Talkin’ Broadway: Hamilton (May 19th, 2024) Study Guide.
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Hamilton (May 19th, 2024)
Study Guide:
Talkin’ Broadway - Hamilton
May 19th, 2024 | 2-4pm
West Bloomfield Library
4600 Walnut Lake Rd,
West Bloomfield Township, MI 48323
Co-Hosts:
Liz Lombard is an acclaimed singer, actor, improv artist, and pediatric occupational therapist. Her career in musicals led her to earn her master's degrees in occupational therapy, specializing in sensory processing and pediatrics. She founded The Sensory Concierge to support neurodiverse families as they step outside their daily routines to attend concerts, shows, and other special events. Favorite roles include Miss Clavel in national tour of Madeline and the Bad Hat, May in Age of Innocence, Merry-Go-Round, Hope in the Fringe Festival’s Storytime with Mr. Butterman, and Tracy Partridge in the Fringe Festival’s The Bardy Bunch. She can be found most evenings performing a variety of show tunes for her 3-year old twins, while her husband dances along (quite well!).
SONGS To Be Performed On Sunday
“Helpless” - Meleah Acuff
“Wait for it” - John Alexander Hatcher
“One Last Time” - Meleah Acuff
“Dear Theodosia” - John Alexander Hatcher
GENERAL NOTES:
Hamilton: An American Musical is a sung-and-rapped-through biographical musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Lin-Manuel Miranda as well as choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler. Based on the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the musical covers the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and his involvement in the American Revolution and the political history of the early United States. Composed over a seven-year period from 2008 to 2015, the music draws heavily from hip hop, as well as R&B, pop, soul, and traditional-style show tunes. It casts non-white actors as the Founding Fathers of the United States and other historical figures. Miranda described Hamilton as about "America then, as told by America now.”
Premiered and Notable Productions - From its opening, Hamilton received near-universal acclaim. It premiered off-Broadway on February 17, 2015, at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan, with Miranda playing the role of Alexander Hamilton, where its several-month engagement was sold out. The musical won eight Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical. It then transferred to the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, opening on August 6, 2015, where it received uniformly positive reviews and high box office sales.
2015 Off-Broadway
2015 Broadway
2017 First North America tour
2017 West End
2018 Second North America tour
2019 Third North America tour
2021 Australia
2021 Fourth North America tour
2022 Hamburg
2023 International Tour
Source Material - Lin Manuel Miranda was inspired by the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which he read on a vacation.
Miranda: "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," Miranda told Vogue. "So I Googled 'Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical' and totally expected to see that someone had already written it. But no. So I got to work."
Synopsis - Hamilton narrates Alexander Hamilton's life in two acts, and details among other things his involvement in the American Revolutionary War as an aide-de-camp to George Washington, his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, his career as a lawyer and secretary of the treasury, and his interactions with Aaron Burr which culminates in their duel at the end of Hamilton's life.
Themes/Influence - Set during the late 1700s, this telling of Alexander Hamilton’s life is inspiring and heartbreaking. Its beautifully explored themes of love, loss, forgiveness, and ambition make the story timeless and engaging.
Upon its release on stage, Hamilton was hailed as a major step forward for representation of people of color on Broadway. The show features a cast of almost entirely BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) actors playing the roles of white historical figures. As Lin-Manuel Miranda said, “it’s America then played by America now.” Hamilton’s acclaim was immediate and widespread: tickets sold out for months on end, ticket prices going as high as $1,500 a piece, it won a slew of Tony awards, a Grammy, and was even awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It attracted a large online fanbase of teenage theatre enthusiasts, a group largely responsible for the continued interest in Hamilton and musical theatre in general, and likely accounts for many of the streams the filmed version on Disney+ got.
One critic argues that with the Black Lives Matter movement reopening important conversations in 2020, the combination of this and Hamilton’s Disney+ release allowed audiences to examine the show from new angles without the dominating praise that might have made these critiques invisible at the start of its fame.
