Mandatory Mad Frog Dissection Presents: Oh Boy. Here We Go. Hamilton. (Patreon)

 This Fuckin’ Guy: Let’s Talk About Hamilton

The standard disclaimer applies twice as hard for this one:

You guys chose this. I told you my opinion on Hamilton is not one of an adoring, anime-eyed fangirl belting out songs out of her range with her eyes rapturously closed at singalong parties. It never was, even before the live performance dropped on Disney+ and suddenly everyone could see it without dropping a cool grand on tickets and it became even slightly socially acceptable to not act as though it is the only musical ever made. All of my feelings about this juggernaut of popular culture can most generously be described as complicated, which is not what anyone has wanted to hear since 2015. 

But you chose this. The voting was not close. If your feelings are hurt by anything I say, it is not my fault, but I will duly accept a duel for satisfaction at dawn in which I will not be acting like a complete twat and shooting God in the sunny blue balls instead of anywhere remotely sensible.

But here is a second disclaimer this time! 

I actually do like Hamilton. Whatever I am about to yell about doesn’t and shouldn’t get in the way of the fact that it is undeniably compelling, passionate, musically fantastic, and full of absolutely stellar performances. It is possible to like something and also have a lot of issues with it. I am, for example, a big fan of the last American Revolution musical full of contemporary-styled songs (70s rather than 2010s), ahistorical sanitizing of the Founding Fathers, and way too much worshipful forgiveness extended toward the Chosen Douche of the narrative, 1776. And boy, I tell you what, 1776 is a mess when you drill down into it. I just did a podcast where I bagged on Ross Poldark for 67 solid minutes, and I love Poldark. 

I feel like in recent years, especially as geeky IP has come to dominate pop culture, it has become unacceptable to like things with caveats. It’s either all in or all out, in an almost paranoid way, as though if we the fans do not love a thing sufficiently, we will get no more of it forever. But…it really is okay. We are gonna get plenty more Star Wars and Marvel and hip hop musicals, even if people don’t think they’re completely perfect in all ways, shapes, and forms. I promise. But look at me writing 500 fucking words of preamble as a way of hedging my bets and fortifying my positions because I know how some folks get if you very quietly point out that hey, Hamilton, while great in some aspects, has a few fairly significant flaws, when that would never even be considered a bad review for Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera or Into the Woods (which people fucking hated when it came out, by the way) or almost any other musical ever.

Except RENT. People have always been real super serious about RENT. And I actually hate RENT, so we won’t even go to the pub down the down from the gas station near there.

Let’s…uh…throw away our shot, shall we?

It’s a testament to how good Hamilton actually is that I like it at all. I was primed to hate it. Because I am a contrary asshole who starts getting crochety af when people universally love a Thing, especially when, in their effusion, start proclaiming that Thing to be the best Thing of its kind, defeating all other Things past, present,a nd future, which now don’t matter because this new Thing is just sooooo different and superior.

I’m not overly proud of that personality trait. It’s not attractive and it doesn’t make me fun at parties. But on this particular score, I think I can be forgiven, because I am a Broadway geek from birth, and Hamilton is the “I’m Not Like Other Girls” of Broadway musicals.

So I heard about this new musical and how amazing and groundbreaking it was and how it was nothing like boring old cringey musical theater that only dumb people like and even just listening to the soundtrack would change my life and I felt so old, you guys. Because there is a musical like this at least once a generation—the musical that Isn’t Like Other Musicals because it’s Serious Art and So Anti-Establishment, Man and Speaks to This Cultural Moment and is Not Stupid or Immature like the Rest of Musical Theater the Olds Like Obviously Is. Basically Broadway you can take home to meet your parents. 

Only your parents already fucking like Broadway because this isn’t the Greatest Show On Earth, it’s just the first show YOU liked, and for your older brother it was RENT and for cousin it was Avenue Q and for your sister it was Hedwig and for your mom it was Les Miz or god forbid, Cats, and for your grandparents it was Hair or Cabaret or even Rocky Horror. 

