she and Eliza urge Hamilton to "Take a Break" and join them upstate. He declines ("I have to get my plan through Congress.") In this time, we enter Amercia's earliest political sex scandal.
Peggy Schuyler disappeared after Act I, but her actress, Jasmine Cephas Jones, pulls some impressive character acting in Act II as Maria Reynolds, the Monica to Hamilton's Bill. The song in which Maria and Alexander instigate their three year affair, "Say No to This", is three minutes of sex and inner turmoil, as Alexander finds himself blackmailed by Mr. James Reynolds into paying him monthly so he can continue boning Maria. As this song ends and Hamilton acquiesces, he quotes The Last Five Years: "Nobody needs to know."
Jasmine Cephas Jones was wet blanket Peggy in Act I, all perky naivete, "The Michelle Williams of Destiny's Child". Maria Reynolds is Hamilton's downfall, all pout and need; "Jazmine Sullivan meets Carla from Nine". The change on Jasmine's part is stunning, but I personally expected a little more dimension from Lin, especially given the care he put toward writing Angelica and Eliza. Maria Reynolds is little more than a femme fatale, but Jasmine's performance is golden.
Cruelly, Hamilton's inability to "Say No to This" leaves him, in his words, "helpless."
Their affair is exposed a few years later after James Reynolds is jailed for speculation. Hamilton's position as Secretary of Treasury makes the blackmail money public interest. Hamilton himself publishes "The Reynolds Pamphlet," a fact-heavy ogre of a song which has Jefferson gleefully chanting "Well, he's never gon' president now", and the gem of Angelica choosing Eliza over Alexander in this conflict. She quotes "Satisifed": "Put what we had aside / I'm standing at her side / You could never be satisfied / God, I hope you're satisfied."
Eliza reacts in the only true solo in this show, free of the slick, modern chorus. This is where Elphaba comes in, from Lin's casting call. "Burn" is a classic Broadway torch song that may well match Wicked's "Defying Gravity" in audition overuse. Phillipa Soo's Tony nomination is almost assured. "Burn" is simultaneously a wounded song of heartbreak and a cheeky reference to our lack of primary sources:
I’m erasing myself from the narrative.
Let future historians wonder
how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.
You have torn it all apart.
I am watching it
burn.
— Eliza Hamilton (Phillipa Soo), "Burn"
Angelica and Alexander are too well matched; neither will ever be "Satisfied." In Act I, after Washington briefly dismisses Hamilton from his service for participating in a duel, Eliza asks him to only be the husband she needs. Not to change the world, or to leave a legacy, or anything. He just needs to be alive and present—"That Would Be Enough." Her motif of "Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now" is meant in terms of history and revolution, but also in literal gratitude to not be dead. Hamilton throws that back in her face as she protests his acceptance of Secretary of Treasury at the end of Act I. And Eliza was right; Hamilton's ambition ruined their lives. Eliza and Alexander only work their way toward reconciliation after the death of their son, Philip Hamilton (played by Anthony Ramos, previously seen as John Laurens), in a duel.
Three major duels happen in Hamilton. Here they are arranged, winner v. loser:
John Laurens v. Charles Lee, 1781
George Eacker v. Philip Hamilton, 1801
Aaron Burr v. Alexander Hamilton, 1804
The first duel is told in the song "Ten Duel Commandments," a tribute to the Notorious B.I.G's "Ten Crack Commandments," and each subsequent duel is a reprise of it, if not in name.
In the original 1781 duel, Washington has named Charles Lee general, and he did a terrible job at the Battle of Monmouth. Lee badmouthed Washington for his own failures. Hamilton is incensed, but Washington has forbidden his beloved aide-de-camp from doing anything. Laurens challenges Lee in Hamilton's place, with Hamilton as his second, like the wizard's duel Malfoy challenged Harry to in the Sorcerer's Stone. Ominously, Lee's second was Aaron Burr. And ironically, at the young age of 26 or 24, Burr and Hamilton gave us this gem:
Burr Alexander.
