How do you write like you’re running out of time?
Last Easter holidays we took the kids up to Sydney to see the musical Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s account of the life of American founding father, Alexander Hamilton, has won almost every award imaginable – including a Pulitzer Prize.
The production has been lauded for subverting a number of theatrical conventions, such as by casting non-white actors to play historical figures who were white, including Hamilton himself. The score is also unconventional, blending rap, hip-hop, jazz and R&B with traditional Broadway forms.
The rapid-fire vocal delivery of rap and hip-hop enables Miranda to convey a lot of information in each song (this is a biography of a historical figure, after all) without ever sounding like a history lesson. By one estimate, the show would be somewhere between 4 and 6 hours long if the songs were at a conventional musical pace.
Of course, it wouldn’t be much fun if the songs weren’t any good. Fortunately, they are. While Miranda’s lyrics are sometimes loose with the truth in recounting Hamilton’s life story, he also draws heavily on primary sources, sometimes quoting them directly. He also incorporates humour, pop culture references and the occasional nod to other musicals.
Miranda drew his initial inspiration from Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton, which he started reading while on a break from performing in his previous Broadway production, In the Heights (which suggests that like Hamilton, Miranda is something of a workaholic).
If you love language as I do, there’s a good chance you will love Hamilton – even if, like me, you’re not normally a fan of musical theatre. Alexander Hamilton was himself a skilled and prolific writer (he was George Washington’s chief secretary and speechwriter) who, despite living for less than 50 years, helped to lay the foundations for America’s political and financial systems. He really did write like someone who was running out of time.
You can watch a filmed version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton on Disney+. Better still, see the live production at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney or next year at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne.