If I seem extra passionate about this particular point, it’s because the exact same attitudes about science fiction and fantasy constantly spring up whenever something from the genre slums breaks into the mainstream—oh THIS one isn’t cringey infantile shit like all that other crap that isn’t Real Literature you wouldn’t be caught dead reading, this is actually good. Entirely ignoring how much “this” is in the tradition of and in conversation with decades of excellent novels that are no less excellent because not as many people read them. Game of Thrones and The Witcher are not big departures from the trends of the fantasy genre, but to some people, they have to be, because they wouldn’t like goofy tits-and-dragons pantomimes, they are serious intellectual adults.

And musical theater actually occupies a very similar place to SFF in the theatrical world—absolutely beloved by some, and absolutely sneered at by the majority of those who Actually Take Theater Seriously, Thank You Very Much, while simultaneously loathing how popular musicals are in comparison to straight plays and/or whatever “experimental” Sam Shepard/Mamet knock-off is floating the leaky boat of everyone’s fragile masculinity this year.

And Hamilton is not some kind of crazy revolution that departs from its genre and re-defines everything. It’s not even the first hip-hop musical, or the first musical written by its lead actor, or the first musical about the Founding Fathers. It’s not even the first hip-hop musical about politicians who have rap battles. 

Hamilton is, in fact, a completely standard Broadway musical. 

And people get upset when you point that out, because they think “completely standard Broadway musical” is an insult. It’s not! Broadway musicals are fucking great! They can do and say things no other media can! They make you FEEL SHIT. They make your bones vibrate and your heart bubble up in your throat. They make you memorize every word and sing them rapturously with your eyes closed with total strangers who become your best friends the minute you discover they know the other part of that one duet for the rest of your bloody life. Are you doing that with scenes from Our Town or Glengarry Glen Ross or Under Milk Wood? Are you having a room party at a convention to do a speak-along of August, Osage County? Fuckin no! That would be super weird! (Unless you are me who 100% held a room party at a convention to do a speak-along of Under Milk Wood but I am the worst and I am fuckin weird.) MUSICALS ARE THE BEST. GO SEE SOME OTHER ONES THEY ARE GOOD TOO.

So a lot of the over-the-top praise for Hamilton made no sense to me when I listened to the soundtrack. The music is so great and the way the lyrics interplay with each other and foreshadow what’s going to happen later! Yes, that is a musical. It’s about history but the contemporary music makes it so exciting and you see everything differently because it wasn’t boring like school! Yes, that is every historical musical. This one guy plays two different parts and it breaks the fourth wall and the set is just scaffolding but it doesn’t matter because the dancing is so good and it was a passion project—yeah, man, I’ve been to the theater in the last 30 years? Even the casting of POC as the Founding Fathers, and I’ll get to that way later, is not something so crazy and out there that cross-gender and cross-race casting wasn’t a thing for really quite some time. 

A great deal of the power of Hamilton actually comes from its grounding in traditional Broadway tropes combined with modern music, toned-down costuming, non-traditional casting, and deconstructed sets. Which…is the story of every massively popular original musical ever. Take the stuff that people love about musical theater and make it more contemporary and either way less over-the-top, or, as in the case of Cats or the show that threatened to be the Next Big Thing before a whole mess happened and it closed, Natasha and Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, way, way more. It even uses Les Miserables iconic rotating stage! 

Broadway had, for some time, gotten stuck in a Disney hole, unable to financially support many shows that weren’t based on a previously made film property. Even Wicked pulled more crowds because of the connection to the Oz movie than the original novel. It was fucking depressing, and there are even musical theater songs about it. And Hamilton did break that, at least somewhat, by going back to the drawing board of what Broadway could always and did always do, which suddenly seemed real new to a lot of people who had never seen Broadway do something deeper than The Lion King before. (Ironic, given how the majority of humans will now have seen this thing.) I genuinely think Hamilton benefitted greatly from the decade and a half of movie and cartoon musical adaptations dominating Broadway and making people think that was the definition of musical theater. Live people acting out (beautifully and with much fanfare) some un-serious thing your kids like.

So Hamilton seemed like a live grenade in a field of drowsy poppies.