For all the criticisms it has received, Hamilton is still undoubtedly an important piece of art, and the filmed version still received a large amount of praise. It remains the most acclaimed musical of all time, and its impact on musical theatre is unmatched. However, it is possible to appreciate something and acknowledge where it falls short. Watching Hamilton: the Movie, something that was filmed in 2016, feels like opening a time capsule. It is a window into the conciliatory optimism of the mid-2010s, and understanding what has happened between its Broadway premiere and its drop on Disney+ reflects how the mindsets of many Americans have changed.
Creative Team & Background - Timeline…
2009: Miranda performs a song from The Hamilton Mixtape in front of President Barack Obama at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word. The song will eventually become the opening number for Hamilton.
2013: The Hamilton Mixtape gets its first workshop at Vassar College and New York Stage and Film Powerhouse Theater. Miranda asks Thomas Kail, who directed In the Heights, to direct the workshop. The workshop contains the eventual first act of Hamilton and three songs from the second act. Miranda plays Hamilton. Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson (who was also in In the Heights) also star — they will eventually star in the show on Broadway, too.
2015: Hamilton premieres off Broadway at The Public Theater on January 20, under Kail's direction. The run sells out immediately. The production is partially financed by Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller, who produced In the Heights. The entirety of the Off-Broadway cast moves to Broadway. Later that same year, on July 13, Hamilton opens on Broadway, where it runs to this day.
2016: Hamilton opens its Chicago production. That production runs for four years and closes in 2020.
2017: Hamilton launches its first American tour, beginning in San Francisco. That same year, a separate tour launches in San Francisco. Hamilton also begins performances on the West End at the Victoria Palace Theatre, where it runs to this day.
2021: Hamilton begins performances in Australia at the Sydney Lyric Theatre. It runs there to this day, with another production in Melbourne at Her Majesty's Theatre.
2022: Hamilton opens a sit-down production in Los Angeles at the Pantages Theatre. Hamilton will also open its first foreign-language production in Germany in September at the Operettenhaus in Hamburg.
Lin Manuel Miranda (book, music, and lyrics) Prior to Hamilton, Miranda had made waves on Broadway with In the Heights, which he also wrote and starred in. His other musical credits include writing Spanish lyrics to the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story. His improvisational hip-hop group Freestyle Love Supreme also headlined its own Broadway show from 2019 to 2020, and 2021 to 2022.
Miranda is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and two Olivier Awards. Miranda has also been nominated for two Academy Awards, for writing songs for the Disney films Moana and Encanto. Miranda has also dipped his toe into film directing, making his feature directorial debut with the movie musical tick, tick... BOOM!
Music - Emerging from African-American and Latino communities, the genres of hip-hop and R’n’B were initially met with resistance and were often associated with social rebellion, illuminating the frustrations, hopes, and dreams of marginalized societies. The soulful tones of R'n'B trace their origins back to the vibrant migration of African Americans from Southern farmlands to the bustling urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest during the early twentieth century. They carried with them an illustrious tapestry of regional African-American music that would later intertwine into the early version of R’n’B. Meanwhile, the rhythmical sound of hip-hop that pervades Hamilton has roots embedded deep within the socio-cultural matrix of the 1970s Bronx borough in New York City. At a time when urban decay was at its pinnacle, with the poorer parts of America grappling with adversity, the resilient spirit of hip-hop burst forth. It emerged as a powerful platform for expression, celebrating identity and survival against the odds, and rapidly grew into a creative and cultural force that would eventually influence artists across industries, including Lin-Manuel.
Fun Facts
For a show about America's first treasury secretary, it was fitting that Hamilton made back its $12.5 million investment in under a year. This is a feat considering that a majority of Broadway shows do not make back the money that producers put into the show. Since its premiere in 2015, Hamilton has consistently sold out on Broadway, with its most expensive ticket going for $1,150 at one point — a Broadway record.
All musicals have songs that are left on the cutting room floor. Many of those songs never see the light of day — but not so in Hamilton. The album The Hamilton Mixtape, which contains remixes and covers of Hamilton songs, also contains songs that were cut from the show, including "Congratulations" and "Cabinet Battle 3." Miranda has also released cut songs from Hamilton separately, which he called HamilDrops.
