Hamilton The American Musical Sparknotes

On August 6, 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical, written and composed by Lin Manuel Miranda, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, premiered at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, immediately achieving fame and success among theatre critics and fans alike through its conscientious non-white casting and melding of contradictory Hip-Hop/R&B beats with traditional show tunes. This argumentatively progressive musical contributes to our understanding that our current society may be a post-racial one; that is, an American society that has shed all examples of racial bias and prejudice and seemingly resolved its long history of racism. The multiracial cast depicts the story of the American Revolution, specifically the story of Treasurer Alexander Hamilton,

originally an immigrant from Saint Kitts who fought his way to the top of the new United States Government through his amazing writing skills and unique dedication to do anything in his power to form the America he thought was one that would be good for the people. Yet, this retelling of history by Black, Latinx, Asian, and Hispanic actors, with minority groups taking ownership of a history that did not include them, unintentionally emphasizes what Matthew Pratt Guterl defines as "racial sightlines" in his scholarly work Seeing Race in Modern America.

By making it a point to cast minority groups and those who are racially "other", Miranda actually resists changing the way we see race as a society, as visual culture is sensory and therefore, "seeing" race is making race. The main concern of this paper is how does this musical specifically reflect who we are as an American society, something that scholar Raymond Knapp serves to answer in a broader sense in The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, written almost ten years before the premiere of Hamilton. In his thematic approach, questioning what do musicals do within a culture, he questions whether a musical reflects "Whose America?" or "Who is

America?". I argue that Hamilton: An American Musical attempts to reflect the question of "Whose America" onto the audience, providing them with a retelling of white-American history through races and ethnicities that have been marginalized throughout our American history.
Lin Manuel Miranda began working on Hamilton during the run of another musical, featuring music and lyrics also written by him, In the Heights, focusing on a Hispanic-American community in Washington Heights, New York.

Taking shape under the title The Hamilton Mixtape in 2009, Miranda performed what would become "Alexander Hamilton", the show's opening number, at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word. It is important to consider the timing of this musical, as he first showcased its rough beginnings during the Obama Administration, one that many presumed was evidence that America had entered a post-racial era; that is, electing an African-American president could only mean that there were no longer racist people living in America. The 2016 Presidential Election, occurring less than a year after the premiere of the musical, would prove this assumption greatly incorrect as the election of current-president Donald Trump would allow for white supremacists to come out from behind the shadows, causing for a recent refocusing on "whiteness". After a performance on November 18, 2016, attended by the at the time Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Brandon Victor Dixon (Aaron Burr) addressed Pence, stating: "We, sir -- we -- are the diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to

uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us." This statement was immediately critiqued by the President, tweeting that the cast must "apologize!" (@realDonaldTrump, 2016) for Dixon's remarks, ignoring the reality of the current political climate, being that many American minorities had fears of how the new administration would represent their needs and desires. This in turn brings up the question of what kind of America does this musical represent if it can illicit such different responses from viewers, as musicals are supposed to arm audiences, "with songs to be shared, providing at least some basis for achieving a sense of unity among the increasingly varies peoples of a country" (Knapp 8).