Hamilton: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes of Genius

Mara here:

My path to discovering and appreciating the musical Hamilton was a start and stop windy road. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it was the 2016 Tony Award Winner for Best Musical. But long before the award ceremony that year, Hamilton had been making headlines for years.

Inspired by the book "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, Hamilton the musical was the brainchild of Lin-Manuel Miranda. He was reading the book on vacation (yes, he's the type of guy who takes a giant book about the life story of Alexander Hamilton on vacation) and had the inspiration that the life of one of the least known founding fathers would make a great musical. Even more unlikely, it was going to be a rap musical.

Miranda had already had success with his first Broadway show In the Heights, which he wrote and starred in. The story of In The Heights was closer to his own about life as a Puerto Rican living in the Washington Heights area of New York. In the Heights won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2008.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was only 28 at the time.

Miranda's original idea for Hamilton was for it to be rap concept album known as the Hamilton Mixtape. Yes, you heard me correctly. He wanted to create a rap album based on the life of Alexander Hamilton.

If you're scoffing, you're not the only one. But Miranda was confident that the life he read about in Ron Chernow's book, which described the turbulent life of an immigrant fighter who came to United States, young, hungry, ambitious and full of words, could only be properly portrayed with rap—a music style where words are the key. Words are poetry and words are weapons.

Alexander Hamilton, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, was a man of words. The more you learn about Hamilton and the more you learn about Miranda, you can understand why Miranda saw the potential in Hamilton's story. He related to Hamilton's immigrant journey to America (Miranda's father immigrated from Puerto Rico) and to the way Hamilton expressed himself in his prolific writings.

So confident was Miranda in his idea that Hamilton's story could be told as a rap, that in 2009, when he was invited to The White House Poetry Evening to perform, and he debuted his concept. In front of President Obama and a room full of the country's foremost politicians and artists, he started rapping:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished,
In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

And for three minutes he rapped, with just a piano behind him, the introduction to the life of Alexander Hamilton. (You can see a video of the performance here.)

Jaws dropped.

Fast forward 7 years and Hamilton wins 11 Tony Awards including Best Musical.

But the years between 2009, when Miranda first introduced the world to the idea of the Hamilton Mixtape, and 2016 when Hamilton the musical was a worldwide phenomenon were filled with twists and turns.

Once you know the story of Alexander Hamilton, you wonder how it hadn't become familiar earlier. He was an orphaned immigrant who married into one of societies best families. He was the right-hand man to George Washington, and became the nation's first Treasury Secretary. His story includes political scandals, an extra-marital scandal, the death of his eldest son to a duel, and ultimately his own death by gunshot in a duel with Aaron Burr. In the prologue of the musical, in a song titled "Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story" it is eerily stated: "Every other founding father's story get told. Every other founding father gets to grow old."

I grew up almost living at my local musical theater, performing and working behind the scenes on the production side. But as I got older, I haven't embraced that many of the newer shows. There have been a few over the years, like Rent and Wicked, that have won me over. But otherwise for the most part, they've passed by me unnoticed.

However, with Hamilton, I was unable to ignore it. I had of course been hearing the buzz about this strange rap musical that was getting everyone's attention. But it wasn't until an acquaintance of mine was hired to be in it, that I really took notice. I started seeing her regular posts on social media about the show. She joined the cast as it prepared to open at the Rogers theater on Broadway. (For those of you unfamiliar with how a show gets to Broadway, it's a long process that involves shows being workshopped and previewed in theaters before it moves to Broadway.)

So I saw her pictures and her posts as she prepared. And then the show opened and suddenly I was hearing about the show on the news, and other friends on Facebook were posting about it. I was intrigued by the idea. The show went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical, and the fervor for the show kept growing. But I still didn't bother to listen to it. There was almost too much hype. I was kind of overwhelmed with the idea of how much everyone seemed to love this show.

And then one day I turned on the news and the cast of Hamilton was on. The cast was at the White House and I saw my friend sitting with her castmates performing for the President and the First Lady. I texted her and said, "Oh my gosh I'm watching you on MSNBC right now!"

