Hamilton the Musical: Broadway’s revolutionary hit show

The smash-hit Broadway musical Hamilton arrives in movie form on Disney+ this weekend, making it accessible to more people than ever before. And with this glossy composite recording of the show comes a longstanding public debate: Is Hamilton a brilliant, visionary reframing of the narrative of America, a revisionist apologetic paying undue worship to the Founding Fathers, or an unholy mix of both?

The timing of the film adaptation’s arrival helps to renew this argument. Disney+ is releasing Hamilton just in time for the Fourth of July, appropriate for the musical’s trappings of lavish patriotism. It also drops in concert with the most intense US political protests in recent memory — protests whose spirit the musical, by centering actors of color in a racebent narrative about revolution, also arguably upholds. It’s an uncomfortable duality, a tension that the beloved hip-hop musical has courted since day one.

I listened to the Hamilton cast album hundreds of times before I saw the live show. Full-blown Hamilton fever was just starting to hit the internet in early 2016, six months after its Broadway debut. With an assignment in hand to write about Lin-Manuel’s Miranda retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton, I bought tickets in seemingly the final week that someone in my income bracket could pull off that feat. I tucked into my cramped perch in the last row of the balcony one March evening, already knowing the show inside and out. Or so I thought.

This week, watching the filmed version of the musical being released on Disney+, I was reminded of that night and of how finally seeing the show made me realize what I’d missed: that the person who “tells the story” of Hamilton is not its namesake, but its villain, Aaron Burr (played by Leslie Odom Jr.).

When the original cast recording for Hamilton was released in September 2015, few people had seen the show. (It had only opened on Broadway a couple of months earlier.) But it didn’t really matter: The album was almost instantly a hit, winning a Grammy before the show had even swept the Tonys. As Wesley Morris put it in the New York Times Magazine in December 2015, “To know someone who has this album is to know someone who needs a restraining order.”

You could think of Hamilton as Schoolhouse Rock but with the Founding Fathers. But that sells its creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s intricate lyrics and richly evocative music — with influences in rap, hip-hop, R&B, dancehall rhythms, and traditional Broadway tunes — pitifully short.

The Hamilton lyric “look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now” can sometimes feel like an ironic taunt, but at 1 pm EST today, it’ll be hard to argue.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has been putting together The Hamilton Mixtape for months now, recruiting Hamilton fans and influences alike to put their own spins on the musical’s numbers. To celebrate its December 2 release, there will be a live-streamed concert of some of the mixtape’s numbers. It appears to be taking place at Hamilton’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, in the spirit of Miranda’s now-retired ticket lottery Ham4Ham concerts.

You’d think Lin-Manuel Miranda might be sick of talking about Alexander Hamilton at this point, but as it turns out, there was one storytelling genre he had yet to conquer: the late-night drunken ramble.

Comedy Central’s Drunk History devoted an entire episode to the Hamilton creator diving a little deeper into Alexander Hamilton’s rise and fall — this time through a boozy haze. The episode, shot in Miranda’s parents’ house in New York City, eventually leads to him and Drunk History co-creator Derek Waters doing a rousing piano rendition of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” and holding drunken FaceTime sessions with Questlove and Hamilton star Christopher Jackson.

President-elect Donald Trump will not stop tweeting about Hamilton, and about how “very rude and insulting” the cast was to urge Vice President-elect Michael Pence to protect and defend all the diverse citizens of America after their curtain call on Friday night.

As my colleague Matthew Yglesias has already pointed out, of all the things that Trump did this weekend, the Hamilton mess is one of the least immediately consequential. It has nothing on the immense financial corruption in which the Trump administration is already enmeshed before Trump even takes office.

Mike Pence probably just thought he was doing dinner and a show. He almost certainly didn’t expect to get booed in the process, or to receive a personalized lecture during the curtain call, from the very cast he’d just seen perform.

But Mike Pence isn’t just any theatergoer, and Hamilton isn’t just any Broadway musical.

When Lin-Manuel Miranda introduced the idea for Hamilton to the world at a White House event in 2009, he explained why he thought Alexander Hamilton’s life story “embodies hip-hop.” It’s because Hamilton was born poor and disenfranchised and rose to the highest levels of government, “all on the strength of his writing.”

”I was like, ‘Oh, he literally wrote his way out of his circumstances,’” Miranda later told Rolling Stone. “That’s it! That’s everything. … Jay Z, Eminem, Biggie. Lil Wayne writing about Katrina!”

“It’s really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.”

So opens “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done),” one of the newest tracks off Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape. Though the full album is set for a December 2 release, select tracks have been released to buy on iTunes and stream on Spotify as a sort of tease, with “Immigrants” and Sia’s take on “Satisfied” (featuring Miguel and Queen Latifah) coming out on November 11.

Just when it seemed Hamilton might release us from its vice grip of tight rhymes and unbridled enthusiasm, Lin-Manuel Miranda went ahead and announced the official release date and track listing for The Hamilton Mixtape — and by the looks of it, we’re in for another solid year of getting Miranda’s melodies stuck in our heads all over again.

The mixtape — which you can preorder starting November 4 for a December 2 release — is a collaboration between Miranda and a host of other artists. Everyone involved will be taking on tracks from the musical, and even some of the musical’s cut B-sides, in their own styles.

Early on in Hamilton’s America, the new PBS Great Performances documentary about the Broadway musical, composer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda sits down at the historical Hamilton’s desk. Fiddling with a quill pen, he muses, “This just makes me feel like I have to go home and write.”

Watching Hamilton’s America makes me feel like I have to go home and blast my cast album of the musical. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing.

Battle of the titans alert! On Tuesday night, while the rest of America was recovering from a post–vice presidential debate hangover, Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda stopped by The Tonight Show for a rap battle with the Roots’ Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, a.k.a Black Thought. And by “rap battle,” I mean “a polite exchange of verses punctuated by a show of mutual respect and esteem.”

“You are the greatest alive!” Miranda cried as Trotter finished his verse. “Why am I here?”

By now, very few Americans remain who have not at least heard of the Broadway smash hit Hamilton, which tells the story of America’s first secretary of the Treasury. The vast multitudes who have been unable to score a ticket to see the play have gotten to know it from the chart-topping cast album. Lyrics from the songs have become catchphrases — the determined Hamilton insisting, “I’m not throwing away my shot”; a gleeful Jefferson crowing, after Hamilton did throw away his “shot” (his political career) by publicly confessing to adultery, “Nevah’ gon’ be president now!” That last one was perfect for the 2016 primary season, with candidates falling left and right before the Trump juggernaut.

After winning a Grammy and a boatload of Tony nominations and awards, and creating a passionate fan base that spans generations, the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and nearly all of the original cast members have moved on to other projects. But there is every reason to believe that this remarkable musical, which will open in other US cities and London, will maintain its popularity and cultural power for years to come.

I didn’t leave the theater after seeing Hamilton. I resurfaced.

Walking out into the cool night air, pushing past the people crowded near the stage door to catch even a glimpse of the show’s cast as they exited, I felt as if I had been sitting on the floor of the ocean and needed to take my time breaking the water’s surface, lest my body depressurize.

She Loves Me, the acclaimed Broadway musical revival starring Laura Benanti and Jane Krakowski, will make musical theater history on Thursday, June 30, when the online streaming service Broadway HD broadcasts the show live from the Studio 54 theater in New York City.

The event marks the first time a live performance of a Broadway show will be streamed on the internet — a huge step forward for the theater industry, which has always been notoriously reluctant to allow cameras anywhere near the stage. (As a result, bootlegging has long been a thorn in the industry’s side.)