After starting to watch the Broadway musical Hamilton, we wondered if we should continue. It was recommended by our daughter’s teacher, so we thought this would be something educational. And it is.
But it’s also a lot to take in when you’re used to watching tame Disney sensations like Frozen or Moana (whom the writer of Hamilton, by the way, also contributed to). But if you’re willing to sign up for Disney Plus for $8.99 a month, you’ll get to watch all of them, Hamilton included (this is not an advertisement).
Alexander Hamilton was no slouch, I now understand. He was lesser-known Founding Father of America, but he had influence. This nerdy 18th century immigrant served as a military leader, ran the U.S. Treasury, co-authored the Federalist Papers in support of the American Constitution, and also (apparently) knew how to rap and sing. If anything, the music kept us watching.
The cast’s diversity is also a plus. As much as the writers tried to keep the content historically accurate, we know most of the founding fathers were not in fact Black. Many owned enslaved Blacks, of which the story doesn’t much touch upon.
Because this is a story about Hamilton. Which will, by the way, be drilled into your head, over and over again, given the number of times his name is repeated throughout the show. It’s even spelled out: “A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R...”
At
certain points I wondered why we had to know so much about this man. Do
we really need to know that his wife missed him when he was writing the
Federalist Papers? Did it really require a full musical number? (To her credit, she did have a better voice.)
What I failed to grasp initially is that this is an in-depth biography. Writing it entirely to music must have been excruciating, especially when trying to stay true to historical fact (or American myth, if you’re the cynical type. There were convenient omissions, like Hamilton’s insistence that the U.S. president be elected for life).
But for the most part, this musical rendition succeeds rather marvelously, and meticulously – to the point of even addressing the grammatical significance of a comma in one song, which, I admit, had to be explained to me by my daughter.
It’s like picking up the book on Hamilton, doctored up with a healthy dose of pizazz – where Thomas Jefferson acts like a Las Vegas showman and Hamilton’s wife beatboxes while their son raps about turning nine. And King George III acts like an emasculated buffoon because, well, Americans love to envision him this way. But he’s also extremely funny. His musical number is what kept us, as a family, watching and then listening. Our obsession involved playing his song ad nauseam until our daughter knew it word for word.
But we didn't stop there. We overplayed one Hamilton song after another until we’d listened to the musical at least 30 times in different formats and cycles. It just kept growing on us.
And at some point it finally dawned on me why Hamilton, of all people, was chosen as the main character. It's because this is a story about the much mythologized American Dream: How a man who was “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore” made it into the history books; how a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps made it onto Broadway, two centuries later.
For this reason we could never have a serious Canadian musical dedicated to one of our founding fathers. We don’t have much for Canadian Myths or Dreams. Only Canadian comedy.
The first lines of Macdonald (John A.) might instead go like this: “How does a crook, drunk, son of a...” It may not even make it as a school play, let alone on Broadway (maybe CBC), but I guarantee it would be hilarious.
Unlike Americans, we’re much better at laughing at ourselves.
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