‘Hamilton’, thru Broadway in Chicago, is still as crisp as a fresh tenner
The Company. Photo by Joan Marcus.
Ever since it fired its opening shot off-Broadway in 2015, Hamilton has left no equivocators in its wake, just as the flinty Founding Father it takes as its subject might’ve liked it. A juggernaut praised to the heavens and damned to hell. It was gunslinger-savvy; it was community-center earnest. It shattered ceilings; it barely tapped the glass. It turned the statues of our nation’s founders into flesh and blood; it kept the mass of skeletons beneath them firmly entombed.
These can all be true. Such is a living art form. These are the debates that should be happening after every show lets out. Such is a living democracy.
The one thing upon which I think we can all agree: from its martial opening beat to its whispering close, Hamilton courses with bioelectricity. Imitators will try their best, but the sheer poetic confluence of Alexander Hamilton, the man of many strongly worded letters, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Broadway baby and hip-hop encyclopedia, is a fiendishly singular thing. It’s uniquely alive, and how lucky we are to be alive right now to see these people in this room making it happen.
Extra kudos to two of those people in the room on press night: Ashley LaLonde and Jisel Soleil Ayon for stepping in for Angelica Schuyler and Maria Reynolds (…and Peggy), respectively. Especially as regards the former, Angelica’s perspective-flipping song “Satisfied” is where Hamilton, having proven its smarts, finds its heart, and LaLonde did it justice.
This company as a whole—the “Philip” company, it’s called, to distinguish it from the other Hamilton productions going on—does this near-three-hour marathon of material justice. And if they flawlessly follow the sweeping, almost-cinematic direction of Thomas Kail and choreography of Andy Blankenbuehler, inch by inch, they’re moving out of the looming shadow of the original cast and finding new spins on established gospel.
Among other points:
Hamilton, especially as biographized by Ron Chernow, reads as a cynic from birth and not without cause. Disenfranchised—“a bastard orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman” and raised in an unforgiving Caribbean backwater—and exposed to heinous slave-driving cruelties, he never seems the wholly trusting sort. (What exactly did he talk about “for six hours,” leaving the Constitutional Convention “listless”? For one, supremely undemocratic lifetime political appointments.) Inversely, Miranda, who wrote himself into the part of Hamilton, is by all accounts a consummate mensch. His performance nailed the nervy, disconcerting ambition, but I’ve always felt his charisma conflicted with that unhappy undertow. Happily, for my tastes, Pierre Jean Gonzalez as Hamilton laces his monomania and spit with some real venom, bringing to mind the description of the role in the first casting notice: “Eminem meets Sweeney Todd.”
The role of Washington has always had a paternal one, but Marcus Choi gives the Father of Our Country a particularly empathetic salt-and-pepper weariness, someone who wishes the kids would stop fighting so he can rest for a second. As opposed to Jared Howelton’s Thomas Jefferson, who wishes he could rest on his laurels for the rest of his days. The former anti-Establishment inexorably becomes the Man, though any Man wishes he had a sliver of Howelton’s boundless energy, doubly so when one considers his doubling for the Marquis de Lafayette.
And as our antagonistic narrator—our Judas, our Che, if you will; Miranda did do his homework—Deon’te Goodman is probably the most glad-handing of the Burrs I’ve seen (live or otherwise), compared to Leslie Odom, Jr.’s smolder and Joshua Henry’s tightly wound spring. It’s not all pasted-on smiles, though; his assaying “Wait for It” and “The Room Where It Happens”, two of the most—dare I say it?—perfect songs written for the Broadway stage, is like a spark meeting dry tinder.
So, yes, I confess I can’t equivocate. I thought then—and I think now—that Hamilton, in all its contradictions, in all its lapses and genius, should be as respectfully heeded as a powder keg
Click.
Boom.
Hamilton runs through Dec. 30 at the James M. Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St. For tickets or more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit either broadwayinchicago.com or hamiltonmusical.com.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.