10 years on, has the musical Hamilton aged well?

Ten years ago, Hamilton premiered on Broadway and altered the course of musical theatre history forever. 

The revolutionary hit show about the founding of America as a nation has been wildly successful, making stars out of many in its original cast. But the world looks quite different from how it did 10 years ago, and hindsight has now cast the show in a new light. 

Today on Commotion, professor James McMaster as well as culture critics Jackson Weaver and Karen Fricker join guest host Rad Simonpillai to unpack what Hamilton: An American Musical's legacy is looking like today.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Rad: James, despite how things may have seemed back [in 2015], the show didn't actually win over everybody. You were one of the first people to publicly question how this musical reimagined American history. Can you walk us through where you thought it fell short? 

James: I'll give two things as offerings in response to this question, with the caveat that I love the musical. I sing Satisfied alone in my apartment all the time. But the history of the United States cannot be told without acknowledging its original sins, right? And those sins, to keep it real, are the genocide of Indigenous people so that the country could be on the land, and the enslavement of Black Africans, right? There are moments in Hamilton where those realities are gestured toward, and I would say very generously gestured toward. But does the musical offer a real reckoning with those realities? No, and this is especially problematic for many of the show's critics because by casting Black and brown people in the roles of the founding fathers, some of whom were slaveholders, the musical allows the audience to sort of distance themselves from the recognition of really who the country was built for [and] the values on which the country was built in the first place….

The second thing I think the musical perpetuates [is] a kind of fantasy of meritocracy that has for a long time in the United States not been a reality, right? So Hamilton is framed as "another immigrant coming up from the bottom," "young, scrappy, and hungry," "not throwing away his shot." But the reality for immigrants in the United States, even at the time of the Obama administration, was not that you could be exceptionally talented, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally hardworking and become a hero of American history. It happens, but it is exceptional. And so there's this bootstraps meritocracy that the show perpetuates, particularly with respect to immigration, that I think was overstating the case.

Rad: I want to pick up on the erasure of the violence that you're speaking of here…. Jackson, these are the kinds of glossed-over historical details that people took issue with. What are you making of those criticisms?

Jackson: First off, I think what James was saying was absolutely right. I love this musical. I will replay The Room Where It Happens over and over in my apartment. And I think if this musical wasn't as hugely successful, as seminal to the lens we look at this decade as it became, then we wouldn't necessarily need to critique it as closely as we do. But because it did, it opens up this whole conversation — an accidental conversation, because when Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote this musical, he was trying to write a musical about Hamilton, a forgotten founding father, a story about ambition that echoes his own rapid-fire brain and his own fear of mortality. And then casting Black and non-white people in these roles, as it says in the book about the musical, was kind of an accidental thing that came about because these are the people that could best rap…. Now it becomes this huge conversation [about] the American story, and it becomes a very shallow one because it reveals how little it actually says about the only true American art form, which is Black musicality. And this revisionist history isn't something like Inglourious Basterds where it gives a Jewish person a different version of history to kill a Nazi. This is Washington rapping hip-hop through a mouth of slave teeth…. 

This is not about what it means to be Black in America. This is not that sort of story about history, about being, even, an immigrant, because Hamilton came over to America by the labour of enslaved people. He was trading sugarcane and all the things he can't afford that were being taken out of the ground by slaves, by people that he then came off the back of and came to America. So this kind of hagiography, or this homage to hip-hop is something because Lin-Manuel Miranda — again, and not Black person himself — loves hip-hop, and he wanted to give all these accolades to hip-hop, and he did such a good job of it. But if you really want to say a story about America and how it looks from the perspective of a Black person, have Frederick Douglass and his speech saying, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" Have the Haitian revolution and set it in America to show how dehumanized these people actually are, and how impossible it is to rise above when the entire world is allied against you. Hamilton is using this Obama-era hopefulness, which made a lot of sense when it was written and when it was very first performed. But now when you get the line, "Immigrants: we get the job done," and people clap — it sounds different when there is a secret police force going through Los Angeles and arresting people. The way that Hamilton looks at the world only works if you are very hopeful about a specific way that the world can be, that is not necessarily the way that the world looks anymore.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Amelia Eqbal.