Review: 'Hamilton,' History and the Immigrant Experience

Hamilton, presented by Broadway in Boston recently at Citizens Opera House, brought the full vigor and verve that has made playwright Lin Manuel-Miranda’s hit musical so beloved over the last decade. Meticulously researched and rooted in Ron Chernow’s biography of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, the musical Hamilton brings to life the rise of this flawed, accomplished figure with an iconic musical score blending hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and Broadway. This most recent performance featured emotionally resonant choreography and set design, with powerful dancing and acting that perfectly delivered the narrative’s emotional ups and downs.

Hamilton tells the life story of Alexander Hamilton, exploring his role as a revolutionary, an influential thinker and writer of the Federalist Papers, a husband, a father, and a scrappy immigrant who consummates his own version of the American Dream. Directed by Thomas Kail, with choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, and musical supervision and orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire, the show was in excellent on all counts, an exemplar of what heights musical theater can reach. In addition to its 11 Tony Awards, it has won also won Grammy, Olivier Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Political divides in the U.S. often root to fundamental disagreements about U.S. history — namely who this country was built by and for. These debates have opened questions about the extent to which the principles of U.S. democracy are compromised by the country’s foundation in slavery and genocide. They have also extended to fiercely contested historiographical battles over whether slavery was a major issue of the American Revolution, such as in relation to the 1619 Project, a long-form journalistic historiographical work launched in 2019 that presents a critical view of the Founding Fathers.

Hamilton has managed to appeal to a wide range of people on both sides of these debates. For many people of color in the audience, Hamilton’s casting of black and brown actors as Founding Fathers and emphasis on Alexander Hamilton’s immigrant background (as a white man from the British West Indies) is moving and powerful. For those who celebrate more monumental tellings of U.S. history, Lin Manuel-Miranda’s eagerness to glorify the U.S.’ founding, as well as the sacrifices of the Founding Fathers to set the intellectual scaffolding for a young, freedom-driven nation is also compelling.

Although it presents itself as a progressive revisionist retelling of the U.S.’ founding, Hamilton has also drawn critique that it only superficially reexamines the American Revolution by inserting non-white actors into what remains a narrative of an all-male, all-White, and largely all-elite Founding Fathers’ story. Hamilton also promotes the classic "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" view that the U.S. is special as a place that has space for impoverished, but ambitious immigrants like Alexander Hamilton to have a seat at the table, but elides the backdrop of slavery, structural racism, and the exclusion of women embedded into the Founding Fathers’ world. Hamilton may suggest the American Revolution was for the liberation of all Americans and the Founding Fathers penned a system that waxed poetic about democracy, but only for propertied white men, and whose intellectual work and labor were made possible by their dependence on enslaved people. (Hamilton himself, though, was an abolitionist.)

Scene after scene — although all excellently performed and delightful — left with me both excitement about Hamilton’s underdog story, ambition, and intellectual contributions to U.S. democracy, as well as disappointment that our nation was indeed founded in an elevated version of a boys’ locker room, with brilliant, macho bros debating politics in between roughhousing, dueling each other, and making lewd comments about the women they intend to deflower. The true romance seems not to be between Alexander Hamilton and the women in his life, but between him and Aaron Burr, someone who is truly his peer and equal in a way the Schuyler sisters are never presented to be in this musical with a strong Alexander Hamilton-loving male gaze.

It is comforting to see the story of the U.S. Founding Father whose history mirrors the immigrant and class struggle that many may relate to more than that of the other Founding Fathers, most of whom were landed gentry such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Hancock, and Patrick Henry who unabashedly trafficked enslaved people while debating the meaning of democracy. But is a stretch to say that Hamilton has reclaimed the U.S.’ founding narrative for immigrants and people of color. Diversity and representation on stage are critically important, but why tell a revisionist story from a perspective that so wholly glorifies and is enamored of a White, powerful man: Alexander Hamilton?

Hamilton is absolutely right when it proclaims that "immigrants get the job done." And yet most immigrants have not done so by "being in the room where it happened." Many have neither been at a constitutional table or have penned written history, but have gotten the job done through bodily labor, and have had fewer strokes of luck and the specific form of intelligence, bravado, and male privilege that Hamilton had. The legacy of us other immigrants and descendants of immigrants, as well as enslaved people and indigenous people in the founding of the United States have been largely repressed by the official archive’s insistence on glorifying only some legacies, especially those written and male, as well as in historiographical examinations of 1776. Post-Hamilton, U.S. history still must be reclaimed.