The result is the most unexpected of phenomena: a Broadway hit that is about political, economic and racial history while also offering an implicit but acidic running commentary on the racial and cultural politics of the US today. Those twin intuitions sparked a musical about historical, cultural and political inclusion, in which an almost entirely non-white cast plays the founding fathers (and a few of the mothers, although the cast is also overwhelmingly male). That sidelining resonated with Miranda, himself the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, as an emblematic instance of the nation’s treatment of immigrants, both as individuals and as a collective part of the nation’s history. But 1776, which tells the story of the battle over writing the Declaration of Independence, does not even mention Hamilton. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams have been the subject of countless books, films, miniseries and even their own popular musical, 1776. And yet, despite all these achievements and dramas, Hamilton has been marginalised by most popular accounts of American history. His dramatic life came to a melodramatic end when he was killed in a duel by the sitting vice president, Aaron Burr. He argued for a national bank, created the national reserve as well as the national debt, and laid the foundations for the US’s economic success. Miranda creates a myth for Hamilton by celebrating him as a symbol of immigrant inclusiveness, egalitarianism and meritocracy: historically it’s a stretch, but theatrically it’s genius.Įventually Hamilton became a hero of the American revolution, George Washington’s right-hand man, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, the co-author (with James Madison) of The Federalist Papers, and the primary proponent for federal government over state government. Neither of these facts makes it into Miranda’s musical, which is the story of a “young, scrappy and hungry” immigrant from the West Indies who became the quintessential American success story through a combination of brains, hard work and audacity. There are many reasons for this, not least that Hamilton’s positions were incompatible with many of our myths – he was avowedly elitist, for example, and supported the idea of a president for life – while his expansion of the federal government prompted the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, which he brutally suppressed. Hamilton represents something of an anomaly in American history, a founding father who never transferred from official histories into popular mythology. Miranda had already created a successful musical ( In the Heights) when he impulsively decided to read Ron Chernow’s prize-winning biography Alexander Hamilton on holiday (Miranda’s whim has made Chernow, who reportedly gets 1% of Hamilton’s profit, a very wealthy man). Phillipa Soo as Eliza and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton. In less than two years, it has exploded all box office records – it has sold $1bn worth of tickets – and won every theatrical prize (including the Pulitzer prize for drama), garnering the kind of hyperbolic praise that no production can possibly live up to. The result is that nearly every song in the show works as a complex historical concert, layering musical pasts with the musical present, just as the historical past mingles with the political present. Hamilton fuses American history with current politics, using a soundtrack of American popular music and one of the most inventive librettos ever written.

Unlike most of its predecessors, however, Hamilton was created by one man, Lin‑Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, lyrics, and book about the musical (only Stephen Sondheim can claim as much, and none of his shows were such blockbusters). It joins the likes of Show Boat, Oklahoma! and West Side Story as game changers, innovative productions that forever redefined what came after them. Hamilton is the kind of transformative theatrical experience that has only happened a few times in the history of American musicals.

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