"My name is Alexander Hamilton/And there's a million things I haven't done/But just you wait, just you wait," Lin-Manuel Miranda sort of sings at the beginning of Hamilton. About three hours later we're still waiting.
Hamilton is divided into two acts. The first covers Hamilton's arrival in New York City in 1776, his work as General George Washington's aide-de-camp during the American Revolution, and how he met and married Eliza Schuyler.
The second covers Hamilton's postwar work as the first United States Secretary of the Treasury and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. The first act is strictly hagiographic; Hamilton is so messianic that Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) might as well be called Judas.
Watching the meteoric rise of the protagonist's military and political career unfold in song and dance form, I began to experience a revelation; if they changed the historical pe-riod and characters, this could easily become Forrest Gump: The Musical.
We never really get a sense of why Hamilton was so special, important, and essential in the lives of so many people; his success seems to be the result of a geographical-temporal accident — that is to say, Hamilton is always in the right place at the right time.
Miranda has allegedly written songs with many adjectives and very few verbs; lyrics that care more about the 'what' than the 'how' and 'why'. "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore/And a Scots-man, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot/In the Caribbean by providence impoverished/In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?"
That’s a good question, deserving of a better answer than "by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter." And, apparently, by being vague as all hell. Hamilton thus moves from one plot point to the next as in a dream, without ever conjuring up a precise image of the cha-racter's trajectory.
The second act is more specific about Hamilton's legacy; the character stops just 'being' and starts 'doing.' There is, however, another problem here.
The real Hamilton was more a man of words than actions, and his writings must surely be fascinating to the appropriate reader; on the other hand, one doesn’t read him for the sheer entertainment value.
To mention just one example, Hamilton helped ratify the United States Constitution by writing 51 of the 85 essays known as The Federalist Papers, which are still used as one of the most important
references for the interpretation of the Constitution.
This is almost as impressive as it is boring, and all the hip hop choreography in the world can't change the fact that Miranda's alleged songs, although true to the spirit of the statesman who inspired them, are devoid of all trace of showmanship.
These are long, heavily expository litanies, laden with facts and dates, as if written by a high school student who can’t remember his History otherwise. Meanwhile, King George III of England (Jona-than Groff, who steals the show in his too brief and few appearances) is depicted as a buffoon, but has the catchiest song in the entire production.
All of the above notwithstanding, Hamilton's biggest flaw is Miranda himself. As a composer he clearly favors quantity over quality, but a performer with authority and presence might have been able, with a superhuman effort, to elevate the author's pedestrian material.
Miranda is very far from being that performer; his dancing can be generously described as spastic, and his singing is more of an irritating nasal whine, as if he inhaled helium before each number — as opposed to the oxygen for which he visibly gasps as he tries to sing and dance at the same time.
Oh, and to be perfectly non-PC, his physical resemblance to the Bumblebee Man from The Simp-sons isn’t very pleasing either. All things considered, Miranda surrounds himself with a wonderful cast; so wonderful indeed that each individual member, as well as the ensemble as a whole, outshines the star, who is exposed as a black hole of charisma and talent that sucks all the joy out of singing and dancing.
