![]() Every single character, with the exception of King George, is specifically described as “non-white.” I’ve seen some people say “so what?” about the cast, or “weren’t all the founding fathers white? This isn’t historically accurate!” Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m fairly certain that the founding fathers also didn’t rap. Phillipa Soo as Eliza Schuyler, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, and Jasmine Cephas-Jones as Peggy SchuylerĪnother interesting aspect of the archive is the cast itself. At the end of the song, she faces the audience, “breaking the fourth wall… surprised that so many people actually came to hear story so many years in the future.” Eliza then gasps in wonder that her attempts to archive her husband’s life were successful. At the end of the final number “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” Eliza tells us that she has “put self back in the narrative” and is attempting to sift through everything that Hamilton wrote in his life in order to tell his story. However, one of the best moments of the show is only experienced live. Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when broke her heart.” Finally, in the immediate wake of the Hamilton-Burr duel, Burr realizes that he has become “the villain in history.” In “Wait For It,” Burr sings of how his parents “left no instructions” when they died-“just a legacy to protect.” Eliza chastises Hamilton on his “obsess with legacy.” Then, in a show of power, she burns his letters and proclaims, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative. ![]() George Washington is the first in the show to say that “history has its eyes on me.” He tells Hamilton this, and something else: “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” The characters in Hamilton are fighting in the American Revolution and then building a new nation from the bottom up, so it’s appropriate that many of them express fear or uncertainty as to how future generations will look back at them. He himself was creating a two-and-a-half-hour-long hip hop archive of Alexander Hamilton’s life when he wrote Hamilton, but even better is that his characters are aware that they’re being archived. One of my favorite aspects of the show is how Miranda handles archives. After Hamilton writes and publishes the Reynolds Pamphlet, his wife Eliza laments all the letters he has sent her and their “palaces built out of paragraphs.” ![]() In “Non-Stop,” the fictionalized Aaron Burr asks Hamilton how he “write day and night like running out of time.” In the same song, we are informed of the Federalist Papers: John Jay wrote five, James Madison wrote twenty-five, and Hamilton wrote an astounding fifty-one. In the musical, this is a point of interest. One interesting idea that comes up repeatedly throughout the show is that of legacy and story-telling. If you weren’t already overly-invested in Alexander Hamilton’s life (like I’ve been for the past few years), you will be after listening to this soundtrack. Based on the biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the music, lyrics, and book were all written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tell the story of the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton through a hip hop musical. By now, I think most people have at least heard of Hamilton: An American Musical.
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