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From a scrappy, young upstart to a cultural behemoth, the tale of Hamilton the musical is the tale of America in more ways than one.
For a man so obsessed with history, its polish and its muddying, Alexander Hamilton would be awed by the sweeping scope, and fresh revisionism, of this musical in his name.
It’s tempting in hindsight to view the creation, staging, and box office obliteration of Hamilton as something of a foregone conclusion – that potent mixture of heady American mythmaking, fluid lyricism, and a triple-threat young performer that cement a once-in-a-generation success seem undeniable.
Yet there’s no denying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s approach – writing the USA in bold new cursive, wiping away the calligraphic stamp that had always shaped it – was bold. Now, Hamilton arrives at Spark Arena for Aotearoa’s one shot at the show’s extraordinary, genre-busting power.
Hamilton, the musical and the man, are both obsessed with storytelling – how historical figures sketch in the edges of their own life’s imprints, refine them, and gild them so our families, country, and posterity will look on them a little more kindly.
And, arriving in those more optimistic, buoyant times, Hamilton became a byword for that streak of Obama Yes-We-Can hope – this idea that anyone can “tell their stories”, as Miranda writes.
What power, then, does Hamilton have nearly a decade from its premiere (aside from serving as a punchline on Succession)?
Now, still, Miranda’s achievement arrives with burning with elevance – his remixed history soars in such beautiful arrangements that you can’t help but be a little spellbound.
Your hunger – or aversion – for Hamilton will be determined fairly quickly.
As a Broadway spectacle, Hamilton shouldn’t have worked. It still shouldn’t work. It still does.
Hamilton is still as formally impressive, historically titillating, and occasionally spellbinding as its 2015 premiere.
Usually it would be futile to try to draw out the strongest performance of such a universally strong ensemble, but this staging brought new life to two characters for me – Aaron Burr (Callan Purcell) and Eliza Schuyler (Martha Burhane).
Burr’s vaulting ambition is hammered through in every beat of Purcell’s readings, and his silver-tongued, diamond-sharp The Room Where It Happened reaches new highs – it’s the song of the night.
Similarly, Burhane brings a stunning level of emotional dexterity to Eliza – Miranda’s writing has always lifted Eliza off the history pages into a more rounded heroine, and Burhane never loses sight of Eliza’s wrenching struggle between her avowal to Hamilton’s legacy versus her anguished relationship with the man himself.
Jason Arrow, as Hamilton, cleaves perhaps the most closely one can to Miranda’s original edition of the great man – he matches him beat-for-beat in the swaggering, bloody-mindedness of Hamilton’s banter. That is to say, he’s a great rapper – always finely modulating Hamilton’s ego with his neat showmanship, and always showing us the brutal, tense power of Miranda’s lyrics.
The show – with Britpop, fluid rap, and some achingly sublime show tunes, has long been the musical for those that don’t love musicals. That Hamilton, and Miranda, are at their best during the verbal warfare of the constitutional arguments (not something all period pieces can say) speaks to its supreme achievement.
It’s difficult to make scenes of writing or policy-making dynamic on either the screen or the stage, but through his wordplay (oft-parodied, never bettered), Miranda makes the whole process seem as exciting for the audience as it must have been for his ego-driven, legacy-obsessed protagonists.
But it’s the under-explored facets of Hamilton’s family heartbreak that give the play its emotional heartbeat – and the impulse for its most finely-wrought songs, as delicately observed by this cast.
The show’s final number, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, shows Hamilton at its best – collapsing a century of American diplomacy, the biography of an elder statesman, and the human cost of the slave debate into one catch-your-breath-it’s-so-good number.
Still, the initial backlash to Hamilton (the Cancel Hamilton movement) has reframed our perspective on these debates – the filmmaker Ava DuVernay called out Miranda for failing to mention Hamilton’s buying and owing of slaves (Miranda said the critique was “fair game”).
And it does, now, feel marginal, the way the liberal aesthetics of Hamilton only reinforce the hegemony behind it, rather than make any great stab at its heart of darkness.
Yet, Hamilton is less a play devoted to championing the founding father than one that scans his obsession with history and his own story – this is his fatal flaw, the one that makes him liken himself to Macbeth. The character work by this cast attune Miranda’s writing, bring it into the frequency of a character study, more than the slick aesthetics of another blockbuster musical. The show is richer for it.
For a 2023 audience, this tour also slightly fine-tunes the elements, with small yet exquisite moments of character work that sketch King Charles, Donald Trump and the Capitol riot into the long shadow of Hamilton’s history.
(These are already filling the pages of Miranda’s already-stacked book, that flies through at least 500 years of pop culture and history, from Shakespeare to the Beatles to NWA).
As a history lesson, Hamilton is an immersive piece of revisionist fiction. As a musical, it’s a feat of technical and songwriting wizardry,
Time for Aotearoa to rise up for the triumphant arrival of a modern classic.
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