[The duality of Hamilton is difficult and challenging and
frankly upsetting. That’s probably why Hamilton has since its
Broadway debut spawned countless takes and critiques attempting to
navigate its competing readings, trying to define it as either ]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY HAMILTON IS AS FRUSTRATING AS IT IS BRILLIANT — AND IMPOSSIBLE
TO PIN DOWN  
[[link removed]]


 

Aja Romano
July 3, 2020
Vox
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ The duality of Hamilton is difficult and challenging and frankly
upsetting. That’s probably why Hamilton has since its Broadway
debut spawned countless takes and critiques attempting to navigate its
competing readings, trying to define it as either _

Hamilton cast performs in New York in 2015., Disney

 

The smash-hit Broadway musical _Hamilton_
[[link removed]] arrives in
movie form on Disney+ this weekend
[[link removed]],
making it accessible to more people than ever before. And with this
glossy composite recording of the show comes a long-standing public
debate: Is _Hamilton _a brilliant, visionary reframing of the
narrative of America; a revisionist apologetic paying undue worship to
the founding fathers; or an unholy mix of both?

The timing of the film adaptation’s arrival helps to renew this
argument. Disney+ is releasing _Hamilton_ just in time for the
Fourth of July, appropriate for the musical’s trappings of lavish
patriotism. It also drops in concert with the most intense US
political protests in recent memory — protests whose spirit the
musical, by centering actors of color in a racebent
[[link removed]] narrative about
revolution, also arguably upholds. It’s an uncomfortable duality, a
tension that the beloved hip-hop musical has courted since day one
[[link removed]].

How can one story simultaneously broadcast a contemptible message of
myopic reverence for America’s founding fathers to some, while
others take from it an equally powerful repudiation of everything
those founding fathers represent? Unraveling this question requires
understanding _Hamilton_ as the messy, mutable product of two
masters: its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the constantly roiling
cultural context in which it’s been viewed, especially in 2020.

On one level, _Hamilton_ is a wryly optimistic American love letter

_Hamilton_ is nominally about the founding of America, written by a
man who in many ways personifies the most idealized version of the
American Dream. Miranda, a native New Yorker and son of Puerto Rican
transplants, grew up in Washington Heights, tested into an elite prep
school, wrote and staged his semi-autobiographical musical _In the
Heights_ while he was still in college, and saw that show_ _become
the toast of Broadway in 2007, when he was just 27.

A year later, Miranda read historian Ron Chernow’s acclaimed 2004
biography about Alexander Hamilton, the oft-overlooked founding father
who, despite causing several scandals and dying prematurely in a
famous duel, did as much as any of his co-founders to establish
America’s economic and legal foundation. Miranda felt immediately
that Hamilton was a kindred spirit — an immigrant who fell hard for
New York City, who sparred with the other ideologues of his day, not
unlike many of the great rappers of the 1990s.

Buoyed by these parallels, Miranda decided to write a hip-hop musical
[[link removed]] about
Hamilton, featuring himself in the title role and using the template
of historical America to explore modern America. He tied each of the
founding fathers to iconic rap artists — the tactically taciturn
Aaron Burr, for example
[[link removed]],
is “Javert [from the musical _Les Misérables_] meets Mos Def,”
while Hamilton is “Eminem meets Sweeney Todd.” In the show, the
fierce cabinet battles under President Washington become rap battles;
the 10 historical rules for fighting in duels become an extended
homage to Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments
[[link removed]].”

Crucial to this entire conceit was casting mainly actors of color to
play white historical figures. It’s a move that, along with the
enlivening sound of hip-hop, instantly transformed _Hamilton_ from a
dry history lesson into an opulent, richly layered meta-text
[[link removed]] about
the impossibility of fully accurate historical storytelling, about the
American dream, and implicitly about the people of color who are so
often left out of the narrative of that dream.

In January 2015, when _Hamilton_ opened off-Broadway, it felt
progressive and full of hope. When it debuted on Broadway in August of
that year, it was already the hottest ticket in town
[[link removed]].
It felt like exactly the right kind of diverse, surprising, self-aware
historical deconstruction for a moment in which Hillary Clinton seemed
primed to continue President Obama’s era of democratic idealism and
inclusivity. (Plus, its songs were catchy as hell
[[link removed]].)

Even accounting for nostalgia, it’s difficult to overstate how huge
the hype around _Hamilton_ was. In 2009, the same year he began
writing it, Miranda went viral when he previewed the show’s opening
number [[link removed]] at Obama’s
White House Poetry Jam.