And although I had heard about the revolutionary concept of the show: a) that its a rap musical about 1700's American and b) that all the lead characters are portrayed by minority actors, the full impact of what that meant hadn't hit me until I saw them lined up on the TV screen.

I watched them perform. It was a concert-style performance, so they weren't in costume, but one song in particular hit me, like an arrow to the heart. It was the song titled "One Last Time" sung by Chris Jackson, an African American actor playing founding father George Washington. The song depicts Washington's decision to step down as President. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, from a new nation born from a history of monarchs, that someone would willingly give up their hold on leadership.

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton sings:
Why do you have to say goodbye?

Jackson, as Washington sings:
If I say goodbye,
the nation learns to move on
It outlives me when I’m gone

I was hooked.

I was watching an African American leading man singing about being America's first President, and singing it to Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States. And it was in Obama's final year of his presidency. We were all preparing ourselves to say goodbye to him. I started crying. (You can see the performance here.)

I went to my phone and bought the Hamilton album and listened to it non-stop for a month.

I won't go into the all the reasons why I love the music, but it's masterful.

I won't even go into all the reasons the show is revolutionary, but it is.

And as I grew to love the show, I realized that what Lin-Manuel Miranda had done was the work of someone really special. He's unique. He's a genius.

And everything I've learned about him and the show since has confirmed my belief that he's someone whose genius will continue to amaze us for decades to come.

I recently discovered that I can borrow books through my local library that I can read on my Kindle or listen to on my phone. This was pretty exciting for me because I read very quickly, so spending money on books has to be carefully restrained. I stopped reading hardcopy books a few years ago, so my trips to the library stopped. But now that I have access to borrow digital books, I am excited to be able to read more books without the constraints of my budget. Ron Chernow's book about Hamilton landed on my list of "I'm interested, but not $15 bucks interested." But I could now borrow it.

So I typed "Hamilton" into the library search and a book about the making of the musical was the first item that popped up. I didn't even know it existed and I was immediately interested. I wanted to check out how the audiobooks worked with library so I borrowed the audiobook version and began listening to it as I jogged.

And the book gave me an amazing glimpse behind the work of the genius that is Hamilton.

When you watch a movie or a musical, you can see how special the work is. But listening to the detailed descriptions of how the musical was formed over the 7 years from the initial idea of a rap album to fully staged production is truly inspiring. And it's not only the genius work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but the work of the team of people who created what became the worldwide phenomenon.

Reading, or listening, to the process of how people with gifts beyond my comprehension can create always amazes me. I love being able to get a glimpse of what's behind the curtain of masterpiece creations, because there's always so much more than what initially meets the eyes. Masterpieces have layers and layers of work that support them.

It's not hyperbole to say that Hamilton has revolutionized the musical industry and had a significant impact culturally. For the first time an almost completely ethnic cast, portraying Caucasian historic figures, has been embraced. Not only have they been accepted, they have been celebrated. 

It's a musical style that is complex, but is also alluring for young people. It's a musical that is inclusive. It's a mix of styles that include rap with traditional musical ballads. And it's historically accurate but also timely in its relevance to the social and political climate of today.

It's the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda that made it possible.

If you are a fan of Hamilton, I would highly recommend the book Hamilton: The Revolution written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. There is also a great video documentary on Amazon called Hamilton: One Shot to Broadway.

For a video from the 2016 Tony Awards, so you can see what the fully staged production looked like, you can watch the video here.

I asked my mom this question:

Was there a show or music, like Hamilton, that revolutionized the genre for your generation?

In the generation before mine, it was Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific because it contained an interracial romance. As a child, I loved that musical and had the great fortune to watch some of the filming of the movie on the island of Kauai...but that's another long story.

In my generation, to me, it was the work of Steven Sondheim that revolutionized the genre, from A Little Night Music to Sweeney Todd to Into the Woods. His ability to take complicated dialogue with a huge number of words in it and then fit it seamlessly into his melodies was astounding. (Mara note: Miranda credits Sondheim as a huge influence—particularly his work in Into the Woods where the witch essentially raps as a way to convey a lot of story through song.)