Federalist No. 86

Hamilton

starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, Phillipa Soo, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom Jr., Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Anthony Ramos and Jonathan Groff

directed by Thomas Kail (Fosse/Verdon, also a bunch of, like, theater stuff)


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I didn't really feel like I had much of a choice but to watch it when it appeared on Disney+ on July 3. I had heard that there was a film version being considered and very likely to happen (I can't say "greelit" because first of all, I'm not an entertainment industry douchebag, and secondly, in the pandemic there are no plans any human can reliably make), but that's a separate project. That was going to be a non-stage production, with sets and stuff, which at the time I thought would eventually satiate whatever curiosity I might have had based on all the covid-level fever of the hype around it. I could be patient because a) I had no intention on spending $100 for one theater ticket when the stage play finally got around to touring in L.A. and b) I am profoundly uninterested in musical theater. So waiting didn't seem like too much of a chore.

But if I'm so indifferent to a musical, you are absolutely asking yourself as you read this, why bother at all? Because I'm an American, reader. And what's an American's one defining cultural constant? Well, yes, institutionalized white supremacy, sure, but the other thing... is it a duty to take in a show dedicated to the lionization of the nation's founders as a patriotic imperative? Ha, not even close. It's that when something achieves a high enough fever pitch of cultural hysteria, we are required to find a way to engage with it, even if it's something we'd definitely hate. Do you think everyone who saw an Avengers movie gave the first fuck about what transpired between the armor guy and the flag guy? The numbers of attendees would tell you that is statistically impossible. For every dork like me parsing every callback and Easter egg in Endgame, there was someone in the seat beside, in front or behind completely bewildered by the whole thing and just wondering why nobody would acknowledge ANY of the homoerotic tension in the piece.

Just because hype gets you to a thing doesn't mean you expect it to be any good. The last time this many upper middle class white people got this worked up about something it was essential oils.

I watched it. And you know what? It was definitely a musical. It's not the most critically nuanced position, but I'm sorry, every time I watch a musical it's tainted by the same impatience, like: when are they going to get done with all the fucking singing so I can get into this story? And in a piece like this, I learned there was an option where pretty much the whole damned thing could be a song. Like, with no stopping, just one into the next and the next and the next and the next...

I will say I didn't hate it, but as I said to a friend of mine, I learned it's possible for a piece of art to move you to tears and still be glad when it's finally over.

You may have guessed by now that my fluency in musical theater is not such that it will lend itself to a particularly nuanced or informed critical analysis. I did see The Lion King on Broadway and I can tell you this one had 100% fewer talking cat puppets. And I saw Book of Mormon out here when it came to L.A. and I will say definitively that Hamilton suffered from a glaring lack of closeted missionaries.

I'm not made of stone, so obviously the cast was impressive. When you saw Philippa Soo so effortless lay out every note on offer with both clarity (tone) and clarity (emotion) or Daveed Diggs smash celestial objects together with explosions of charisma and flow, you couldn't help but notice which one of the people on stage got to be in it because he wrote the damned thing. Lin-Manuel Miranda wasn't bad and this is actually praise for so brilliantly and confidently casting the rest of it knowing he'd be shrunk by orders of magnitude in comparison. It's a testament to the writing and the integrity of the narrative that in the end I wasn't openly rooting for Leslie Odom Jr.'s thwarted, aggrieved, fuming Aaron Burr as he lit the stage on fire every time he mounted it. And that all says something for Odom's talent as well because Aaron Burr was an asshole.

What's been most fascinating is, now that the thing has been pushed out of the Broadway birth canal screaming into the fully realized world of Disney-branded streaming, it's been getting a full vetting 1) by people seeing it for the first time and 2) with eyes refocused by Black Lives Matter and George Floyd and Confederate statues. The play debuted on Broadway in 2015 when, yes, the president was a black guy, but we were still entrenched in a cultural moment when something like the name of the Washington Redskins was an unassailable cultural constant. The fact is that Hamilton is a production where several slaveholders get together to talk about freedom and stuff, all played by people of color. Part of the reason it's getting a re-examination is due to the nature of the ubiquitous medium of television* and part of it is just because that's what we do in 2020. Christopher Columbus statues go into rivers and beloved stage musicals get long side-eye. It all fits in this spasm of reconsideration and iconoclasm. If it's strong enough to shake the Cult of Police, some singalong show isn't going to escape notice.

The criticism goes: Hamilton doesn't do enough (beyond literally one or two lines) to explicitly address the realities of inequality in the Revolutionary War setting and the glaring, intentional oversights of the founders leading directly to centering a whole society around the degradation, exploitation and murder of a huge and vital percentage of its own people. Which, you know: fucking valid.

Other criticism has focused on viewers being squicked out by people of color playing slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but (and maybe this is facile and too generous), but I bought that as sort of the whole point. I'm not certain it's a point that holds up over time as the work itself becomes more and more divorced from the moment of its inception and the cultural context of its initial presentation, a connection all works of art lose over time as societies around them stretch themselves into something subtly but irretrievably new. There is no theme or rhyme to the multiculturalism of the African-American and Latinx and Asian-American cast. Any character can be any ethnicity, without regard to her or his relation to any other character. It's certainly not a cynical show of diversity the way street gangs in 1980s TV shows were careful to contain an Assortment of World Ethnicities. What it is instead (right here and right now, and perhaps a little more certainly in 2015) is an assertion that the American story belongs to everyone, even the people who look like the cast of Hamilton. And not only can it look like that, it's presented in the language and rhythm of hip-hop, an mode of art and expression explicitly and undeniably born from African-American effort and worldview. There's a strength in the position, as James Baldwin said about "integration" in the 1960s, to paraphrase: we don't need integration, we've been integrated since we got here. Hamilton I think at its roots to the metatext of staging and casting, is an assertion of that: an imagining of the insane idea that the principles espoused during the revolution could look like what it is they actually say.

It's a time to re-examine all of the lazy assumptions of white supremacy, sometimes in surprising ways. Like I came away certain that the best parts were the three numbers by King George III (as played by Jonathan Groff with spit-flecked surety). A whole musical built on hip-hop and I like the pop ditty belted out by the white colonizer guy. I haven't decided what that means exactly about me yet, but it's probably not great.

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*Ubiquitous provided you can kick in the monthly fees for Disney+ or you know a guy who will let you borrow his password.