Hamilton
"A show about young rebels grabbing and shaping the future of an unformed country, “Hamilton” is making its own resonant history by changing the language of musicals. And it does so by insisting that the forms of song most frequently heard on pop radio stations in recent years — rap, hip-hop, R&B ballads — have both the narrative force and the emotional interiority to propel a hefty musical about long-dead white men whose solemn faces glower from the green bills in our wallets." (x)
Hamilton is a groundbreaking new hip-hop musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton and the political landscape of the early United States. With music and lyrics by Tony- and Grammy-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, the musical opened at the Public in January 2015 and moved to Broadway in August 2015.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, grew up in the Latino neighborhood Washington Heights in Manhattan. When he was at Wesleyan University he started writing a show that would become In The Heights, an award-winning hip-hop / salsa musical about life in Washington Heights. LMM wrote the music & lyrics and played the starring role in Hamilton, just as he did for In The Heights.
Daveed Diggs is an actor and rapper from Oakland who taught as a substitute teacher and didn't consider himself a singer before joining Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton,
played by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Aaron Burr,
played by Leslie Odom Jr.
George Washington,
played by Christopher Jackson
Thomas Jefferson,
played by Daveed Diggs
Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, orphaned as a child, and came to New York at the start of the American revolution. Through the strength of his writing and his inflammatory opinions, he became George Washington's right hand man during the war and the first treasury secretary of the United States.
