‘Hamilton’ Cheat Sheet: Everything You Need to Know Before the Tonys
A very special room exists in New York City. It is the Room Where It Happens, where a musical about the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton has been radiating joy, frenzy and dolla dolla bills, y’all.
Hamilton, the $12.5 million musical, is on its path to rocketing past the billion-dollar revenue mark. In its wake, it has left a trail of delighted theatergoers, including Beyoncé, Jay Z, Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney – even Madonna, who texted the whole time – but, due to the theater’s 1,300 seats, its fan base far outsizes its ticket holders, causing confusion between the haves and have-nots.
As it dominates the Tony Awards (it’s nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards) this weekend, we’ve put together a guide to some basic Hamilton questions, not that anything about the show is basic.
Why do I keep hearing about Hamilton?
Because it keeps making news. It won a Grammy for best musical. And a Pulitzer. But it also got summoned to the White House to perform a few songs for the Obamas and guests (the First Lady has called it the greatest art she has ever seen). And because its star — who won a $500,000 no-strings-attached Genius grant — keeps pulling off amazing feats of rap derring-do with Stephen Colbert (about Button Gwinnett), James Corden, Jimmy Fallon (about Darth Vader), and John Oliver (about Puerto Rico). This weekend, it’s the centerpiece of the Tony Awards, where it scored a record-setting 16 nominations (even though it was cheated out of a 17th).
Isn’t it all about race?
In a Broadway season featuring Eclipsed, the first Broadway all-black, all-women play, and Shuffle Along, a history of the first jazz musical, Hamilton is doing the heavy lifting on an industry-wide conversation about race, with Puerto Rican Lin-Manuel Miranda in the title role, black Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson, Dominican Christopher Jackson as George Washington and black Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr. But it’s not groundbreaking. Consider David Oyelowo as King Henry VI in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2001 production. Or the many people who played Bob Dylan — notably Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin — in the 2007 film I’m Not There. Without sounding too grad school about it, Hamilton is more about otherness (there’s a line where John Adams derides Hamilton as a “creole bastard”). As the show expands into Chicago, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, casting agents have considered women for the roles of Founding Fathers, as well as trans performers. If that sounds weird, enjoy how captivating it is to watch three young boys play Hamilton‘s Schuyler sisters.