Hamilton Aaron Burr, sir.
Burr Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?
Hamilton Sure.
— "Ten Duel Commandments"
Laurens shot Lee in the side, but he survived. For participating in and encouraging this misbehavior, Washington sent Hamilton home, bringing him back just in time for the Battle of Yorktown. Hamilton's Washington also had the knowledge that Eliza was pregnant—a month before Hamilton knew. He sent him home to his wife and unborn child.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048"] "Stay Alive - Reprise"; Eliza (Soo), Alexander (Miranda), and Philip (Ramos, again)[/caption]
You would think that Washington's reprimand would put Hamilton off duels forever, but in 1801, when his son Philip graduates from King's College (Columbia University) and wants to duel George Eacker for trash talking his father, Alexander gives him his pistols and shares with him the "Ten Duel Commandments." Granted, Alexander is banking on Eacker being a decent person who wouldn't actually shoot a kid like Philip, so he tells his son to "aim his pistol at the sky" because killing people is wrong. But George Eacker is not a decent person, and he would and did shoot a kid like Philip.
Tragically, the tidbit of Philip's childhood we hear in "Take a Break", learning to count in French with Eliza, is a covert echo of the "Ten Duel Commandments" and the "Ten Crack Commandments" ("Un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf..."). While hearing Anthony Ramos as a nine year old boy is funny in its way, Philip dies a decade later in his mother's arms, singing the French counting song of his youth. And when you remember that Washington dismissed him for dueling because he was going to be a father, it's much worse.
The counting hook created by the Notorious B.I.G. and borrowed by Lin-Manuel appears one last time as Burr tells his side of the duel: "There are ten things you need to know," including #5
Burr
Now I didn’t know this at the time
But we were—Burr and Philip
Near the same spot
your son died
Hamilton
Near the same spot
my son died
— "The World was Wide Enough"
and #8:
They won’t teach you this in your classes,
but look it up, Hamilton was wearing his glasses.
Why? If not to take deadly aim?
It’s him or me, the world will never be the same.
I had only one thought before the slaughter:
This man will not make an orphan of my daughter.
— Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), "The World was Wide Enough"
Aaron Burr is played with magnetic charm by Leslie Odom Jr., seen on NBC’s short-lived Smash. Lin-Manuel calls Burr “Javert meets Mos Def.” True to form, Les Mis’s influence is tangible in the very air surrounding this cast album. Javert is Lin-Manuel’s dream role, and the importance of having an engaging antagonist is not lost on him at all.
The rivalry between Burr and Hamilton is odd in that it's rooted in pure disagreement. From the moment they met, in the second track "Aaron Burr, Sir", light ideological friction was present, as Burr dispenses his unsolicited advice: "Talk less. Smile more." Which is exactly not what Hamilton does. Ever. He interrupts Hamilton's big 'I Am' Song, "My Shot", to quote South Pacific with "You've got to be carefully taught / If you talk, you're gonna get shot!" When Mulligan, Lafayette, and Laurens encourage Hamilton to heckle the loyalist First Episcopal Bishop Samuel Seabury, Burr shushes him with "let him be." Even as college students, Burr and Hamilton didn't agree. "If you stand for nothing, Burr, what'll you fall for?", Hamilton asks when they first meet in 1776.
Their philosophical differences are highlighted lyrically and musically when Burr gets his own 'I Am' Song—a belated reply to Hamilton's "My Shot" called "Wait for It." Where "My Shot" was a rallying song, a mission statement, "Wait for It" is an ode to patience, recalling the funk-infused R&B of the 80s. While Hamilton is a man driven by action, Burr has learned to step back and assess.
"Wait for It" takes place after Hamilton's wedding. Burr has found his own love: Theodosia Provost, the wife of a British officer. Hamilton sees Burr's reluctance to "go get her" as his throwing away his shot, but Burr isn't inclined to take his shot—at least, not immediately.
