Hamilton: the musical creator Lin-Manuel Miranda appears in the leading role with Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton in the original Broadway production.
Not everyone likes Hamilton: the musical.
The production by Lin-Manuel Miranda about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton is an international smash hit.
The tale of a poor boy’s rise to power. Love and violence. Coloured actors in the roles of white men rapping about revolution.
It’s the hip-hop melting-pot musical for the new millennium. Since its debut on Broadway in 2015, the show has been taken to theatres around the world, streamed to millions through Disney+, and won a string of awards, including 11 Tonys, a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize.
Miranda has been hailed as an artistic genius for rethinking the modern musical and turning the casting process on its head to give a new face to the founding fathers and present Hamilton as the rags-to-riches archetype of the great American dream.
“A way of pulling you into the story and allowing you to leave whatever cultural baggage you have about the founding fathers at the door,” was how Miranda described the casting decision to The New York Times when it opened on Broadway in 2015. A popular line promoting the show reads, “This is the story of America then, told by America now.”
It opens in Auckland on Friday and a buzz has been building about what is expected to be one of the most popular live shows in years. But much of what makes Hamilton so loved has also earned it critics. And what the show leaves out has led to claims it is a sanitised retelling of a story in which slavery should play an important part.
Critics have spoken out about coloured actors playing known slave owners like George Washington, and Hamilton himself being portrayed as someone who was opposed to slavery.
The debate has never threatened to derail the Hamilton juggernaut but it has raised questions about the way such stories are told and drawn historians into debates and discussions like no other production.
They have taken part in panels, written papers and even provided their analysis live online. When Hamilton started streaming on Disney+ in 2020, historians took to Twitter under the hashtag #HATM (historians at the movies) in a generally fun event to comment on the show.
There is also the book Historians on Hamilton which, according to its publisher, Rutgers University Press, “brings together a collection of top scholars to explain the Hamilton phenomenon and explore what it might mean for our understanding of America’s history”.
Rutgers professor Lyra Monteiro, one of the contributors, says the show erases black and brown people from that history. “This has never been a white nation,” she writes in a 2016 essay.
“It is easy to miss the fact that there isn’t a single black character in the show, because there are so many black and brown bodies on the stage,” she adds.
Artists have also weighed in.
Ishmael Reed, an American poet, author, and activist, has been one of Hamilton’s most prominent critics from the start. In 2015 after the show’s debut, he wrote an article for Counterpunch titled “Hamilton: The Musical”: Black Actors Dress Up Like Slave Traders . . . And It’s Not Halloween.
In it, he argues that through the writings of “establishment historians”, Hamilton’s “life has been scrubbed with a kind of historical Ajax until it sparkles”. “His reputation has been shored up as an abolitionist and someone who was opposed to slavery. Not true.”
Reed later wrote a play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, described by The New York Times as “A cross between A Christmas Carol and a trial at The Hague’s International Criminal Court”.
Characters left out of Hamilton come back to fill in Miranda on the violent context the show omits. It opens with Alexander Hamilton and George Washington discussing the trade and treatment of slaves, features the ghosts of slavery including Harriet Tubman, and closes with Miranda refusing an award for his work, admitting he’s been a “co-conspirator in a crime against history”, and saying he’s been duped by Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow.
It is Chernow’s book Alexander Hamilton that provided Miranda with the inspiration for the production.
Hamilton is a central figure in the forming of America — he founded the Treasury Department, strengthened the banking system and helped write The Federalist Papers — and the size of his biography reflects the importance of the man. A weighty tome at over 800 pages, it follows Hamilton’s life from his childhood in the British West Indies and his journey to New York as a teenager, through to his rise in the military and political worlds of his new home to become George Washington’s chief of staff during the War of Revolution and the first Treasury Secretary once Washington became President.
Then there’s his death in a duel in his late 40s — historians aren’t sure of his exact age at the time.
And now doubt is increasingly being cast on Hamilton’s reputation as an anti-slavery campaigner.
Miranda has acknowledged the controversy, writing on Twitter in 2020, “All the criticisms are valid. The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took six years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5-hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”
Members of the original cast have also addressed the criticism. Okieriete Onaodowan and Daveed Diggs, who played James Madison and Thomas Jefferson respectively, discussed the impact of the show in an Instagram Live conversation in the same year. In it, Diggs welcomed the debate, saying: “I’m glad for the conversation... I definitely appreciate everybody questioning it. We should continue to do that and hold our creators accountable.”