The performance drew plenty of skeptics. Then-_Daily Show_ host Jon
Stewart, in a segment that has aged like asbestos
[[link removed]],
roundly mocked Miranda and the other poets of color featured in the
event, snarking, “You’ve been dissed, disrespected,
disenfranchised, but ’dis? Is kind of ridiculous.” But mostly,
Miranda’s _Hamilton_ musical drew years and years of anticipation.
The show was an instant sellout at the Public, and those who scored
tickets to the off-Broadway performance claimed (and still claim
[[link removed]])
ultimate insider status.

Barely a month after its off-Broadway opening, a Tumblr countdown
[[link removed]] until it
won a Pulitzer began. (It took
[[link removed]] 393 days
[[link removed]].) The
show broke pre-sales records
[[link removed]].
Chernow’s Hamilton biography became a bestseller
[[link removed]].
Many members of its large ensemble cast became household names among
Broadway fans, in particular Leslie Odom Jr, Renée Elise Goldsberry,
and master rapper Daveed Diggs
[[link removed]],
who all won Tonys for their performances.

When NPR previewed the cast recording
[[link removed]] in
September 2015 — the first time most people had ever heard the show
— it garnered
[[link removed]] international
[[link removed]] media
[[link removed]] attention
[[link removed]],
and mainstream culture outside of New York began to take notice of
the show
[[link removed]].
Tickets sold out for months and remained nearly impossible to get
[[link removed]],
especially at non-scalped prices — which didn’t stop floods of
celebrities
[[link removed]],
including both President Obama and his political enemy, former Vice
President Dick Cheney, from seeing it and singing its virtuous
praises
[[link removed]].

“I was an entertainment reporter for years, and I have never, ever,
ever seen [a] level of hype like this show received,” Martha
Southgate, a novelist and playwright who taught a class
on _Hamilton_ for the New York Times, told me.

After 11 Tony wins
[[link removed]],
a Pulitzer
[[link removed]],
a MacArthur genius grant
[[link removed]],
and endless late-night talk show appearances, however, even the most
electrifying art may overstay its welcome. (“You don’t need to
watch _Hamilton_,” Slate tells us now,
[[link removed]] after
devoting at least 114 articles [[link removed]] to
the show since 2015.) As it has reached peak cultural saturation, much
of _Hamilton_’s textual liberal centrism
[[link removed]] —
a political stance that made it controversial from the beginning
[[link removed]] and has
only come to seem more outdated and disingenuous
[[link removed]] during the Trump
administration — has induced lots of eye-rolling and even more
outright contempt:

This level of scorn for the show now seems to have been adopted by an
increasing number of audiences and critics, at the precise moment when
it’s poised to reenter the cultural conversation on a much larger
scale. “As a cultural product, the hype plays into expectations
about it,” Southgate told me, “and that’s part of the critique,
too.”

Is the critique of the show — that it’s a revisionist, worshipful
affirmation of the American patriarchy as well as an erasure of
historical people of color — just as overinflated as the hype and
praise? No, not exactly; _Hamilton_ has never stood up well to
criticisms of its historical accuracy. But that could be by design,
because _Hamilton _itself is much less concerned with history than
its historical critics want it to be.

_Hamilton_ is as multi-faceted as it is difficult to pin down

One of the incontrovertible truths about _Hamilton_ is that it is
inextricably tied not just to its eponymous figure but to its creator.
“You do have to consider where a work of art comes from,”
Southgate told me. “[Miranda]’s dad worked in government. He’s
certainly a Democrat, he raised money for Hillary — he’s kinda
like Obama. [_Hamilton_] is the work of someone who is the
somewhat-moderate, left-leaning son of an immigrant. Who grew up in
Washington Heights and has struggled with being Puerto Rican.“

Southgate notes that Miranda “grew up in two worlds,” attending
prestigious schools while also growing up in a poorer Latinx
community. “You have to learn to code-switch and do all this
juggling that makes you kind of guarded and makes you learn how to get
along with everybody,” she said. “That’s the artist you’re
dealing with, whether you like it or not.”

