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'Hamilton' is Better Than its Hype

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

When singer/writer/rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda announced at a White House event five years ago that he was working on "a hip-hop album about somebody who I think embodies hip-hop -- Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton," everybody laughed.

They're not laughing anymore.

I was not laughing either, as I almost had to take out a second mortgage so my wife and I could sit wa-a-a-ay up in the back row of the balcony.

Yes, "Hamilton" is a mega-hit, having won just about every honor it can. It has won eleven Tony Awards, a Grammy for best soundtrack album and a Pulitzer Prize -- one of only nine musicals to win in that award's century old history.

We wanted to be, in the words of one of the musical's songs, "in the room where it happens" to see whether it earns the raves it has received -- and my ticket money, as one who is too impatient to wait for the movie version.

I also wanted to see if the production is guilty, as some critics have charged, of "founder's chic," the practice of over-glorifying our nation's Founding Fathers (and thanks to modern DNA tests, we're learning more about who some of them fathered), especially when judged by today's standards of anti-racism, anti-sexism and other culture war issues.

 

Those are legitimate concerns, in my view, although they also call upon us to judge people by the standards of their day, as much as ours, which is not always comfortable.

For example, Harvard history and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been credited with reopening debate over whether Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with slave Sally Hemings, said she loves the musical yet has qualms.

"Imagine 'Hamilton' with white actors," she wrote in a blog of the National Council on Public History. "Would the rosy view of the founding era grate?"

Good question. The show's nontraditional casting of mostly nonwhites to portray white historical figures is timely, refreshing and enticingly ironic. It enables us to have a bit of emotional distance to see, for example, white slave owners portrayed by black or Hispanic actors.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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