30 April – 22 June
The platinum talent of Hamilton author, composer, and librettist Lin-Manuel Miranda is plain for all to see in this barnstorming musical narrative about one of America’s most important but lesser-known movers and shakers at the time of its foundation.
A multi-Tony and Grammy award-winner, Miranda has pumped zest into this near 3-hour long epic. Breath-taking in its scope and ambition, Hamilton is fired up with musical inventiveness, fusing rap, R&B, hip hop, jazz and dance in a score that pumps up its audience with triple espresso energy, who roar approval after every number.
Moving a little-known political player centre-stage and spinning the tumultuous story of the American Revolution around him has proved to be an inspired move by Miranda. Hamilton is an unlikely outsider, an orphaned immigrant who succeeds against all odds. With self-belief as his superpower, with a whip-sharp brain and an innate ability to write well, Hamilton could put into words ideas that would define the governance of a country post revolution. But Hamilton was more. A natural polymath – we witness his unstoppable rise as Washington’s aide-de-camp; we later find him founding a bank and a newspaper as well as being admitted to the New York bar as a lawyer – always, ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ it would seem. But rivals lurk.
The back story of Hamilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler (Maya Britto) and the smouldering but unrealised affections towards him by sister Peggy (Gabriela Benedetti) and his later affair with fellow politician’s wife Maria Reynolds, (also played by Benedetti), affords an otherwise sizzling ensemble brief periods of stillness.
Shaq Taylor delivers a towering, rock-like performance as Hamilton, alongside Sam Oladeinde as his political adversary Aaron Burr, with KM Drew Boateng as James Madison, and swaggeringly flamboyant depictions of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson by Billy Nevers.
Charles Simmons convinces as a brooding, epoch-making George Washington while Daniel Boys excels as a camp version of King George III, bedecked in pink satin and a glittering garter.
In an interview with The List, Taylor references Hamilton’s upbringing on an island full of prisoners, surrounded by suffering, and how that had hard-wired his ambition to rise above and to combat an internal ‘alarm bell of death’. In the end that drive to succeed just couldn’t be turned off and confrontation grew more deadly. The machine-gun delivery of Miranda’s quick-fire narrative in rap provides the perfect vehicle to illustrate Hamilton’s ‘not-a-minute-to-waste’ attitude. Thirty-three songs pulse through this performance, with My Shot perhaps most encapsulating the idea of seizing a moment.
With the highly tailored period costume designs of Paul Tazewell, some wonderfully responsive lighting design by Howell Binkley, and an ensemble to die for, driven all the way by the nine-piece band/orchestra led by Musical Director Zach Flis, Hamilton is a feast for the senses and the heart.
★★★★★ Simon Bishop, 4 May 2024
Photo credit: Danny Kaan
