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Review
Hamilton West End review: believe every single word of the hype
"Alexander Hamilton – my name is Alexander Hamilton – and there’s a million things I haven’t done but just you wait, just you wait.” The cheer that goes up in the gloriously renovated Victoria Palace theatre when Jamael Westman steps forward, solemn, serene and self-possessed, introducing us to the hero of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical phenomenon – the most talked-about musical of the century – is like the rapture of a crowd of believers meeting their awaited saviour.
The fervour that attends this show – which retells the life and times of Alexander Hamilton (c1755 – 1804), first Secretary of the US Treasury, using a predominantly non-white cast and a welter of rap music – is off the scale.
“The Greatest Show on Earth”, one paper declared the other day. C’mon! But seriously folks, there’s going to be more where that came from, because – lock up your doubters: I have to report that it really is as good as we’ve been told. Can you quibble that it’s a bit too cold, a bit too clever, and a bit too crammed with exposition? Perhaps, but it displays an artistic sophistication that makes most of its British counter-parts look like they’re mumbling into their shoes in comparison.
On stage, it sounds, first off, amazing – studio-recording levels of clarity. A bullet-hail of words comes our way – witty, lacerating, compact and playful; thanks to director Thomas Kail, his team and the mainly British cast (across the board superlative) you barely miss a syllable. And you’ll be spoilt for choice as to what to come out humming.
Street-wise and college-smart, Miranda does things with rap so nifty that even people who hate rap will relent, and he keeps shifting tempo and mood, a magpie maestro: there are roof-raising soul numbers, achingly tender ballads too, here a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan, there a hint of Kander and Ebb. Thanks to the through-sung craft and graft of the piece, though, they all form a unified whole.
It also looks remarkably appealing: the aesthetic is very stripped-back but the towering brick-walls (with 18th-century-effect wooden walkways) combine with precision-tooled choreography to create a sense of gravitas and whirling lightness.
In the course of over two and half hours, we’re spun through the professional travails and private torments (drawn from the 2004 Ron Chernow biography) of a fascinating and under-sung Founding Father as he races from impoverished Caribbean origins to the heart of George Washington’s inaugural presidency, taking in heroism in the War of Independence, scholastic endeavour in the drafting of the Constitution, and a whole heap of politicking that culminated in his death in a duel at the hands of his rival Aaron Burr, Salieri as it were to his Mozart.
Yet even that doesn’t do justice to the experience, the ingenious collision of contemporary sounds and 'colour-conscious' casting with period-dressed historical subject-matter makes us see this epic as a biography of the dawn of the USA itself. Who knew that the birth-pangs of a nation could bring so much pleasure?
Even if you miss particular references, you feel the gist on your pulse: there’s a continuum between then and now and it’s thrillingly compounded by the fact that America’s nemesis George III (a tour-de-force from Michael Jibson in the comic show-stopper of the night) once lived round the corner; he bought what became Buckingham Palace.
So, far from standing at one aloof remove from this foreign import, then, it’s as if a vast arc of history, spanning centuries, has come full circle here in the West End. Look what we managed to do after we left you, the show says, in playfulness not anger. The awed answer from our side can only be: like, wow.
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