Harvey on Romano and Potter, ‘Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past’
By Renee C. Romano & Claire Bond Potter
—
Originally posted on H-Net
Hamilton: An American Musical debuted at New York City’s Public Theater in 2015 and has since dominated Broadway’s ticket sales and Tony Awards. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is on the record stating, “I want the historians to take this seriously” (p. 6). The contents of the volume under review should gratify him. To the editors, “Hamilton’s traditional political story, told through Afro-Caribbean music and by a multiracial cast, has seemed to capture the political zeitgeist of the Age of Obama” (p. 4), but Renee C. Romero and Claire Bond Potter have also brought together fourteen scholars of diverse perspectives who evaluate the show’s historical accuracy and explain its significance. The wide-ranging essays in Historians on Hamilton will broaden readers’ grasp of the varied contexts that have shaped the production, reception, and political and cultural stakes of the musical’s story, staging, and celebration.
Appropriately, given the attention critics and fans have paid to the show’s hip-hop foundation and the primarily African American and Latino/a cast, several of the essays address contemporary questions of race. Examining the play “from inside the Broadway bubble,” Brian Eugenio Herrera argues that the play’s casting “emphatically resists the presumptions and privileges of whiteness” and its “hybrid musical apparatus” expands the audience’s sensibilities of what Broadway music can be (pp. 232, 236). Other authors are more critical. Referring to the show’s focus on white social and political elites, Patricia Herrera argues that “when racial bodies take on a history that disavows race, the voices of enslaved people remain audibly silent” (p. 272). Lyra D. Monteiro goes further: “The idea that the musical ‘looks like America now’ in contrast to ‘then’ … actively erases the presence and role of black and brown people in Revolutionary America, as well as before and since.” It is a “damning omission,” Monteiro writes, that “not a single slave or free person of color exists as a character in this play” (p. 62). The significance of that omission comes through in Leslie M. Harris’s history of slavery in New York City, where nearly 20 percent of inhabitants were enslaved in the colonial era and in which most people of African descent remained enslaved until well after Hamilton’s death in 1804. In light of that history, Harris likens the play’s “racially mischievous” casting to the traditional African American celebration of Pinkster, allowing for isolated role reversal while doing little to challenge structures of power (pp. 72, 88-89).
Other essays situate the show in diverse media of storytelling and communities of experience and circulation. Elizabeth L. Wollman examines Hamilton’s place in the history of previous Broadway plays that combined innovation and commercial success, such as the all-black show Shuffle Along (1921) and the rock musical Hair (1967). Other essays look beyond the stage. From the Treasury secretary’s day to ours, Michael O’Malley shows us, money has also told stories, particularly through the images that adorn it. O’Malley describes how those images have changed on paper money since the nineteenth century. In presenting Hamilton as “a democratic hero for a multiracial America” (p. 135), Hamilton makes the “the ten-dollar founding father” a symbol of American values today. Claire Bond Potter emphasizes that much of the show’s significance can be found offstage, particularly the effective use of social media by Miranda and other cast members. It has created an online community of fans and a place of “cultural belonging and comfort at a moment when real politics, often played out on the same social media channels, could not have been more divisive” (p. 347).