I saw Hamilton in Chicago. I liked it. It was excellent. Unless you have been living in a cave you probably know of it, if you haven't already seen it, but short shrift is that it is a hip-hop/rap musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, his rise, his fall in what we would today call a sex scandal, and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. It is a wonderfully told story and is very nearly an opera. There are very few spoken passages, but perhaps because much of the "signing" is rap it doesn't strike one as operatic.
To get this out of the way, virtually all the music is in the style of rap and hip-hop, with a ballad or two mixed in, and 95% of the cast, include all the Founding Fathers, are portrayed by black actors. In truth, nobody much cares about that beyond noting the fact as an observation, but the limited vocabulary and cognitive facilities of our current culture means this must be a "controversy" and require positioning in our hierarchy of virtue. Whatever. I'll just say that Hamilton was not an exercise in political correctness and everyone in the cast was a spot-on match for their role from an acting perspective. (Although I would have wished Hamilton was a little taller.)
Only a few years old, it's hard to say if Hamilton will be one of those eternal classics, but it wouldn't surprise me. Although the setting was in political, the drama is essentially personal, not social, so it should hold up well over the years. The music was enjoyable. The songs didn't stick with me, but that's probably me. I am too attached to the age of melody-based music; the rhythm-based songs of the current style leave me cold. If you get a chance you should see Hamilton, no doubt about it. I would gamble it becomes an American classic. Although, as I think about it, that might depend on the quality of the inevitable movie. You'll spend hundreds to see it on stage so the movie will likely be the first impression for most people. A lousy film could stop it in its tracks. Glad I got to see it on stage first so I don't run the risk of forming a bad opinion.
Later in the month I saw a revival of The Music Man at the Asolo theatre in Sarasota. The Music Man is already an American classic (first performed in 1957). Of course, we all know the movie -- one of those rare cases where the movie enhanced the reputation of a play. It is old-timey, from the era of the middlebrow, with cultural references that will likely me nothing to anyone under fifty -- "I hope, I pray, for a Hester to win just one more 'A'"; "Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy sittin' on Dan Patch?" -- you don't know what those mean, do you? The choreography is both traditional, much of it tap, and clever. The acting is perfectly exaggerated, as it should be for the material. All in all, it was delightful. Also, high marks for the Asolo Theatre. Music Man is a must-do if you find yourself snowbirding on the Gulf.
You would think the two plays would have nothing in common, but they both feature passages of rhythmically spoken words -- what we now call rap and what used to be called a song's verse, as opposed to refrain. The "rapped" passages often blend seamlessly into, or are interspersed within, proper songs. You can see it when Harold Hill is counting out 6 pockets in a pool table, and when the Hamilton company is counting out the Ten Dueling Commandments. Everything old is new again.
