My wife and I got to see Hamilton last night.
I’ve been thinking about the show for a while, both in anticipation of going and ever since the final blackout last night. I mentioned to a few people that we saw it and they had questions… so I figured I would put the answers down in a post.
How was it?
Spoiler alert: I loved it. It’s a powerful show about important things. It’s written well, performed well and staged well. I’ve seen shows with problems… Hamilton has none.
How did you get tickets?
Simple. I jumped online as soon as they were available and paid face value. Then waited 10 months.
The show is popular; there is no getting around that. The theater is full for every single performance and people buy tickets well in advance. I just checked the website and, as of today, there is a block of available tickets for performances between April 10 and August 19. Of course, that’s a lot of dates and the one you want may be sold out… and the ticket-purchase process is awful… and you have to spend a long time clicking on dates to see if any seats are available… and the tickets start at $220. But there are there if you want them.
It seems that you can somehow subscribe to text alerts for when new seats are available. A friend is on that list and told me, back in March, when that happened. I jumped online and found some seats. It took almost 30 minutes of trying before I found a date I could go that had available seats and the purchase process failed twice before it succeeded… but we got seats. They were a little more than $210 each and I would not describe them as the best seats in the house:
If you look closely, you can see that there are, in fact, two seats that are worse then ours… but only two. That being said, there really are no bad seats at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and, as you can see in the selfie, we had a great, unobstructed view of the stage:
Anyway, that’s how to get tickets: buy them as soon as they’re available.
Could you understand what the actors were saying?
The show is wordy.
According to a fantastic analysis by Leah Libresco at FiveThirtyEight, Hamilton has “twice as many words per minute as its closest competitor” and “nearly an order of magnitude more words than 1776” (20,520 vs 2,735). There are a lot of lyrics and they come at you fast… for almost three hours. Understanding what they are saying is a legitimate concern.
We prepared, I guess. I’ve been listening to the cast recording since before I bought the tickets (not constantly, of course, just now and then) and I was certainly familiar with everything the actors say in the show. However, I have been to many Broadway shows where I couldn’t make out the lyrics because of too much other music and noise, or mealy-mouthed performances.
I am pleased to report that this wasn’t really an issue at Hamilton. There were a few spots where someone swallowed a word or two — and, to be honest, James Monroe Inglehart’s performance of “Guns and Ships” is simply incomprehensible, especially compared to that of Daveed Diggs on the album — but those moments are few and far between.
It was clear to me that comprehensibility was important to the company and, furthermore, the theatre’s amplification did a great job of carrying the lyrics all the way back to the cheap seats.
This brings up a related question:
Did you really enjoy a whole show performed in rap?
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding.
It is true that many of the show’s songs are performed in hip-hop… but certainly not all of them. There are a number of different musical styles in the show, ranging from Beatle-esqe 60’s pop to R&B and classical ballads. A number of my favorite numbers (“Satisfied,” “That Would Be Enough,” “One Last Time” and “It’s Quiet Uptown”) are big, beautiful, classic Broadway showtunes. The show doesn’t deserve to be pigeon-holed into a single musical style.
Who did you see?
The show opened on Broadway back in August 2015. It’s been running for over two years now and most of the leads from the original cast have turned over. We didn’t see Lin-Manuel Miranda, or even Javier Muñoz, the current actor playing the title role. We didn’t see Daveed Diggs as Lafayette/Jefferson, or Leslie Odom Jr. as Burr, or Christopher Jackson as Washington or Brian d’Arcy James as King George. That being said, none of those people (except Miranda) were household names before they launched Hamilton; it was the play that made their careers, not the other way around. The current players are certainly competent — excellent, even — and I didn’t suffer s single moment of “how the hell did they get this part?”
The company is small for such a huge story — there’s quite a bit of doubling — and the show gets a ton of mileage out of every person on stage. There are also a number of moments when the entire company performs at once… and they are powerful.
So? Is it really as good as people say?
In a word, yes. It’s a brilliant piece of theatre.
As I said at the outset, I loved it. It’s a powerful show about important things. It’s written well, performed well and staged well. Let me flesh that out a little bit:
- The story is huge. It begins with Hamilton’s birth and moves straight through his move to New York and then the entire Revolutionary War. Once that’s over, the show moves to Hamilton’s time as Secretary of the Treasury… and that’s just the first act. Act II deals with Jefferson’s opposition, the Adams administration, political infighting, the tragedies in Hamilton’s personal life, his eventual death at Burr’s hand and his legacy. It’s a humongous story and Miranda’s script is tight all the way through.
- The play’s pacing is, in a word, relentless. Even the applause breaks feel quick… there is always more action, more intrigue, more story about to happen.
- As I’ve said, I was familiar with the cast recording long before I saw the show. As you may have heard, the recording includes every minute of the performance; there is nothing to the show except for those songs. That being said, there’s a lot more to see:
- The play’s staging and choreography are what impressed me the most. There isn’t much dancing — not in the traditional Broadway sense — but a small chorus is used to great effect in a series of short, modern dances that underscore the play’s action and themes.
- The show is lit like a rock concert. The lights open, close, move, appear and disappear… they create mood and setting, hide things you aren’t supposed to see and force you to see (and feel) the things you are supposed to. Speaking as an experienced lighting designer, it’s the most innovative lighting design I’ve ever seen.
- The set includes two concentric turntables which are used brilliantly: they are practically characters in the show. The play’s action is virtually constant — there are very few blackouts — and the cast and set pieces move on and off in an almost never-ending ballet. There is one moment in particular — when Hamilton is caught “in the eye of the hurricane” — which made me gasp out-loud.
In short, the show does virtually nothing wrong and is so ambitious, so ground-breaking and so innovative that, in my opinion, it really does deserve the accolades its been getting. It’s almost trite these days to call a show “brilliant” and “a must-see” but, in the case of Hamilton, it’s justified.
See it, if you can. I can’t imagine you being disappointed.