I first heard Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Revolutionary War hip-hop musical, in 2015. It was a different world, then. Miranda started writing the show early in the Obama presidency. Hope and change were the watchwords of the day. The American Dream, we told ourselves, was alive and well. It was the perfect time for a play that celebrated the founding of the United States, a brief moment of optimism after the bleakness of the War in Iraq. (Afghanistan? What Afghanistan? We don’t talk about that.) Hamilton exploded onto stages and into the Discourse.
I want to get one thing out of the way up front: This is not a piece about tearing Hamilton to shreds. It’s a brilliant play, phenomenally entertaining, and while I disagree with its politics, I’m not going to pretend like Lin-Manuel Miranda is not an immensely talented writer and lyricist just because he’s also kind of a dweeb. This was a once-in-a-generation concurrence of talent happening in a single, excellent show. Fuck, man, there are just some great tunes in this thing, and that matters a lot in a musical.
But I confess: Watching Hamilton in 2020 is a radically different experience for me than hearing it in 2015, or even seeing it in Chicago early in the Trump administration. And I want to talk about why.
Immigrants: We get the job done
There was a moment when this felt like a rallying cry. When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for President by calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, there was a real resonance to the play’s positive, pro-immigrant message. Casting people of color as these figures felt revolutionary, like a reclaiming of a past that all-too-often erased their contributions.
2015 was a different world than 2020. As Hamilton comes out on Disney+, we are in a national debate about not just the statues of Confederate generals but about the slaveholding founders of this nation and the awful sin they saddled us with for generations. Daveed Diggs’ Thomas Jefferson might get called out in Hamilton for his defense of the institution of slavery — but George Washington doesn’t. And Miranda’s woke bae Alexander Hamilton, explicitly portrayed in the show as a ‘revolutionary manumission abolitionist’ may not have owned slaves… but the Schuyler sisters did, and Alex was more than happy to buy and sell human beings for his in-laws.
What felt like a reclamation of the American identity in 2015 feels more than anything like a whitewashing of American sin in 2020. It’s hard to shed a tear at George Washington’s eloquent farewell and enjoy memes about the fall of Mount Rushmore, you know?
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love
And yet, there are also aspects of the show that feel newly relevant. King George’s first song, “You’ll Be Back,” was one of the funniest songs in the show in my earliest listens. Jonathan Groff’s performance is just as saucy and fun as ever – hell, more so; there’s a delightful physicality to his performance that obviously can’t come through on a cast recording – but there’s a menace to the songs that wasn’t there for me in 2015. Initially, they felt toothless but entertaining. Now… well, some things have changed.
The poet Aimé Césaire argued that fascism is colonial violence brought home. Watching now, it is impossible not to see a line from King George’s oppression of the colonies to the same kind of violence we visited on Black Americans for centuries. It’s easy to draw that line from lyrics like
You’ll be back, time will tell,
You’ll remember that I served you well.
or
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!
to the statements released by police during the wave of protests about how much we’ll miss them when they aren’t around, how unappreciative we are for their ‘loving’ control of black, brown, disabled, and impoverished Americans. Even many liberals are having to come to terms with the fact that fascism did not arrive with Trump; it was already thriving in Black communities across the United States. And we voted it in, and supported it with our tax dollars. Trump took the mask off, but he didn’t build these structures.
Oceans rise, empires fall
Never before has American empire felt so fragile. Finally, there is a robust American left, one that hopes to reject imperial power both within and beyond the nation’s borders. The American right, on the other hand, clings more tightly to an empire state of mind than ever before. In a very real way, the election of Trump is an impassioned howl for increased colonial brutality, both at home and abroad. Even at the tail end of the Obama administration, I think a lot of Americans were coming to recognize that we as a nation, regardless of party, have not been kind with our global power.
Hamilton is a story that celebrates something that time has forced me to realize never actually existed. It remains a phenomenal play. But for a story about the revolution, it isn’t as revolutionary as it thought it was. As I thought it was. So, sure, my enjoyment is more tempered. The cracks were always present, but they’re harder to ignore today.
This happens sometimes. Rent went from a groundbreaking mainstream picture of queer representation to… well, not that. But its art endures. And Hamilton‘s art is powerful. So the show, flaws and all, remains a treat, if perhaps a bittersweet one.
The man is non-stop
Why is that? Why is Hamilton still so good, despite it all?
Hamilton is a political show. All art is political, of course, but Hamilton is pretty explicit about it. But it’s also a human drama — and a fantastic one.
This is a show with a large cast of memorable characters, all of whom have distinct voices and song styles. Not just that; they all have rich inner lives that those songs capture. Daveed Diggs plays both Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, but you wouldn’t know that listening to “Guns and Ships” and “What’d I Miss” back to back. The first is a portrait of a tense, arrogant showboat juggling a thousand thoughts a minute; the latter, a laid-back genius in the fullness of his power and prestige.
But it’s Alex and Aaron who stand out. I never appreciated the show’s fixation of Hamilton’s trauma from the hurricane and illness that nearly destroyed him as a child. But Miranda grounds Hamilton’s obsessive energies, not in brilliance, but in fear. Even as a young man, he fantasizes about death, so much so that he turns down prestigious positions because he can’t imagine a life where he isn’t in constant danger. In a way, his later self-sabotage and eventual personal calm stem from a shockingly deft, sensitive resolution to that lifelong fear.
And Burr? “Wait For It” was always one of the show’s best songs. Seeing it live, and up close, it’s impossible not to love Leslie Odom, Jr.’s performance. The show understands that fear drives these men — fear of failure, of not making a difference, of letting down a family they never really got to know. It would be easy to perform Hamilton as a ghost story changing only the staging, because these two men are profoundly haunted by specters from their past. The ghosts drive them in opposite directions until they come around the other side and collide tragically, in some of the show’s most beautiful moments.
You’re running out of time
Jesus, fine, I’ll wrap up.
Five years on, and Hamilton still slaps. Its politics are more staid and regressive than the current moment demands — but it isn’t from the current moment. As long as it doesn’t become a West Wing-esque brainworm in the hearts of compromise-hungry liberals and derail a generation of left wing activism in doing so, who cares?
Oh.
Oh no.
That’s totally what’s going to happen, isn’t it?
Fuck.
