Hamilton: The Musical

is like a wedding.

Sometime just before I got married and for a little while afterward, I became obsessed with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 hit musical Hamilton. I’d seen the film version—in the UK, actually, which was kind of an odd place to watch it—but it was the earworm audio that I became obsessed with in the last few months, playing it over and over to keep myself awake on long car trips and during extensive packing sessions. Miranda’s penchant for assonance—“the founding father without a father who got a lot farther by being a lot smarter, by working a lot harder”—and the musical’s influence from hip-hop and rap helps it escape the singsong, saccharine quality that Broadway musicals sometimes have.

But even more than that, Hamilton perfectly walks the very thin line between being a piece of fluff entertainment and having something important to say. Musicals—or plays or movies or music—overburdened with “something important to say” are often lugubrious and self-important, but Hamilton escapes this fate. It touches on many tempting hot-button issues—discrimination, misogyny, inequality, the fatal flaw of slavery written into the U.S. Constitution—but somehow manages not to let any of those issues take the steering wheel.

The reason for this is simple: Hamilton is about Alexander Hamilton. We see a strange, difficult, glorious life full of contradictions play out on stage, where each character’s struggles are particular to them—Angelica faces the stifling expectations of 18th-century womanhood but also the fallout from her own impulsive personality; Hamilton’s race and position in life, but also his workaholism and lack of self-control, tend to set him back.

The musical swept America in the 20-teens, at a time when Marvel was inexorably marching out one blockbuster after another and Disney kept doing live-action remakes of its classic animated films. Original ideas were few and far between—why hadn’t anyone thought to write the story of Alexander Hamilton, full of heartbreak and duels and strokes of wild genius and the drama of the American Revolution, before? The new IP was literally in everyone’s wallets.