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There’s no debating: Hamilton has made American history hot. Now that it’s elected Chicago as its first post- Broadway home, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has us ready to enter the ticket lottery early and often. By Kris Vire Photographs by Tawni Bannister
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HAMILTON. PERHAPS YOU’VE heard of it? The biggest and, in some ways, most unlikely theatrical phenomenon in a generation, the musical about Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Founding Fathers of the United States, has smashed past low bars like “Broadway hit.” After a buzzy Off Broadway premiere at
New York’s Public Theater in early 2015, the hip-hop– and pop-flavored take on American history, written by certifiable genius Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) to be performed by actors of color in modern vernacular, transferred to Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre that summer. By the time the Broadway reviews hit, tickets had become all but impossible to get, unless your name was Oprah, Beyoncé or Obama (all of whom attended). Miranda was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while the show made stars of Leslie Odom Jr., Renée Elise Goldsberry and Daveed Diggs, now all Tony winners. This summer, Hillary Clinton quoted the show in her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for President: “Though ‘we may not live to see the glory,’ as the song from the musical Hamilton goes, ‘let us gladly join the fight,’” Clinton told the crowd in Philadelphia, lifting from the Act I song “The Story of Tonight.” Now, as 2016’s unpredictable presidential race revs into high gear, Miranda and the show’s creative team prepare to open a second production of Hamilton in Chicago, with an entirely new cast. In this high-stakes election season, the show’s 200-year-old themes about the birth of a nation feel improbably resonant. “The thing that is so funny about the show is that it is about the themes and the contradictions inherent in the founding of our country, and those don’t ever go away,” Miranda says on the phone a few days before Clinton’s DNC speech. Miranda, who won two Tony Awards for Hamilton in June—Best Score and Best Book—was also nominated for Best Actor in a Musical for his turn in the title role. (His castmate Odom won for the colead role of Aaron Burr, who serves as Hamilton’s nemesis and the show’s narrator.) He left the Broadway cast in early July; when we speak, he’s on a well-deserved vacation with his family, including his two-year-old son, Sebastian, who wants to answer some of my questions himself. People would say the same thing about Hamilton’s election-year resonance in 2012 as they would in 2020, Miranda thinks. “Because the things we fight about as a country, they’re just our things. It’s like when you fight with members of your family; you’re not having a new fight with your brother or sister. You’re having variations on
September–November 2016 Time Out Chicago
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