In fact, there is really nothing anti-establishment about this show at all, if there ever can be about something that only the wealthy can afford to see if they don’t win a lottery. Parts of it are even somewhat regressive. On top of being a show about how mostly awesome and cool even in their failings the Founding Fathers of America are, which could not possibly be a more conservative premise, it was written with a MacArthur grant, which is about the most establishment way possible to write a show. It was never some indie out of nowhere bootstrappy success story—they were workshopping songs at the White House for Obama. This show was always going to be a hit, because it is a product of a system that creates hits, and embodies every element of past hits that have made them popular—including the meme that all those elements are brand new and have never graced a stage before so you’re not a be-sequined nerd for liking it, you’re a cool rapping rebel.

So yeah, I was got in my feelings about all that, and wasn’t that impressed with the soundtrack at first, admittedly because I listened to it while doing dishes and not with the libretto breathlessly in front of me like I usually do with musicals, but eventually my better musical-loving half got into it, and then we were listening to it all the time, because it is a great musical, utterly in line with all the other musicals we love, and we are only human.

But Hamilton, because it is a traditional Broadway musical, also has one of the biggest traditional Broadway musical problems: the second half is much, much weaker than the first.

And here’s where we get to the meat of my problem with the show, which was the same the first time I listened to it, the second time, the fiftieth time, when I watched it, and every time I think about it until the heat-death of the universe.

I fucking hate Alexander Hamilton.

I don’t think I’m supposed to hate him. I don’t think Lin-Manuel Miranda set out to write a musical that would take Alexander Hamilton from a guy I knew like five or six facts about and star of the greatest Got Milk? ad of all time to someone I loathe with every ounce of my being. I don’t think that was the point. But I fucking hate this guy. He is the worst. 

SWIPE LEFT, FUCKBOI.

And the play cleans him up a lot. The text is not confrontational about Hamilton or any of them in any substantial way—he is the hero, he is forgiven for everything, his sins are understandable (…understandable/yes it’s perfectly/understandable/comprehensible, comprehensible/not a bit reprehensible/it’s so defensiiiiible…) his is the story that will be sung through the ages, and all the really bad stuff is cut for time or only implied. The original concept for the show was actually to rehabilitate and tell the story from the point of view of Aaron Burr, so he gets off very easy as well. The worst treatment any Founding Father gets is probably John Adams, Mr. Not Appearing In This Musical For Some Reason Even Though He Was Kind of a Big Deal Probably Because He Already Has His Own Musical I Guess getting called a fat motherfucker and shaded by King George. But it’s historical fiction and I’m not here to litigate poetic license. I don’t care that all eight Hamilton kids weren’t in the show, that’s just trivia for the bar after. But to make it short: basically every shitty thing A Ham does in the show, he did even more and harder in real life, multiple times, then wrote about how good it was that he did it, really, and then on top of that his day job was pretty much slave-trading from the jump to the final shot.

No, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be blown away by the incredible edible awesomeness of Thoroughly Modern Alex and root for him every step of the way. And it almost works during the first half. It’s everything you want in a protagonist—an orphan, came from nowhere, worked his way up the ranks, passionate and clever and headstrong, contrasted with the stick-in-the-mud villain whose first egregious sin is to try to explain to this weirdo to maybe take about 10-15% off the top because he’s annoying the shit out of everyone with his Big Dork Energy, which, to a musical theater audience, is the equivalent of asking us to kindly remove both arms and also our souls, so burn Mr. Burr to the GROUND. FOREVER. It’s all pretty much Luke Skywalker territory, the exact hero’s journey stuff that’s fuel in the tank for Hollywood blockbusters and indeed the whole SFF genre. Hamilton is Spider-Man—poor and young and skinny and clever, not a rich powerhouse like Batman/Jefferson or an established legend like Washington/Captain America, but a scrappy guy in the right place at the right time who wants to prove himself and whose greatest power is his agility and his wit. 

