FEW Broadway musicals make their Scottish premiere having already achieved the legendary status that attaches to Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 dramatisation of the life of the American revolutionary and statesman Alexander Hamilton.
As much a history play as a biographical drama, the show (which is embarking on a tour of the UK and Ireland) has been inundated with awards and critical plaudits.
Boasting a superb musical score and choreography that are rooted in hip-hop culture, the musical has captured the socio-cultural zeitgeist by casting non-white performers in most roles.
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Indeed, it is a crucial feature of the show that founding fathers of the United States – such as George Washington (leader of the American Revolution and first president of the US), Thomas Jefferson (third president of the US) and Hamilton himself – are played by people of colour.
Miranda describes his show as a musical that is about “America then, as told by America now”. However, its multi-ethnic cast is not only reflective of US society in the 21st century, it also speaks powerfully to the history of “race” (that most destructive of pseudo-scientific concepts) in America.
Famously (or infamously), a majority of the founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, were slave owners. By contrast, Hamilton (the orphaned son, born out of wedlock, to white colonists in the Caribbean) was a noted campaigner for the abolition of slavery – a fact that highlights the paradoxes and conflicts around race and racism that have afflicted American society throughout its turbulent history.
The bedrock of the show’s success is its originality, both within the stage musical genre and the popular re-telling of US history (Miranda’s book and lyrics are inspired by Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton).
It is, in many ways, opposite to other popular Broadway musicals (such as Disney’s all-conquering The Lion King, for example), which are successful due to their adherence to artistic conventions and their assiduous meeting of audience expectations.
With Hamilton, the music and dance, rather than traditional stage effects, provide the spectacle. The nine-year success of the show has brought with it bigger budgets, but, sensibly, the producers have remained true to the relatively simple staging of the original.
David Korins’s set is a beautiful and ingeniously utilitarian, wood-dominated period affair. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeously tidy-but-accurate. Crucially, however, both facilitate (rather than substitute for) the show’s performative dynamism.
Director Thomas Kail’s staging has that dynamism in abundance. The performers (who were cast in the UK for this tour) are universally impressive: from the appropriately charismatic and fiery Shaq Taylor (Hamilton), to the brilliantly flamboyant Billy Nevers (as both the Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson) and the fabulously voiced Aisha Jawando (this production’s standout singer, playing Hamilton’s sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler).
The score includes not only hip-hop but also soul, alongside mainstream pop and songs in the stage musical style.
Of course, some numbers – such as the famous My Shot and The Room Where It Happens – present themselves as showstoppers, but there truly isn’t a weak link in the score. Indeed, it’s extraordinary how much of the story – from Hamilton’s humble origins, through his early political pamphleteering, the Revolutionary War and his self-destructive private life – is told in the lyrics.
The show’s interpretation of history is, inevitably, a tad loose at times. In particular, Britain’s King George III is represented as an absolute monarch (whereas England had not had such a thing since 1649, when Cromwell’s republican revolution beheaded Charles I).
However, as Daniel Boys’s (below) wonderfully funny performance (which carries a few neat allusions to our current monarch, Charles III) attests, a dandyish king has far greater entertainment value than the period’s Tory prime minister, Lord Frederick North. There are few lines in the musical that are more humorous than King George’s pronouncement that “I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love”.
Huge credit is due to Alex Lacamoire for his musical arrangements and orchestration, and to Andy Blankenbuehler for his choreography. Both contribute hugely to the amazing sense of energy that defies the show’s almost three-hour length (including interval).
Hamilton is one Broadway musical that absolutely lives up to the hype. Beg, borrow or start a republican revolution for a ticket.
Hamilton is on at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until April 27.
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