The fastest rap ever written for Broadway is found in the Hamilton song "Guns and Ships." There, the Marquis de Lafayette raps 6.3 words per second. Hamilton overall is a word-filled musical. According to FiveThirtyEight, Hamilton contains 20,520 words, with an average of 144 words per minute. The show would last about six hours if it were sung at a traditional musical theatre speed.
Hamilton is a veritable lyrical Easter egg. Lin-Manuel Miranda shows off his musical chops by writing songs that reference previously written songs from various genres. For instance, George Washington calls himself the "model of a modern Major General" in "Right Hand Man," a reference to The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. The "Ten Duel Commandments" is inspired by the song "Ten Crack Commandments" by Biggie Smalls. In "Cabinet Battle No. 2," Thomas Jefferson says, "If you don't know, now you know," quoting Notorious B.I.G.'s rap song "Juicy."
Glorifying America’s Past? – Some critics believe that, with only one named Black character in Hamilton, the play almost entirely silences the voices of people of color during America’s founding era. In an essay about the erasure of the Black past in Hamilton, Rutgers-Newark history professor Lyra D. Monteiro writes, “With a cast dominated by actors of color, the play is nonetheless yet another rendition of the ‘exclusive past,’ with its focus on the deeds of ‘’great white men’ and its silencing of the presence and contributions of people of color in the Revolutionary era.”
Ishmael Reed, who has been nominated twice for a National Book Award, has chosen to collect his critique of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acclaimed show into a play. Reed’s The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda is an uncompromising take-down of Hamilton, reminding viewers of the Founding Fathers complicity in slavery and his war on Native Americans.
Following criticism that Hamilton minimized the roles that the Founding Fathers played in perpetuating slavery, the second act opener of Hamilton was changed in 2021. The song portrays Thomas Jefferson coming back to his plantation Monticello, where he interacts with his slaves, including Sally Hemings. Prior, the interactions were playful but in the new choreography, Hemings turns pointedly away from Jefferson.
Major Awards - Hamilton's 11 Tony Awards include Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Direction of a Musical (Thomas Kail), Best Choreography, Best Leading Actor in a Musical (Leslie Odom Jr.), Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Renée Elise Goldsberry), Best Costume Design of a Musical (Paul Tazewell), Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Daveed Diggs), Best Lighting Design (Howell Binkley), Best Choreography (Andy Blankenbuehler), and Best Orchestrations (Alex Lacamoire).
The show was nominated in every category, including two categories that had Hamilton actors competing against each other.
While Hamilton's 16 nominations broke the record for nominations, its 11 victories falls one short of The Producers, the Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan musical that set a record with 12 Tony Awards in 2001.
Casting Notes - Lin Manuel Miranda says, "Hip-hop was uniquely suited to telling Hamilton's immigrant narrative," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And it's incredibly meaningful to then populate our live show with Black and brown artists ... because hip-hop is a Black art form and, also, it's our country too." This color-conscious casting approach has been praised by many, and it’s clear that Hamilton has shown a light on how to actively encourage diversity in the theatre industry.
However, some critics believe that, with only one named Black character in Hamilton, the play almost entirely silences the voices of people of color during America’s founding era. In an essay about the erasure of the Black past in Hamilton, Rutgers-Newark history professor Lyra D. Monteiro writes, “With a cast dominated by actors of color, the play is nonetheless yet another rendition of the ‘exclusive past,’ with its focus on the deeds of ‘’great white men’ and its silencing of the presence and contributions of people of color in the Revolutionary era.”
Casting the West End transfer – During the show’s transfer from Broadway to the West End, Kail and Miranda did not take the easy route. Instead of casting experienced actors in the meatiest roles, they spent almost a year seeking newcomers. The pair announced – to the surprise of many – that a recent drama school graduate would star as Hamilton, Jamel Westman. Yet, according to Kail, it was not an impressive CV they were looking for but bravery. And when Westman walked in “we could just sense it”. “He just filled the room and nothing frightened him,” he added. “And to play Hamilton, what you need above all is fearlessness.”