So yeah, you’re all in, the Prince That Was Promised, and maybe you overlook how hard all these young guys are for war and people dying without so much as an Empty Chairs at Empty Tables moment of sobriety, and maybe all these amazing POC actors onstage makes it easy for a super long time to not notice that we’re just not dealing with slavery even as much as happy-ass goofy 1776 did (which for all its cheesy dumbassery is the only piece of pop culture I have ever seen address the North’s complicity in slavery with Molasses to Rum to Slaves, and it would not have been hard to add one damn song about it now instead of a few throwaway lines when lines come thick and fast in this show) and maybe you don’t know the history super well so you buy the thesis that if not for those tempting ladies and their tempting temptations this dude who has all the micro-level interpersonal social instincts of a skunk in heat and on fire would have been able to put together enough support from a bunch of people who hated him to be President and sure, maybe at first glance it seems cunning and socially adept for Alex to use the same pick-up line with Angelica that he does with Eliza like some Brooklyn faux-sensitive chode who acts sincere but still copy/pastes the same opening message to every girl he matches with on Tinder and maybe you’re not quite as annoyed as I’ve always been with yet another musical getting up there on stage and singing MORE THAN ONCE about how New York is the greatest city in the world, because god forbid New York City not get its dick artistically sucked for five seconds, when in 1776 it very much fucking was not, it wasn’t even the greatest city in America, and the Schuyler sisters were rich and cosmopolitan enough to know that, and maybe, maybe, you don’t even notice that this bad boy doesn’t actually pass the Bechdel Test because even THAT song is about how they’re on the prowl for husbands and once again the sole line about how shitty life was for women is a throwaway you go girl moment followed up by nothing and given no oxygen when one bloody song sung by a woman that is not directly about this fuckin guy would have been pretty great and you *deep breath* go into the post-war half of the show still fully ride or die for the swaggering #MeToo moment known as Alexander Hamilton.

As a palate-cleanser after that sentence allow me to point out that the two songs by King George are fantastic and fabulously performed by Jonathan Groff without hardly moving a muscle (other than the now-famous spittle) in the first-go round and manic bouncy joy that subtly points to the actual insanity of that person in real life. It’s brilliant to have the only white guy be the oppressive king, brilliant that his songs are the most traditional Broadway structures outside of Eliza’s, brilliant that he’s used to slide the narrative further along in history without being awkward. Daveed Diggs is also Ye Olde Bees’ Knees and for me the absolute breakout can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him performance as both Lafayette and Jefferson. He’s so good that honestly I can’t fully understand why so much was made of Leslie Odom’s turn as Aaron Burr—and I know this is rank heresy—who left me cold. Maybe he had a cold on the night it was filmed, but he seemed very subdued, quiet, not into it, and technically not as gangbusters as some of the others. I know Burr is supposed to be uncharismatic, but he just didn’t do anything for me in the part, which weakens the whole because he never seems like much of a nemesis or opposite number to Alexander. He’s just kind of a tool and then he kills him. I’ve heard a lot of people say that given how high-level the rest of the cast is, and they are, that Miranda doesn’t really measure up and wouldn’t have been cast if it wasn’t his gig. I can completely see where they’re coming from but it doesn’t matter that much to me—it’s not all about vocal pyrotechnics and it’s awesome to see a writer who clearly gave this his everything go after it on stage. Also Goldsberry is wtf earth-shattering as Eponine whoops sorry Angelica and Philippa Soo as Eliza breaks your heart so hard that it’s a big part of me hating the fuck out of her stupid husband.

BACK TO THAT.

