Hamilton
the same fight you’ve been having since you were 8 and 10 years old, right?” Those fights, as Miranda enumerates them, do sound like never-ending ones: federalism versus states’ rights; the legacy of slavery versus how it reverberates. “The notion of finances, of who pays your taxes, of how involved are we in the affairs of other countries—for them the French Revolution, for us: Name a country. “And the notion of immigrant having
both incredibly positive and negative connotations in American society,” he continues. Hamilton, the show, was famously inspired by Miranda’s reading of Ron Chernow’s hefty biography of the man who became the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury but began life as an impoverished kid propelled from the Caribbean to New York City on the strength of his striving and smarts; Miranda saw a hip-hop narrative. As the Burr character asks in the show’s
opening lines, “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?” But the show also depicts another side to the idea that Hamilton, “Got a lot farther by working a lot harder / By being a lot smarter / By being a self-starter.”
Time Out Chicago September–November 2016
“We love the up-from-the-bootstraps
narrative, but there’s always a point in which it will be used against us, to arouse suspicion,” says Miranda. “Those are all things that happened to Hamilton before they happened to anyone who’s alive today.” The musical lived in close proximity to
modern politics since before it was really a show. Invited to perform at the White House as part of an evening of spoken word and music back in the first year of President Obama’s first term, Miranda rapped those
“We love the up-from-the- bootstraps narrative, but there’s always a point in which it will be used against us.”
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opening lines of what became the show’s opening number, “Alexander Hamilton.” As can be seen in the YouTube video that’s now been viewed nearly 3 million times, Miranda described the nascent project then not as a musical but as a mixtape. “The White House song was remarkable and incredibly stimulating and impressive, but it was just this one song,” says director Thomas Kail, Miranda’s collaborator on both In the Heights and Hamilton. “So the fact that anything would come after it wasn’t proven. It was just a stand-alone thing that I thought he did beautifully.” It was two years later, when Miranda
presented a second song in front of an audience at the small NYC theater Ars Nova in June of 2011, that Kail saw stage potential. “When he wrote the second song, what
became ‘My Shot,’ and I was actually in the room watching the song interact with an audience live, that’s when I knew. It was relatively immediate,” says Kail. “We had a conversation that night at this little gathering afterward where everybody was, you know, patting him on the back and plying him with snacks, and that’s when I said to him, ‘Great, let’s get going. We’re relatively young now, but we’re going to be pretty old if you keep up this pace.’” Five years later, Miranda, Kail and
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