Once in a generation, a musical comes along that resets the theatrical atmosphere and perhaps enters the wider popular culture. Hamilton is such a show — as Show Boat was in the 1920s, Oklahoma! in the 1940s, Hair in the 1960s, Phantom of the Opera in the 1980s, and Rent as the millennium approached. “Whether it’s a watershed, a breakthrough, and a game-changer,” New York magazine critic Jesse Green noted in his review of Hamilton, “Miranda is too savvy (and loves his antecedents too much) to try to reinvent all the rules at once.”
While on vacation from his 2008 Tony-winning musical In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. Within a few chapters, he began to envision music leaping off the pages. He secured Chernow as historical consultant and started work on The Hamilton Mixtape, a show about “America then, as told by America now.” On May 12, 2009, he was invited to perform music from In the Heights at the White House. Instead, he performed a draft of his new show’s opening, “Alexander Hamilton.” (President Obama later invited Miranda back to perform music from Hamilton with the original cast.)
By July 2013, Miranda had a draft of the entire first act and three songs from the second act, which he presented in a workshop at Vassar College, where Thomas Kail joined as director and Alex Lacamoire as musical director. After another two years of writing, the show made its Off-Broadway debut at the Public Theater in February 2015. Choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler joined Kail and Lacamoire for the production, which included three principals from the workshop production: Miranda (Hamilton), Daveed Diggs (Lafayette, Jefferson), and Christopher Jackson (Washington).
Variety critic Marilyn Stasio wrote, “Miranda’s impassioned narrative of one man’s story becomes the collective narrative of a nation, a nation built by immigrants who occasionally need to be reminded where they came from.” New York magazine critic Jesse Green highlighted Miranda’s craft: “The conflict between independence and interdependence is not just the show’s subject but also its method: It brings the complexity of forming a union from disparate constituencies right to your ears.” Stasio had also noted, “The sense, as well as the sound of the sung dialogue, has been purposely suited to each character.”
The production received 12 Lortel Award nominations, winning for musical, director (Kail), choreographer (Blankenbuehler), actor (Miranda), actress (Phillipa Soo), featured actor (Diggs), and featured actress (René Elise Goldsberry). It received additional outstanding musical awards from the Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics, Off Broadway Alliance, and Obie Awards.
After two extensions of its limited Off-Broadway engagement, it moved to Broadway. Most of the cast moved with the show, except Brian d’Arcy James, replaced as King George III by Jonathan Groff. In his review of the Broadway transfer, Time Out New York critic David Cote wrote, “The work’s human drama and novelistic density remain astonishing.”
The production received a record-setting 16 Tony nominations, winning for musical, book (Miranda), score (Miranda), actor (Leslie Odom Jr.), featured actor (Diggs), featured actress (Goldsberry), direction (Kai), choreography (Blankenbuehler), and orchestrations (Lacamoire). It also received a 2015 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a special 2018 Kennedy Center Honors.
The West End production opened in December 2017, winning seven Olivier Awards, including musical. The first U.S. national tour began in March 2017, a second tour in February 2018, and a third tour in January 2019, which included a three-week engagement in Puerto Rico with Miranda in the title role.
The cast album peaked at #3 on Billboard 200 and #1 on the Top Rap Albums chart, the first cast album to do so, and won the Grammy as Best Musical Theater Album. It became the fifth best-selling album of 2016 and was certified six-time multiplatinum, making it the best-selling cast recording ever. The followup The Hamilton Mixtape topped the album charts in 2016.
After listening to the original cast album, read more about the making of the show in Hamilton: The Revolution, by Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. Then watch the film, which premieres July 3, 2020, on Disney+.
NEXT, listen to another multi-platinum (and Grammy-winning) cast album: Wicked, with a score by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 retelling of the classic story from the perspective of the witches in Oz, before and after Dorothy arrives.
THEN, explore The Book of Mormon by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone. It became the fastest-selling cast album in iTunes history and the first to make the Top 10 on Billboard’s album chart since Hair in 1969.