70 pages • 2 hours read
Lin Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarterHamilton: The Revolution
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
In Hamilton: The Revolution, McCarter’s essays documenting the production journey of the musical, naturally center the creator and star of Hamilton, Miranda. The progression of the narrative, placed in between the scenes of the musical, demonstrates a clear parallel between Miranda’s artistic interpretation of the historical Hamilton and Miranda’s life and career trajectory, particularly because Miranda wrote the role with the intention of playing it himself. Both Hamilton and Miranda emerged as prodigies with their writing. Like Hamilton, who was untrained as a writer, Miranda’s aptitude for composing is self-taught. Miranda began working on his first musical, In the Heights, while he was a sophomore at Wesleyan University. He not only wrote the music and lyrics but also starred in the show, and he was only 27 when In the Heights premiered Off-Broadway and 28 when it transferred to Broadway. In the Heights was successful, both critically and commercially, receiving 13 Tony Award nominations and four wins, a Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, and a nomination for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The music included some hip-hop within a primarily traditional Broadway score with a stylistic infusion of salsa.
Miranda expresses gratitude openly for those who offered their collaboration on both In the Heights and Hamilton, and Hamilton similarly needed collaborators, but unlike Miranda, tended to alienate others. In contrast to Hamilton, Miranda has cultivated a particularly wholesome public image since his career brought him into the spotlight. The spacing of the chapters and libretto highlight the similarities of their lives until the point when Hamilton’s life starts to derail. The juxtaposition of their biographies and rise to prominence begs the question: How might Hamilton’s story have played out differently if he were less tempestuous and uncompromising? Would he have achieved what he did? Or, would he have perhaps survived to achieve even more?
Literary Context
Musical theater reaches audiences across demographics; it is often concerned with social issues and is integral in the formation of American national identity. Musical theater is one of the only uniquely homegrown American art forms (alongside jazz) and has traditionally incorporated popular musical idioms into a recognizable musical theater style by which those forms become dramatically legible. Musical theater began to solidify as a modern form in 1943 with the premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which stunned audiences with a score that was integrated into the dramatic action, both stylistically and narratively. The modern musical followed suit in what has been called the golden age of musical theater. The musicals of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s tended to use a formulaic structure: two acts; chronological storyline; a large, dancing chorus; and centered on a love story, among other conventions. Golden age musicals might seem old-fashioned to contemporary musical theater fans because musicals like Hamilton are the result of the turn toward postmodernism, marked by the musical Hair, which debuted Off-Broadway in 1967 at the Public. Hair was the first concept musical, meaning that its central unifying convention was an idea, or concept, rather than its loose storyline. It was also the first musical to use rock and roll as the musical language for its score, proving that rock had the potential to be dramatically legible.
Concept musicals have since become much more common, and postmodernism has opened the door to variations on even narrative-based musical theater. What has made Hamilton notable is its use of hip-hop as its primary musical medium. Certainly, there have been hip-hop musicals that never made it to the mainstream, and Holler If Ya Hear Me, a jukebox musical using the music of Tupac Shakur, premiered and failed quickly on Broadway in 2014. There have also been musicals that included rap numbers. As with rock music in the 1960s, many critics harbored doubt as to whether hip-hop was an effective enough dramatic form to support an entire musical. Much like Hair did for rock, Hamilton bridged the gap between hip-hop and musical theater, creating a score that was both dramatically legible for audiences following a narrative and had a cast recording that was accepted as hip-hop. Throughout the musical, Miranda makes several references to musical theater and hip-hop, so he is taking part in the hip-hop tradition of sampling the work of other artists. Additionally, he is bringing hip-hop to the mainstream, creating wider acceptance of a form that was created by BIPOC songwriters.