That _Hamilton’_s creator is an unabashed believer in the American
dream with perhaps just slightly left-of-center politics affects how
we discuss _Hamilton _in 2020. It helps to remember we’re dealing
with a story about a man who founded America’s banking system first
conceived at the very beginning of the 2008 economic recession, before
the growth of Occupy Wall Street and before a deeper cultural critique
of capitalism became a sustained part of mainstream debate. The bottom
line, for some interpreters, is that _Hamilton_ may not have ever
been as progressive as many of its fans always claimed it to be.

The way the show was created also invites that notion. Apart from
Miranda, its creative team consists of white men; the show has never,
for example, had a Black musical director. Then there are moments in
its history like a memorably uncomfortable scene
[[link removed]] from _Hamilton_’s
popular pre-show street performance series, Ham4Ham
[[link removed]].
In it, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler performs some of the show’s
dance moves, which originated from Fred Astaire’s blackface
imitation of Bojangles — all without any apparent self-reflection
beyond noting the layers were “a very deep-seated thing.” The
delighted white audience looks on, but it’s hard not to watch this
now and cringe. It encourages us to wonder whether Miranda and his
creative team even considered how Black history factors into telling
Hamilton’s story.

“_Hamilton_ is both a piece of art that troubles me deeply, and a
piece of art that sustains me, that gives me life,” Rutgers
professor Lyra D. Monteiro wrote on Medium in 2017
[[link removed]].
Monteiro had previously published one of the first widely distributed
pieces of academic criticism of _Hamilton_, which argued that
“while the play is praised for its racially adventurous casting, it
in fact uses the talents, bodies, and voices of black artists to mask
an erasure of people of color from the actual story of the American
Revolution.”

There’s little wiggle room in _Hamilton_’s text here to defend
itself. The show has zero named characters of color, apart from a
pointed throwaway line referring to Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved rape
victim Sally Hemings [[link removed]]. It
emphatically aligns its heroes with modern-day movements for Black
equality without pointing out their views on slavery. “Washington
had slaves,” theater educator Blaire Deziel told me bluntly. “His
iconic teeth are slaves’ teeth. In its celebration of the other
people who created American history, [_Hamilton_] whitewashes American
history as well.” (Hamilton generally opposed slavery but abolition
of it was not central to his politics
[[link removed]].)

Okieriete Onaodowan, who played James Madison and Hercules Mulligan
in _Hamilton_’s original cast, told me it didn’t surprise him
that the play managed to provoke praise and criticism for the exact
same reasons. “_Hamilton_ is like any other art piece,” he said.
“Everyone walks away with [what] they want. I’ve seen some people
who did not like the show [because] we’re celebrating these people
who owned slaves and thought Black people were three-fifths of a
person
[[link removed]],
which is also 100 percent accurate. But then there were also other
people who came ... who probably were like, ‘Yes, finally Black
people knowing their place and telling the story of the founding
fathers, rightfully so.’

“It makes sense why Dick Cheney would like it,” he said.
“We’re not telling the story of Marcus Garvey. We’re not telling
the story of Nat Turner, we’re not telling the story of Harriet
Tubman. We’re telling the story of founding fathers, people who look
like [Cheney], that uphold the ideals that he loves. So it makes sense
that he likes it.”

Can _Hamilton_, then, be read as a text that supports both Black
lives and white supremacy? Some say yes. Onaodowan, for his part,
notes that “Trump got elected the year that _Hamilton_ came out
[during the 2015–’16 Broadway season]. There are a lot of people
who like both things.”

The duality of _Hamilton_ is difficult and challenging and frankly
upsetting. That’s probably why _Hamilton_ has since its Broadway
debut spawned countless takes and critiques attempting to navigate its
competing readings, trying to define it as either regressive or
progressive, historically valid or invalid. Often contradictory
[[link removed]] takes
[[link removed]] may come
from
[[link removed]] different
critics at the same outlet
[[link removed]],
including from
[[link removed]] Vox
[[link removed]].

In 2019, longtime _Hamilton_ critic and playwright
[[link removed]] Ishmael
Reed savaged _Hamilton_ and Miranda in an original play, _The
Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. _The work,_ _as the New Yorker
describes it
[[link removed]],
stars “a fictionalized and comically exasperated Miranda [who] is
harangued by a procession of ghosts: slaves owned by Hamilton’s
in-laws, Native Americans absent from the story that the musical
tells, an indentured white servant, Harriet Tubman ... Miranda begins
to see the light when the ghost of Alexander Hamilton appears and
proves to be a craven and openly racist man.”