Hamilton’s formative years were spent on Caribbean islands the economies of which were built on slavery and Chernow writes that Hamilton’s later politics cannot be fully understood without understanding the raw cruelty that he witnessed growing up.
Hamilton married into the wealthy, slave-owning Schuyler family of Albany, New York. But while it was understood he bought and sold slaves on his family’s behalf, many historians have held onto the view that Hamilton - who became a member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated for the emancipation of the enslaved - didn’t own slaves himself. Recent research adds to the evidence that suggests otherwise.
In an email agreeing to an interview, Reed includes a link to a 2020 New York Times story titled Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver? New Research Says Yes.
Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, examined letters, account books and other documents for her paper “As Odious and Immoral a Thing”: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver. Her conclusion? “Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.”
Chernow, who in his book conceded Hamilton may have owned slaves, told the Times that Serfilippi’s paper “seems to be a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways” but that she “omits all information that would contradict her conclusions”. But Serfilippi writes that “to date, no primary sources have been found to corroborate” the idea that Hamilton’s early experiences shaped opposition to slavery and that any of Hamilton’s writings that are used to promote that idea “are more in line with his politics than his morals”.
Hamilton’s approach to slavery has often been described as complicated or complex. Even his descendants appear to have disagreed on his involvement in the slave trade, with his son, John Church Hamilton, claiming his father never owned slaves, and his grandson, Allan McLane Hamilton, later saying he did indeed own them and that documents proved it.
Interviewed for the Smithsonian Magazine about Serfilippi’s research paper, historian William Hogeland described her work as “super exciting”. Hogeland, another contributor to Historians on Hamilton, said, “Her research confirms what we have suspected, and it takes the whole discussion to a new place.”
Reed faced a backlash for his portrayal of Hamilton - “I got a lot of vitriol, many comments in the New York Times” - so there’s vindication in such research, not that he’s looking for it. “This is the kind of stuff I make a living at, pointing out these different contradictions,” he says from his home in Oakland.
“People don’t understand the history and what’s actually being portrayed.”
It doesn’t help, he says, “casting these black actors as slave owners and Indian killers”.
”You know, 75 per cent of the ticket buyers are white, and they say, ‘Well, you have black people up there, coloured people, diversity up there on the stage, what can be wrong’?”
For Monteiro, the use of a coloured cast allows the absence of coloured characters to be overlooked. She saw Hamilton in its first week on Broadway and admits to being “enraptured from the start”. But she also believes it erases black and brown people from the nation’s history. “The idea that this musical ‘looks like America looks now’ in contrast to ‘then’ ... is misleading and actively erases the presence and role of black and brown people in revolutionary America, as well as before and since,” she writes in a 2016 essay in The Public Historian.
”America ‘then’ did look like the people in this play, if you looked outside of the halls of government.”
In revolutionary-era New York, where the production is set, around 14 per cent of the population was black, and most of them were enslaved, she writes. “In the 1790s, a slave was present in one in five of the city’s white households. Thus, every scene in the play contains an opportunity for an enslaved character.”
She uses the line “No one else was in the room” from the song The Room Where It Happens to make her point, writing that it “completely erases the slaves who would have been in that room serving dinner”.
Harvard history professor Annette Gordon-Reed points out: “A Broadway show is not a documentary.”
An article in the Harvard Gazette, entitled “Acclaimed musical doesn’t know its history”, notes Gordon-Reed, makes it clear that Gordon-Reed likes the show but that the Hamilton on stage isn’t a true reflection of the historical figure.
Speaking to students in 2016 about the show, she said: “Artists have the right to create, but historians have the right to critique,” adding that, “The Hamilton on the stage is more palatable and attractive to modern audiences.”
Yet the success of Hamilton has seen it move from the stage into schools. Hamilton-themed resources have been used to teach history and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History have allowed thousands of pupils from low-income schools to go to the show so it can be integrated into classroom studies.
Monteiro acknowledges students have responded positively to the show but also raises the question about what happens when what entertains influences our understanding of actual events.
“Whenever a historical story is shared, it has an ideological component. What ideology is being inculcated by a show like this, at the same time that it engages its audience?” Monteiro writes. ”If the goal is to make them excited about theatre, music, and live performance, great. But reviews regularly imply that what is powerful about the show is how it brings history to life.”
As Gordon-Reed told students, if you want to find out who the real Hamilton was, the answer isn’t on Broadway.
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