A Celebration of ‘Hamilton’ at 10 Years

On January 20, 2015, the unmistakable first riff of the Hamilton score echoed through the Public Theater in East Village. Eleven Tony Awards, 10 years, and a Pulitzer Prize later, the story of Hamilton and the musical’s namesake are far from over. 

To some, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s name appears to have materialized overnight. To the savvy theatergoer, Hamilton was yet another success in Miranda’s already well-established career—and, without a doubt, his greatest. In 2008, Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ In the Heights won four Tony Awards, among them Best Original Musical and Best Original Score. In addition to bringing the barrios of his youth to Broadway, in 2011, he co-authored the cheerleading musical spectacular Bring It On with Tom Kitt and Amanda Green.

Years before Hamilton graced the Richard Rogers stage, Miranda’s hallmark blending of rap motifs, unpredictable yet unimaginably satisfying rhythms, and clever lyrics are undeniably present in his earlier scores. To the Hamilton fanatic, the loud siren in Bring It On’s “Cross The Line” and militaristic drumbeat at the start of “Do Your Own Thing” are hauntingly similar to motifs in “Non-Stop” and “Meet Me Inside.” Also from Bring It On, “It’s All Happening” is a treasure trove of Miranda’s writing style: the song’s tightly-knit female harmonies layered over R&B groove, rhyme scheme as fluid as that of “Cabinet Battle #1,” bold shifts in meter, and final salvo of ensemble vocals are signatures of Miranda’s style.

Miranda’s contribution of rap and pop music to theatrical vocabulary is groundbreaking, and as article after article has pointed out, game-changing in countless ways for the American musical theater canon. But after 10 years, Hamilton remains at the forefront of not just Broadway, but American culture. Perhaps Hamilton’s greatest legacy, even more so than its immaculate vocals and artistic genius, is the way it fundamentally changed the relationship between scholarship, performance, and the public. 

Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton is not the Alexander Hamilton of high school United States history classes. He is not merely the founder who pushed for the assumption of states’ debts—whatever that means—nor the guy who was shot in a duel by resentful veep Aaron Burr. He is an intensely disagreeable man, a tragic hero, and a cathartic figure whose flaws and virtues are almost one and the same. 

On the whole, Hamilton does not conform to the widespread, oversimplified, and grossly inaccurate narrative of the founding era which consists of a group of colonists unilaterally deciding to rebel against “taxation without representation.” Miranda’s Hamilton is a rabble-rouser, a relentless, hot-tempered spit-fire. By no means does he agree with characters in the show on a regular basis. He disobeys Washington, verbally attacks Jefferson, and frequently finds himself at odds with his family and friends. 

This is to say, Miranda’s founders are surely theatricalized, but also incredibly human. It is no wonder that audiences are still sniffling when (*spoiler alert*) Hamilton’s son dies in a duel for his father’s honor. 

While Miranda certainly takes artistic liberties in the script for the sake of concision and cohesion, he performs the role of a scholar-curator—presenting his audience with a compact, largely textual depiction of a figure formerly glossed over except in eighteenth-century economics. Miranda’s Hamilton fires off an astonishing 6,205 words every show, many of which are parsed directly from Hamilton’s own lengthy writings. Take the Reynolds Pamphlet, for instance, where segments of Hamilton’s own writing are interwoven in the lyric. Miranda condenses 11,000-some words of the Pamphlet into a two-minute song, taking an obscure and dense footnote of history and transforming it into an easily memorizable earworm. 

In addition to moving a figure who once belonged to the academy into America’s public history and pop culture, Miranda hammers home the “why now?” question with parallels between the eighteenth and twenty-first century. Past and present collide with tasteful cultural commentary on themes such as immigration and American identity which continue to resonate with the American people. But with the musical’s 2020 release on Disney Plus, Hamilton also cast a spotlight on a new path forward for musical theater: streaming. 

This is not to say that other creatives had not attempted to place Broadway productions online for audiences around the world. In 2016, Broadway producers Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley set the Guinness World Record for “First Livestreamed Broadway Show” with a production of She Loves Me. While BroadwayHD provides a window into the nostalgia of the “golden age” of musical theater with recordings of revivals of Oklahoma! and Carousel and even access to previously-aired musical specials such as The Sound of Music and Jesus Christ Superstar, many musicals available on the platform are neither very popular nor current. 

The decision to record and release an original-cast production of Hamilton, both widely popular and currently running on Broadway, speaks volumes about the show’s universality and impact. Disney Plus subscriptions skyrocketed after the announcement that the Tony-winning musical would be available on platform, with its original cast no less. Debate still exists around whether the streaming model can at least comparably capture the artistry of live performance. Hamilton, available on Disney Plus since the summer of 2020, continues to fill theaters on Broadway and beyond, showing producers that it is in fact possible to run a new digital path parallel to the traditional syndicate model in the twenty-first century. 

On the eve of the semiquincentennial of the United States, the political and cultural questions posed in Hamilton are perhaps even more salient than at the time of the show’s opening and the musical’s poignant moments more impactful. Just as the founders frequently disagreed about the path forward after the American Revolution, it is doubtless that America’s future leaders will continue to disagree on their visions for the country. 

For over ten years, scholar-artist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton has flipped the script on the relationship between public intellectualism, the arts, and popular culture, somehow making all three not only compatible but cool. He has invited the American public into the narrative of our nation’s history, making the theater—as it was in its “golden era”—a wellspring of radio hits and transforming it into an electrifying entry point into the academy.

 In the words of Hamilton’s cast, the world will never be the same.