Hamilton: worst father ever or worst husband ever? IT’S SO HARD TO CHOOSE. I guess it’s just a bit rough for me to cheer on a show as this revolutionary thing when it’s asking me to lionize the same kind of I’m-always-right-everyone-else-is-sheeple-idiots dick-swinging piece of shit young-girl-groping plausibly date-raping but it’s okay because I’m so smart and my work is so important parenthood-neglecting democracy-hating (doesn’t come up much but it’s true) self-aggrandizing entitled douchebro maleness that the dominant cultural paradigm always asks me to be dazzled by and I’m just…I’m not. You can dress it up in cool music and progressive casting all you want but this guy straight up sucks. There’s a whiff of techbro hispterness to him, too, once you get into the much-harder-to-dramatize nitty gritty of designing a government, the kind of man you have to deal with in startup culture all the time who swans in calling himself a rock star because he has the last big thing on his resume and thinks he has this killer app called Financr or whatever and everyone else is just too stupid to understand his genius and give him free reign to reshape society without considering the needs of anyone who doesn’t look and think and act like him. I don’t buy for a minute that Alex would ever have been President, even if he could keep it in his pants. He does not know how to build alliances, he alienates people he needs on his side all the time, his ideas on how to fix his problems are fucking crazy dumb, he desperately needs like, a full time PR department, and he was from New York, which, notwithstanding its obvious status and once and future Greatest City in the World, did not make Presidents at that point. We made it TEN Presidents in before a New Yorker got it, and SEVEN before it was anyone but a Virginian or one of two guys from Boston, and they were father and son. Also, he could not keep it in his pants.

I can barely watch the whole gross af Say No to This scene and will direct you to Katharine Ryan’s bit on it which is brilliant and CORRECT. I hate this scene. It’s horrible. It’s deeply ambiguous as far as consent (and you can bring up history all you like but none of these powdered college debate club gave one wig about consent or would ever have admitted that maybe any girl honored by their fondling wasn’t that into it, and if it was a whole set up by Mrs. Reynolds’ husband, she may not have been 100% on board with that either) plus Eliza has been gone for about thirty-five seconds before Sir Fucksalot Bear over here is skeezing up this very young woman who came to him for help because he husband was mistreating her and he’s all she definitely wants the me I see no issues here. The whole song on his part acts as though she initiated it and seduced him, but not one word she sings backs that up and also her body’s saying hell yes is a yucky cringey line that makes me want a shower. But the show pretty much plays it as all fun and polyamorous enlightenment games (you know, like the poly guy you know whose wife doesn’t know he’s poly. That fuckin guy) until he gets caught and then he’s brought low by a woman oh let us beat our breasts at the lost potential of this brilliant man who just couldn’t help himself and is definitely not every guy who does this and gets no punishment because he has such a bright future ahead PROGRESSIVE PLAY FOR THE SENSIBILITIES OF THE 2010s!

Plus, he 100% banged out Angelica in real life and a ton more women, too, and Eliza isn’t even allowed to be actually angry about this, she just has to be sad and sing about removing herself from the narrative when girl, they never let you into the narrative in the first place. Jefferson didn’t include women in the sequel and this show does not care about you except for a beautiful window through which to forgive and elide Hamilton’s shittiness, which is why you’re never allowed to sing about anyone but him when ding-dong dumb 1776 gave Abigail Adams a song about dysentary and dead kids and maybe care about women sometimes JOHN in the 70s but you can not has. 

Oh hey also, Alex, you walnut, you killed your son, who seemed to be pretty much the same kind of sexual harassment lawsuit you were, with nonsensical duel advice that you then inexplicably thought would work the second time if not the first. I think a lot of people don’t know much about duels so these bits were cool and informative, but if you are into history, you know all this stuff and it never seems any smarter than the first time you learned how Alexander Hamilton died. (The bullet thing is really cool though, that and the rewinding bit during Satisfied are the actually innovative staging moments that truly are breathtaking.) I don’t really buy the headcanon that he wanted to kill himself, he seemed to have a lot of plans for the future for that, and his son’s death and his weren’t as close together as they seem in the play. But it’s really hard for me to like a guy that got his son killed stupidly and then himself killed stupidly in the same way, neither for any good reason, continually compounding fucking problems for his wife every step of the way.

I have heard, over and over, people say this is really Eliza’s story and HARD DISAGREE. Eliza never sings one song about herself or her experience. Even her wife-done-wrong song is all about him. Even when her son dies because her husband is a fucking idiot, she gets to just cry quietly. She is a pair of eyes through which to see him. Her final song is about all the amazing things this woman did with her life HEY MAYBE SOMEONE SHOULD WRITE A HIT MUSICAL SHE SOUNDS COOL but ends up with the thesis that she did it to fill the void he left and he would have done so much better things if he’d lived so she hopes people know about him in the future. Not her, him. He is the gravity well of this show and there is not one song a woman sings that is not MOSTLY ABOUT HIS DICK except the one that is only metaphorically and tangentially about his future dick and the civic dick of New York City. 

