And we’re back from a short vacation trip to Chicago, a whirlwind tour of two museums, one madman’s hidey-hole, Geno’s East, and the Broadway production of Hamilton: An American Musical at the CIBC Theatre in eastern Chicago. That last item is the subject of this post.
I’m going to keep this short, partly because I couldn’t appreciate all the nuances of this lovely production. This was due to my own failing: I do not pick up on accents or extremely rapid patter very well, especially when there is musical accompaniment, and that is the essence of this play: a biography of the American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, warts and all, told mostly through the musical form rap. The use of this musical form in this play is important in that it connects a profoundly American musical form (though built on preceding imported forms), still relatively recently developed, to the beginnings of the American experiment in government, in perhaps the most important possible way – each began in the depths of alienation and struggle. Rap started as a street music developed by a black community struggling with centuries of American racism, and all it that has implied for members of a black community who have the spirit of the poet moving through them, the desire to chronicle their stories and how injustice impacts them.
The Founding Fathers were reacting to the sometimes arbitrary rule and taxation of a sovereign far, far away, who knew little of their situation and cared less, a monarchy the history of which contained acts of extreme barbarity inflicted not only on enemies, but on citizens of the British Empire as well, often justified through appeals to religious orthodoxies not applicable or accepted by the colonists of America. Thus, the alienation felt by the colonists who were of various religious sects, were belabored by the monarch’s representatives, and often felt like afterthoughts who were managed not for their prosperity, but for what they could produce for the faraway homeland. In this alienation, there is a connection, and that connection is important to making the play significant for American audiences familiar with the history and themes of both.
But the play is also interesting in that it recognizes there’s more than one story here, and that this is an inevitability. We learn the story of Alexander Hamilton (and how many Americans know the story of Alexander Hamilton – I certainly didn’t, and in fact as the play progressed towards the infamously tragic duel, I realized that I knew of the duel, but not the why), but the playwright also deliberately introduces the story of Hamilton’s eventual antagonist, Aaron Burr, another orphan and his friend and rival, and how their differences made Hamilton both better and worse. We also catch parts of the story of Hamilton’s mentor, George Washington, and of Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, who brings us to the real end of the story as we discover she is responsible for founding the first private orphanage after his death in the duel.
Orphaned, ambitious, amatory, brilliant, and infuriating – it’s a fascinating story, and well told if you can hear it. We loved the story, presentation and the music, except when we couldn’t quite hear the words, as well as the costumes. If you have a chance, please go see Hamilton, and see that American politics has always had an element of the dirty about it.
Recommended.
