Actors Austin Scott (left) and Carvens Lissaint of the national tour of “Hamilton” (Photo by Joan Marcus courtesy Broadway in Richmond)
‘Hamilton’
Nov. 19-Dec. 8 at Altria Theater (Tickets go on sale Sept. 27 at 8 a.m.)
Patricia Herrera first saw “Hamilton” in 2015 when the musical was playing off Broadway at New York’s Public Theater. “The same night I was there, they announced it was going to Broadway, and so I got a ticket and saw it again,” she says. Herrera, an associate professor of theater at the University of Richmond, has now seen the production, based on the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, three times. “I was enamored by it, I am still enamored by it,” she says.
Yet she cautions that the musical — a show so big it produced an unlikely hit song about Yorktown — should not be taken as history.
“It is a great vehicle to begin a conversation about history,” she says. “It’s theater, so the artists can imagine other things and other possibilities. I think it’s a great starting point. But you should go deeper.”
In a recent book, “Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restating America’s Past” (Rutgers University Press), Herrera is one of 16 scholars who offer pointed thoughts on the historical, artistic and educational impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-, Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning spectacle, coming to Richmond for the first time Nov. 19-Dec. 8. The book of essays examines everything from the ongoing revisionist revival of “founder’s chic” — a few great men did everything — to the play’s often fast-and-loose depiction of its hero, a Revolutionary War veteran who co-wrote the U.S. Constitution and helped build the nation’s financial system.
Herrera is delighted by the musical’s use of hip-hop, and how it immediately captured the attention of young people — no mean feat for a contemporary musical. “I was struck by how much my children connected to it and how they identified with some of the lyrics. I was really proud as a parent that they were responding so favorably to these themes of immigration and valuing them.”
But then she listened harder. “What makes the musical so incredible is that there’s this multiracial cast that is representational of what we want America to be, and then it uses a hip-hop vocabulary that you don’t often see in theater,” she says. “Because you are bombarded and saturated with all of these possibilities, however, you begin to lose sight of other things.” Like, she says, the very real institution of slavery. “The audience gets to imagine the possibilities of America, but it becomes a problem when you stop there. What an opportunity it would’ve been to include the narratives of the slave people.”
Claire Bond Potter, a historian at The New School in New York, and the co-editor (with Renee C. Romano) of “Historians on Hamilton,” says the inspiration for the book was their awareness that many teachers were using "Hamilton" in the classroom to spark conversations about the themes of the American Revolution. “There were all of these debates about the history that the play represented, and there wasn’t one book that people could read where they could engage with those discussions,” she says.
What "Hamilton" does, Potter says, is grab us with a story that is human and emotional. “But it may not exactly be the right story,” she adds. “It may either leave certain kinds of history in place that aren’t being questioned or insert new historical themes that aren’t really appropriate. ... People need to be informed, and students hopefully will learn to distinguish between actual history and historical fiction.“
One of the main debates surrounding the musical, in the essays and elsewhere, is whether the real Alexander Hamilton was an abolitionist. “He’s positioned that way in the musical,” Herrera says, “but it really lets him off the hook. It lets a lot of the founding fathers off the hook because the country was created on the backs of enslaved people, and that’s the conversation that is not heard.”
“'Hamilton' draws on history, but it’s really art,” echoes Potter, “and art has to do something that historians don’t have to do. It has to bring the audience in and keep them there with a minimal storyline, while we historians can afford to highlight contradictions and point out ironies and give our audience liberal amounts of evidence to back ourselves up.”
Despite the critiques, Herrera and Potter, like most of the other essayists in “Historians on Hamilton,” praise the show as powerful entertainment. Both of them say, at times, they wept with emotion.
“Don’t let the criticisms of the musical keep you from enjoying it,” Potter says with a laugh. “Everybody enjoys it. You’d have to be a very curious sourpuss not to like it.”
JUST THE FACTS, HAM
What the musical gets wrong1
- Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth, never wrote to General Washington begging to have her husband sent home from battle.
- John Adams couldn't have fired Hamilton from his cabinet because he had been out of office for two years.
- Aaron Burr never attended Hamilton’s wedding.
- Jefferson wasn’t a boastful scoundrel but was described as quiet, contemplative and nonconfrontational.
1 “Alexander Hamilton: The Graphic History of an American Founding Father”
3 MORE THEATER EVENTS
Through Oct. 18 at Firehouse Theatre
This former Broadway rock musical and Spike Lee-directed film tells the story of a young man discovering himself in Europe in the 1970s. It’s part comedy, part drama. $20 to $45.
"A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder"
Sept. 27-Oct. 20 at Virginia Repertory Theatre
When Monty finds out he’s ninth in line to become Earl of Highhurst, he will stop at nothing to ensure his place in the family that rejected him. This Tony-Award-winning musical was based on the 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” $36 to $63.
"Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods"
Oct. 10-Nov. 2 at 5th Wall Theatre
Christine, recently divorced in Pittsburgh, meets Gabriel, a former Sudanese “Lost Boy” working in the produce section of Whole Foods. Touched by his story of struggle, she invites him to live with her and her daughter. $15 to $32.
