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Feb 21, 2023 · The show is written as if Miranda aimed to create an anthem to ambition, love, and legacy with this new and remarkable piece of theatre. It’s no wonder Hamilton is resonating in countries around the world.
- Broadway Inbound
- It's About Alexander Hamilton
- It All Started with A Vacation and A Book
- It's Not The First Hamilton
- It Was Inspired, in Part, by Les Misérables
- It Took A Long Time to Create
- It (Mostly) Sticks to The Facts
- Most of The Cast Is Non-White
- The Show Also Confronts Slavery
- It Contains Almost No Dialogue
- It Packs in A Whole Lot of Words
Hamiltonfollows U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the Caribbean who became George Washington's right hand man during the American Revolutionary War, as well as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury. As anyone who has seen the show will say, however, it's anything but a dry historical tome: the fast-paced, high-energy sho...
Hamiltoncreator Lin-Manuel Miranda was on vacation in Mexico when he read author Ron Chernow's biography about Hamilton, and began to imagine it as a musical. "I was like, 'This is an album. No, this is a show. How has no one done this?' It was the fact that Hamilton wrote his way off the island where he grew up. That's the hip-hop narrative," Mira...
It wasn't the first time, however, that Hamilton's story has hit the stage. Hamiltonwas also the name of a 1917 Broadway play written by a high-society woman named Mary Hamlin and starring George Arliss, and it followed the underrated founding father as he helped devise a new financial structure for America. At the time it won favourable reviews, b...
From childhood Miranda loved musicals, and performed in several high school productions. One of his all-time favourites is Les Misérables, and that musical theatre classic inspired Miranda's thinking on Hamilton. "The things that you can see in Hamilton that are affecting people are also present in Les Mis. One, it's trying to capture so much of th...
Miranda wasn't a newbie to the musical theatre world; in fact, when he set out to create Hamilton, the writer, composer and performer had already won a Tony for In the Heights, a hip-hop- and salsa-infused show set in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighbourhood. Still, it took Miranda a full year to write the first song, and another year to write ...
When writing the show, Miranda used some creative license with the history, but for the most part was a stickler for the facts, and even hired author Chernow as a consultant on the project. He read Hamilton's voluminous writings, and visited the New York spots where history happened — including Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street where George Washingto...
America's founding fathers were all white, and many of them owned black slaves; in Hamilton, however, people of colour play the leading roles — and Miranda says that was very intentional. "This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance. Our story should look the way our country looks. Then we found th...
In interviews, Miranda regularly makes the point that slavery comes up in the third line of the show, setting it apart from many historical works that fail to mention the founding fathers' use of slaves. "I was very conscious of it. And having the show from Hamilton's perspective is a blessing, because he was ahead of the other founding fathers. H...
Traditionally, musicals have dialogue between the songs, and for a time Miranda worked with a playwright — but found the spoken text didn't meld with the hip-hop. "We actually went down the road with a playwright. There's a version of Act 1 where we had songs and they were the songs that are in the show, but we found that if you start with our open...
Musical theatre isn't usually known for fast-paced dialogue; because it's sung, it can take a long time to get a thought across — but using hip-hop, Hamiltonhas seriously disrupted that norm. In fact, the stats-minded website fivethirtyeight.comtook the cast albums of eight top musicals, and calculated the number of words they contained per minute....
Aug 6, 2015 · Led by a cast of mostly black and Latino actors, “Hamilton” has already helped challenge the perception that Broadway’s nickname as the Great White Way refers to the color of the actors onstage.
- Erik Piepenburg
Jun 15, 2018 · Hamilton deals with America’s original sin, slavery, by emphasizing Hamilton’s abolitionism and his close relationship with John Laurents, who heroically raised an all-Black regiment to fight the British and as evidence against slavery. But what the musical doesn’t mention is that Hamilton helped to secure household slaves for Angelica ...
- Tim Treanor
Dec 22, 2017 · After weeks of hype, Hamilton has officially opened in the West End at last - and the critics verdicts are in. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton has...
Aug 27, 2015 · Hamilton is winning its loudest accolades as a “game changer” for bringing rap to Broadway. But that’s not really the primary source of the show’s success, nor of its importance.
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In the musical, Hamilton is portrayed as being a firm abolitionist, someone who wanted to end slavery. He furiously accuses Thomas Jefferson of using slave labour to pay off the South’s...
