Hamilton review: Believe the hype – Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical is a knockout

Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical makes 18th-century politics seem as explosively immediate as a rap battle, writes Henry Hitchings
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Henry Hitchings21 May 2020

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical arrives in London on a giant wave of hype — acclaimed as an unmissable game-changer that’s made hip-hop part of the vocabulary of Broadway.

Sceptics have wondered if its American subject matter and idiom might not survive the journey from New York. But they have. Hamilton is a knockout, and its British cast is superb, with two star-making performances from Giles Terera and, in the title role, magnetic newcomer Jamael Westman.

Miranda’s portrait of a ‘young, scrappy and hungry’ immigrant’s astonishing rise is, explicitly, a story of America’s abundant possibilities. It pictures the country’s Founding Fathers not as frozen marble monuments but as spirited, fallible and crafty, while making 18th-century politics seem as explosively immediate as a rap battle.

Its source material is unlikely: Ron Chernow’s massive 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, the volatile statesman whose innovations laid the groundwork for America’s economic success.

Raised in poverty on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, the young Hamilton was abandoned by his Scottish father and orphaned following the death of his half-French, half-British mother. Yet once he arrived in New York, he ascended swiftly, buoyed by his charm, fierce intelligence and facility for language — before being killed in a duel, aged forty-nine, by fellow orphan and politico Aaron Burr.

It’s giving nothing away to mention his death, since it’s referenced in the opening song, and the show’s first three minutes — expository yet invigorating — make it clear that Hamilton’s linguistic artistry is something Miranda shares. The lyrics are densely packed, layered with puns and embedded rhymes, and their bristling intricacy justifies Miranda’s thesis that hip-hop is — or at any rate can be — the authentic sound of the American Revolution.

The score, lyrics and book are all his. For rap fans there’s the pleasure of spotting references to Grandmaster Flash, Mobb Deep, DMX and the Notorious B.I.G. But he's also sensitive to the history of musical theatre, with nods to Les Misérables, Stephen Sondheim and the tongue-twisting patter of Gilbert and Sullivan. At times the show’s tone is lushly operatic, and it's punctuated with bluesy moments, bar-room rowdiness, R&B ballads and even some twiddly harpsichord, richly orchestrated by Alex Lacamoire.

Hamilton: the original Broadway cast

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Thomas Kail’s finely tuned production takes place on a single set, and there’s athletic choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler. As a result it hurtles along, the dance and movement as urgent as the vocals, yet the cast’s energy is matched by its poise.

The tall and elegant Westman captures Hamilton’s cockiness and piercing gaze, as well as his tendency to lapse into a pensive quietness. He’s both enterprising and studious, and Westman is particularly good at suggesting his shift from adolescent daring to maturity.

As the ambitious Burr, Salieri to Westman’s Mozart, Terera has a cool shrewdness. But there are notes of resentment, awkwardness and longing in his performance — Burr’s appetite for politics is quickened by a thwarted desire to be, as one second-half song emphasises, in ‘the room where it happens’.

There’s quality all around the central pair. Rachelle Ann Go has a lovely vocal purity as Hamilton’s demure and earnest wife Eliza, and Rachel John brings wit and spark to her passionate sister Angelica. Obioma Ugoala has the towering authority needed to play George Washington. Jason Pennycooke doubles brilliantly as the rapidly rapping Marquis de Lafayette, the self-styled ‘Lancelot of the revolutionary set’, and a preening Thomas Jefferson. Michael Jibson’s George III earns some of the biggest laughs with his foppish trolling of the American rebels.

With its fresh take on the politics of opportunism Hamilton feels sharply topical, but it’s also the best kind of history lesson. True, there are a few dramatically expedient inaccuracies, but Miranda knows which liberties are worth taking, and he makes the past exciting. At the same time this is an extraordinarily uplifting vision of people from society’s margins becoming big-hitters. In short, believe the hype.

Until June 30