That "Hamilton" Show Is Really Starting to Take Off!

What NYC finds so-eight-years-ago is post-lockdown-au-courant everywhere else.

Dateline 2023: “Hamilton Extends Manila Run”

If you’re a follower of happening trends, you have plenty of reason to assume that the amazing impact of “Hamilton: an American Musical” peaked a while back. I’ve even noted some active backlash against the show by some of the former kids, now in full-on adolescence, who once lived and breathed the original cast album.

The kid backlash isn’t totally surprising. As young adults, we tend to reject our teenybop faves and even claim we never liked them. We re-embrace them in our late twenties, onset of the nostalgia phase that drags on until grim death.

Leaving the former young fanbase aside, though, journalists and U.S. historians and other certified grownups who could talk of nothing else between 2014 and 2016, as well as the liberal population for whom the cast album became kind of counter-soundtrack to the heinous 2017-2020 presidential term—to the point where the actual Hamilton was obsessively quoted everywhere, from The New Yorker to the Jan. 6 Committee, where nobody would have quoted him before (for good reason)—have stopped paying any attention to a phenomenon that, when it first exploded, was cast as indelible, defining, the ultimate Obama-era proclamation of a newly redeemed national history and polity, embodied in a great American popular art form.

That was then. In the pages of The New York Times, “Hamilton” is pretty much over. Life, amazingly enough, has gone on, and some of the former-kid snark has even leached into the mainstream. “Tony Awards Are Spared a Lin-Manuel Miranda Rap”—Vulture, yesterday.

Everywhere else in the English-speaking and English-fluent world, however, things are different. You wouldn’t know this unless you have a Google alert set on the term “Alexander Hamilton” (and who on earth would do that!?): productions of “Hamilton: an American Musical” are only now starting to proliferate and penetrate. The real phenomenon is only now getting underway.

When I say “everywhere,” I mean it. This week, tickets went on sale in Abu Dhabi. The show will soon open in Auckland. Recent productions launched in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. In Birmingham (England). In Dublin. In Manila.

That list of overseas locales may seem to suggest that the U.S. has long since been saturated by productions of the show, which still does sell out in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere; touring companies began traveling in early ‘17. More significantly, though, as pandemic cautions were lifted, the last eighteen months or so have seen new and returning regional productions in a host of much smaller U.S. theater markets: Oklahoma City OK, Appleton WI, Dayton OH, and that’s only a few of dozens. Some are booked-in. Some are new rep-theater productions.

This is the real cultural success (commercial too), impact on a level that in-the-know bicoastal elite types who identify trends—as well as founder-quote-slinging pols—so often miss. In the trend world, those who saw the show at the Public Theater have it over the Broadway crowd; those who scored a Broadway ticket far outrank those who would one day be reduced to watching the Disney-Plus TV airing, in 2020. Those first flushes of “Hamilton” excitement probably peaked with the 2016 PBS Great Performances documentary “Hamilton’s America,” featuring President Obama among other celebs. It’s a documentary that only seven years later, many might find fairly cringe-inducing—and if so, please remember you’re only catching up to how I felt then!—but while the PBS/celeb version of popular success can aid real popular success, it isn’t real popular success. Dublin, Manila, Dayton . . . That’s the thing.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. For me, the continuing interest in “Hamilton” is good. I have a character-driven, page-turning, dissenting pop history of Hamilton and his dire and dramatic political fights, not mentioned in the play, coming out next year—so maybe my book will draw some general-reader interest from the musical’s ongoing penetration of less fancy markets. I hope so, anyway.

From the BAD HISTORY point of view, the issues remain a bit more complex. Awareness of the musical’s ongoing spread has forced me to look back over the past eight years or so and shake my head in wonderment. I get much less testy, now, over the general public’s enjoyment of hiphop-patriotic-fantasy pageantry than I did in 2017 about somebody as sophisticated as Martha Nussbaum’s taking the thin hagiography of the source material seriously.

Those fights are probably over for good, even if the phenomenon isn’t. Works for me.