That is not what a story that is really secretly about a woman looks like. 

The vast majority of the time, there are no women on stage except androgynous background dancers, they are not mentioned, and their reality is never explored. You have to think for yourself about how completely Alex ruined Eliza’s life with the Reynolds’ pamphlet, which was a clownshoes idea in the first place that proves my point about his lack of political and personal instincts, that she can’t leave him and she can’t take part in society with everyone knowing what her husband did, her children and their futures are damaged and she has zero options other than to forgive him eventually because that’s the universe she lives in and it’s the universe most women lived in until like six months ago in terms of cultural time but I guess that’s not worth a song when Alexander Hamilton could just sing his name like seventeen more times or someone could count to ten again.

Yeah. Musicals make you feel stuff.

And part of what I feel is that maybe this show shouldn’t get quite so many pats on the back for being such a revolutionary postmodern political masterpiece than makes all other Broadway seem silly and trite when West Side Story and The Music Man do a better job letting women speak and they do not do a good job.

And along those lines, it’s really hard not to notice in 2020 some things that weren’t really on the top level of the concern-pile in 2015. In many ways, I think Hamilton is a show that could only be born during the Obama Administration, when people with the money and distance from trauma to mount huge musicals funded by MacArthur grants might conceivably imagine that the very worst of racism had died down and would never be quite so bad again. When POC were playing the roles always played by white men before and the simple act of having a Black man play George Washington (but never a Black woman, in any cast, which is kind of interesting to think about, while they were making statements with the tension between actor and role) was breaking the mold in a way that felt pleasurably envelope-pushing but not really confronting to the culture at large. Because the Founding Fathers themselves are never confronted with being the bastards a lot of them were except in side-sung jokes. Because slavery is not even a C plot because it makes all these people look dreadful and not fun to sing along with. Because women are only on stage when about to sleep with, be briefly sad about losing, or forgive the Chosen Man. It’s all very woke, but not really dangerous.

Now, this all feels a little naive in 2020. If Miranda were writing this show right now, I don’t think it’s remotely the same script. Now we know that half this country would happily still own slaves, not just politicians but our neighbors and co-workers. Now white supremacy is spoken out loud and without shame in the corridors of power. I don’t think, at the least, Hamilton 2020 cuts out slavery and feels like it’s enough to use POC to add to the legend of white Founding Fathers instead of telling a different kind of story (and yes I know there’s theories that Hamilton was not completely white, but they are just theories and never brought up in the show). I'm not sure it's as easy to ignore that Guys Like This still run the place and they're asking us to swoon over a golden fuckboi again instead of interrogate that archetype. Does that make it a bad play? No, not at all. But it very much makes it a play of its time, a more optimistic time, where eventual unity seemed remotely possible, at least if you were in the social strata that dealt with well-funded performing arts. A time in which pretty uncomplicated pride in being American was something assumed to fill seats without the audience crumpling into a pile of pessimism and hopelessness. I think Hamilton would be a much more dangerous show now than when it premiered, but its almost universal acceptance and beloved status blunts that and it is simply, for better or for worse, The Musical of its era, until the next one comes along. 

And one will. In five or ten or fifteen years there will be a show, whose set is mostly scaffolding, full of young, passionate unknown actors in stripped-down costumes playing poor (but not really that poor) kids trying to make their way against the cruel establishment in this crazy world, but mainly about a young ambitious angsty dude who fucks a lot, singing songs that sound so fresh and new and authentic about things that feel so incredibly real and immediate to my son and his friends that they will stay up all night rapturously singing along with their eyes closed, and I will smile and learn the words too, and we will listen to the soundtrack on every road trip, and then I will tell him it’s all been done before and it’s not special and it’s actually pretty reactionary when you think about it and he will think his mother just doesn’t get it because Broadway in her day was so cheesy and un-serious she just can’t handle something real.

And just like Elton John says, the circle of life will go on.