This sort of critique, however, requires holding Miranda’s work to a
higher standard of historical accuracy than that which we expect from
every other fictionalized historical musical. (For example, as
Southgate pointed out to me, the recent revival of _Oklahoma!_
[[link removed]] was
no less beloved for failing to center Native Americans.) Such
criticism also assumes that Miranda’s work isn’t self-aware about
the ways in which its absence of people of color from the narrative
provokes this entire debate to begin with. But there’s plenty of
textual evidence that it is.

Take one early song, “My Shot
[[link removed]].” In it, our hero
Hamilton, having arrived in New York as an immigrant from the
Caribbean, describes both himself and his new country as “young,
scrappy, and hungry.” He clearly believes in the possibilities of
this version of America. So does Lin-Manuel Miranda, who not only
wrote the whole show but originated and left his indelible mark on the
role of Hamilton.

But later on in the very same song, Hamilton asks, “If we win our
independence, / is that a guarantee of freedom/ for our descendants? /
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless / cycle of vengeance and
death / with no defendants?”

In other words,_ Hamilton_ is overtly uplifting, but it also seems
to be shrewd about the dark repercussions of patriotism and its own
presentational contradictions. It constantly invites the audience to
think about the ways in which our modern political problems have
stemmed from the embedded failures of the historical ones onstage.
“I will pop chicka-pop these cops till I’m free,” sings John
Laurens, a character explicitly tied to the abolitionist movement, in
“My Shot.” The use of “cops” to mean British soldiers is not
just a convenient rhyme; when a Black man plays Laurens, the line
gains parallels to modern resistance against police brutality.
Laurens’s fight for freedom becomes a fight to be free not from
British tyranny but from slavery and generations of systemic racism.

Whether _Hamilton_’s contradictory impulses are intentional or not
is another source of debate. From the first moment I heard the cast
recording of _Hamilton_, I’ve believed that it’s a text that
deconstructs itself. To me, all of the sharpest (and accurate)
historical criticisms that can be made of the show were always
intended to be a part of the point of the show.

Many _Hamilton_ fans argue
[[link removed]] that
the show’s lack of characters of color and its refusal to address
its heroes’ relationship to slavery have always been a part
of _Hamilton_’s implicit, default, scathing commentary on
historicity and the erasure of marginalized people from the story of
America. As an audience member (I’ve seen the show twice), I read
the glaring absence of these links as a long, intentionally looming
shadow over each performance; it’s a silent-but-screaming commentary
on the way people of color, especially Black and Indigenous Americans,
have been denied agency over, or even a presence within, their own
stories in so much of the history we’re taught in flawed textbooks.

Until this week, when reconsidering the show ahead of its streaming
premiere, I thought this interpretation of _Hamilton_ was the
baseline assumption under which most of its viewing audience operates.
That _Hamilton_ operates at that self-aware level seemed
self-evident to me because Miranda himself is immersed in both hip-hop
culture and internet culture
[[link removed]],
where such layered meta-commentary and implicit audience dialogue are
foundational tools of the creative trade. And then there’s the
casting: For Miranda to racebend
[[link removed]] the whole cast with any
self-awareness, surely he’d also have intended his show’s erasure
of historical characters of color to be part of the discussion of his
multiracial performers. Right?

Or is it a privileged view to give _Hamilton_ that much credit —
to assume that the textual erasure of BIPOC is anything but
pernicious, full stop?

As it turns out, nearly everyone I spoke with for this article found
my meta-reading surprising. Even Onaodowan was surprised by the idea
that _Hamilton_ was a commentary on itself. He told me that when the
cast was developing _Hamilton_ in 2015, they were focused on
building the body of the show, not unpacking its many layers of
implied meta-references.

“All _Hamilton_ does is present itself,” he told me. “What
people do with what we present — that is not on _Hamilton_. And as
an artist, you have to just make your art — how people use it and
distort it, you have no control over it once you put it out there.”

The meaning of _Hamilton_ is still evolving

Perhaps the best way to describe _Hamilton_, then, is “slippery.”
Like the story it’s trying to tell, just when you think you’ve got
it pegged as a text, it wriggles free from your grasp to take a
different shape or invite a different frame of reference.

As I talked to fans and critics about the show, a recurring theme was
how difficult it is to evaluate because it is just five years old; its
place and artistic legacy is still evolving. But another, undeniable
reason it’s hard to pin _Hamilton_ into place is that it has been
responsive to dozens of different historical moments since it first
opened off-Broadway.

The beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement
[[link removed]] in Ferguson,
Missouri,
[[link removed]] in
August 2014 preceded _Hamilton_ by just five months. When the show
opened off-Broadway in January 2015, New York City was just settling
down from months of demonstrations over the lack of an indictment
against police officers in the death of Eric Garner
[[link removed]]. Internationally, the Syrian
refugee crisis [[link removed]] was
mainstreaming an immigration debate that Donald Trump was already
fully embracing as he campaigned for president — a
debate _Hamilton_ slyly responds to and shuts down through a single
line (“Immigrants — we get the job done
[[link removed]]”)
that frequently causes spontaneous audience ovations.

Well after its opening, _Hamilton_ continues to intersect with an
unraveling present-day history. In November 2016, shortly after the
election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show amid a
tense, politically charged atmosphere that culminated in actor Brandon
Victor Dixon addressing Pence onstage with a plea for tolerance from
the show’s cast and crew
[[link removed]].
The day of the show’s sweep at the 2016 Tonys was also the day
of the Pulse Nightclub shooting
[[link removed]] in
Orlando, then the largest mass shooting in US history and widely
believed at that time to be a hate crime
[[link removed]].
In response to the shooting, the cast removed the prop guns from its
Tonys performance of “Yorktown.”

_Hamilton_ also found itself in President Trump’s crosshairs
[[link removed]] following
Pence’s visit, and that feud has continued, bolstered by
Miranda’s blistering personal response
[[link removed]] to
Trump’s reluctance to send aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane
Maria in 2017. Southgate told me she felt that the years since the
2016 election have been something of a personal evolution for Miranda
himself, “who I think is not by nature an intensely political
person” — the centrist peacenik, then, increasingly becoming more
revolutionary, like the characters he put onstage.

Miranda’s and his show’s political awakening may have been
unexpectedly complicated by this year’s nationwide protests against
police brutality following the murder of George Floyd. In late May,
Miranda issued an official statement from the show in support of Black
Lives Matter:

Multiple people I spoke with for this story mentioned _Hamilton_’s
renewed relevance in light of the protests. “At at least two
demonstrations now, I’ve heard people [reference the line], ‘This
is not a moment, it’s the movement,’” Southgate told me. It
makes sense: The most progressive thing about _Hamilton _is its
implied argument that anti-racist protest is patriotic revolution.
As one of my favorite commentaries on the show
[[link removed]] puts
it:

Why do we consider the founding fathers revolutionaries and not the
Black Panthers or the Brown Berets or any number of other anti-racist
revolutionary organizations? Whose rebellion is valued? Who is allowed
to be heroic through defiance? By making the founding fathers people
of colour, Hamilton puts people of colour into the American narrative,
while simultaneously applying that narrative to the present.

“It’s just curious to see how the people who are utilizing
[_Hamilton_ right now] happen to be all the protesters,” Onaodowan
echoed. “All the lines that seem applicable to today seem applicable
to the people who are in the streets protesting the murder of George
Floyd.”

“For me, _Hamilton_ is on the side of the protesters,” Minister
Darrick Jackson told me. “It is a story about revolution, and ...
the current protests are more than just decrying injustice, [they are]
calling for a revolution, to change the institution that allows the
brutality in the first place.” Jackson, a Unitarian Universalist
from Chicago who’s seen the show three times, told me he
believes _Hamilton _is “a beacon in the midst of the Trump
administration.”

“It reminds us of a commitment to centering marginalized
communities. It reminds us to think about what legacy we want to leave
for the future. It reminds us that imperfection is not irredeemable
and that forgiveness is possible,” he said. “For me, the ending
of _Hamilton _is a charge to think about what story we want told
about this lifetime, and who we allow to tell that story. If we want a
different narrative, we have to work to make it so.”

Put that way, _Hamilton_ seems like it’s been a part of the racial
protest narrative all along. But now that the show is poised to reach
a much wider audience through its arrival on streaming
[[link removed]] —
anecdotally at Vox, many of our staffers’ parents appear to be
signing up for Disney+ just to watch _Hamilton_ — the many heated
conversations around the musical may be headed in entirely new
directions.

And that, Southgate emphasized, is exactly the sort of engagement that
keeps _Hamilton_ relevant.

“All this thinking and excitement, and all the thinking, even the
[criticism], indicates how significant it is, and how worth thinking
about it is,” she told me. “Just like it’s worth thinking about
this country.”

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