What is it like in his shoes?
Hamilton doesn’t hesitate.
He exhibits no restraint.
He takes and he takes and he takes
and he keeps winning anyway.
He changes the game.
He plays and he raises the stakes.
And if there’s a reason
he seems to thrive when so few survive, then
Goddamnit—
I'm willing to wait for it.
— Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), "Wait for It"
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1280"] "The Room Where It Happens"; Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) and the company of Hamilton[/caption]
The rift between these two men becomes tangible when Burr refuses to help Hamilton with a little endeavor called the Federalist Papers in the Act I finale, "Non-Stop."
Hamilton
Burr, we studied and we fought and we killed
for the notion of a nation we now get to build.
For once in your life, take a stand with pride.
I don’t understand how you stand to the side.
Burr
I’ll keep all my plans close to my chest.
I’ll wait here and see which way the wind will blow.
I’m taking my time, watching the
afterbirth of a nation, watching the tension grow.
— "Non-Stop"
Hamilton seems confused by Burr's inaction because of his identification with him. In his dying monologue, he calls him "My first friend, my enemy". Before anything, Hamilton remembers walking up to him in "Aaron Burr, Sir", and recognizing in him a fellow orphan with something to prove. Lin-Manuel calls Burr "Javert meets Mos Def", and the parallelism of Les Mis's "Confrontation" is reflected in the true similarities between Burr and Hamilton: peers, students of law, lawyers, subordinate to Washington, in love in a time of war (not with each other), and fathers at the nation's birth.
In the song "Dear Theodosia", a sweet lullaby sung after "Yorktown", Burr and Hamilton sing to their newborn children, Theodosia Burr and Philip Hamilton, promising, "You'll come of age with our young nation / We'll bleed and fight for you / We'll make it right for you / If we lay a strong enough foundation / We'll pass it on to you / We'll give the world to you / And you'll blow us all away."
Aaron and Alexander both outlived the children they sang to.
Burr doesn't take his shot until 1791, in the true showstopper "The Room Where It Happens"—the jazzy event horizon that drives Burr to Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, against Hamilton across party lines. In unflattering terms, this song describes the compromise that moved our capital to D.C. and created our first national bank. Onstage, it's the height of suspense, and much more than debt involvement policy. It's Burr, drunk on the idea of power, drunk with the want Hamilton has always had and expected from him, entering the political arena and "the room where it happens." As Hamilton meets him, emerging from the mysterious dinner in "the room where it happens", he taunts Burr with the same words from "Aaron Burr, Sir":
Hamilton/Jefferson/Madison/Washington
What do you want, Burr?
What do you want, Burr?
If you stand for nothing,
Burr, then what do you fall for?
— "The Room Where It Happens"
In terms of genre, "The Room Where It Happens" is a major departure from the mild, tenuous tone we've come to associate with Burr from "Wait for It" and his interjections throughout. It's sinister, driven, and overall jazzy. Genius.com is no great authority, but it has a wealth of crowdsourced information, and on the lyrics for "The Room Where It Happens", someone contributed this insight:
As outlined in “What Did I Miss,” [sic] Thomas Jefferson’s musical style has Southern elements of boogie-woogie jazz, one of the earliest popular forms of African-American music. Miranda has discussed that he chose Jefferson’s musical influences to represent how he was over a decade older than Hamilton and his cohorts—upstarts who embody 90s & contemporary hip hop/r&b styles—with correspondingly more old-fashioned priorities.
Here, Burr embraces New Orleans/Dixieland jazz, a somewhat later incarnation of the early jazz movement, also (obviously) based in the South. Basically, Burr’s style is being influenced, possibly even corrupted, by Thomas Jefferson. This presages his defection to the Democratic Republicans in the next song.
