Go and see Hamilton with eyes wide open

Prior to the show storming Broadway upon its release in August 2015, the name Alexander Hamilton only appeared as a footnote in your American history undergrad class. If the Founding Fathers were One Direction, Alexander Hamilton was, at best, Niall Horan (Washington, Harry Styles).

Such has been the success of the musical he gave his name to, if the Fathers were to reform and do a reunion tour next summer, Hamilton would be on the front of every poster, across every billboard, on every couch on every late night talk show, wowing the crowd with talk of his essays, economic acumen, and, well, his prowess with the ladies.

So, what can you expect? Les Misérables on Adderall, that’s what. You will emerge bleary-eyed, heart pumping, ready to write, rant, take up arms, start a revolution on the street or in your mind, or on the bus across town. It is a truly powerful artistic experience.

Sometimes it’s ok to check your cynicism in the cloakroom and submit for a couple of hours. Sometimes it’s ok to believe the hype. Sure, this is essentially the story of one man’s role in the bloody birth of an always-broken nation, but the story is secondary to the music and the performance and the energy of the actors.

Trust me, this could be a show about the Lehman brothers’ selling sub-prime mortgages, and, such is the power of the experience, you’d come out rooting for them.

Hamilton’s novelty is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. In casting an almost exclusively Black, Latino and Asian cast, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda took the founding fathers — Washington, Adams, Jefferson — the unimpeachable sacred cows of white American history, and made them a rabble of daydreamers and warrior beat poets, just with black and brown faces.

George Washington raps, Aaron Burr drops beats, and the Schuyler sisters move like Destiny’s Child. This is white American history performed by actors of color, sung by Black and Latino and Asian voices, danced by black and brown bodies. As twists in the telling of contemporary American history go, it’s pretty epic.

Problematic

It’s also problematic. Though most actors in Hamilton are Black, all characters portrayed in the musical are white. Hamilton appropriates Black culture to rap its protagonists’ praises, when in reality Alexander Hamilton played a significant role in erasing Black stories through his own history of incarceration of the African American people.

Despite the show presenting Hamilton as a staunch abolitionist, his personal records show he did purchase, own, and trade slaves. He also married Eliza Schuyler, the daughter of slave owner Philip Schuyler.

Like most biopics on stage and screen, Hamilton cherry-picks its narrative, and consequently, fails to address the realities of slavery during America’s revolutionary period, paying lip-service with clever one-liners, amplifying other character flaws as much more problematic, such as Hamilton’s infidelity.

Such revisionist history is hardly uncommon, especially in pop culture. The Founding Fathers are revered as intellectual revolutionaries, while the evils they habitually practiced are rarely discussed, despite their legacy being their ubiquity in American society today.

If anything — and I realize how much of a buzzkill this might be for those paying attention — this very brilliant musical only highlights how America continues to treat the subject of slavery, and the way it is taught to consecutive generations of Americans.

To compound the problem, it does so using Black performers playing glorified versions of white slave owners, while ignoring their crimes. The irony is not just confined to the retelling of the past, but how it reflects the global present.

Palestine

As Americans continue to flock thousands in their tense to watch Hamiltonthey do so largely ignorant of the contradiction that the very freedom the show so triumphantly celebrates was born out of a violent resistance pretty similar to the one their government so brutally suppresses in places like Palestine.

“Liberation is not achieved at the negotiating table” sounds like a lyric from a Hamilton number — and could be — but instead came from the mouth of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian revolutionary.

When I went to see Hamilton on a wet May evening in London earlier this summer, I did so already knowing most of the lyrics. I have a friend who is so fluent in the language of the show you can barely mention a sequence of routine words that, unbeknownst to you, appear in the lyrics without her going full Phillipa Soo (the original Eliza) and spontaneously erupting into song.

It could be something as simple as answering “I do,” to a question, and suddenly, as if overcoming by musical Tourette’s, she will bellow “I do I do I dooooooooo.”

This may not make sense to you now, but it will once you go see it. Now, this person is an adult, with a job and responsibilities, and, moreover, a better sense of race history in the United States than most, both as an activist, and a woman of color from a mixed-race family.

She is all too aware of the problems with Hamilton but is also inspired by his poetry. It’s a delicate dance. A poetic paradox that demands the prosecution of two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, while still retaining the ability to function.

Hamilton does not do this deliberately; it absolutely sees itself as one thing, while, by ignoring slavery — comes across as quite another. Even more reason to go watch it. Just do so with your eyes wide open.