Lin-Manuel accelerates the events leading up to the duel. He has Hamilton's choice to endorse Jefferson, his long-standing rival, over Burr in the "Election of 1800", as the event that sets Burr over the edge; their dislike has finally boiled to a point where their only tool for resolution is the duel they found "dumb and immature" twenty years earlier: "You've kept me from the room where it happens / The room where it happens / For the last time."
Hamilton's death scene plays with narrative convention. His part in "The World was Wide Enough" is rhythmic monologue, suspended in the second before Burr's bullet lands in between the ribs, in which he recalls a sentiment he's repeated so often in the course of this show and his life: "I imagine death so much, it feels more like a memory..." And then the bullet strikes, and Burr takes over, with verbatim from the real Aaron Burr: "The world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."
Burr lives another thirty years. "When Alexander aimed / At the sky / He may have been the first one to die / But I’m the one who paid for it. / I survived, but I paid for it."
Hamilton sees the dead as he joins them: his mother, John Laurens, his son Philip, and Washington, And he remembers Eliza.
In The New Yorker piece "The Women of Hamilton", Michael Schulman describes the finale, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story":
The last verse—unexpectedly, and powerfully—belongs to Eliza, who survived her husband by a whopping fifty years. How did she use them? “I put myself back in the narrative,” she tells us—interviewing soldiers who fought with Hamilton, raising funds for the Washington Monument, and establishing the first private orphanage in New York City. Most crucially, and with Angelica’s help, she sorts through Hamilton’s papers and helps secure his legacy, much as Miranda is doing with his musical. In the show’s final moment, he motions Eliza to the lip of the stage, where she steps beyond him and takes the light. The last image we see is of her awestruck face, gazing out into some blissful beyond. [...] As a Latino working in the Broadway theatre, [Miranda] knows the importance of who tells the story, and how. And, by implicitly equating Eliza’s acts of narration with his own, he’s acknowledging the women who built the country alongside the men. You’re left wondering whether the “Hamilton” of the title isn’t just Alexander, but Eliza, too.
And in Hamilton itself as a narrative outside of history, we have another storyteller: Aaron Burr.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="635"] The company of Hamilton, opening night at the Richard Rodgers Theater on August 6.[/caption]
We’ve had some significant musicals on U.S. history. 1776 is endearingly jokey in its depiction of the revolution, aligning with the Democratic Republicans and John Adams. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins is a cynical look at presidential assassins successful and unsuccessful. Our closest cousin to Hamilton is Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which the IU Theatre Department is performing in the spring. It depicts Andrew Jackson as a Billie Joe Armstrong-esque punk rocker.
Bloody Bloody has the anachronisms and heroism of Hamilton, but little of the impact. New York City Center recently announced it will mount a multiethnic production of 1776 as a part of their Encores! series.
I’ll say this: Lin and I are children of immigrants. My parents came to New York from the Philippines in the Reagan era. There was a time I wanted to be a musical theatre actress. All I had to look to was Lea Salonga, of Aladdin and Mulan fame, in the racist monstrosities Miss Saigon and Flower Drum Song. And seeing Phillipa Soo as Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, what I will hazard to say is one of the greatest roles written for a woman in musical theatre in the past decade, would have made all the difference.
It has been hard to communicate and to realize that American history is my history, and I suspect it's the same for Lin and immigrants everywhere. Lin and I have had blood on this soil going back only one generation. But they came here because of this story. And it's as much our story as it is the story of the descendants of slaves who didn't choose to come here, which is why it's so vital to hear political discourse as rap battles, and to see our Founding Fathers as if they could be our fathers, and their wives our mothers.
Hamilton has a wealth of guts and, as an album, lives up to its hype tenfold. It's a crossing of classes, in the social classes of consumers and the exclusionary "classes" of art. Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda broke these bounds to create something indispensable. In the words of Hamilton's opening number : "The world will never be the same."
Rating: 7/7