It’s hard to remember the excitement surrounding a Broadway show coming to Des Moines being as high as it has been for Hamilton: An American Musical, the Lin-Manuel Miranda written story about Alexander Hamilton, America’s forgotten Founding Father. The show is based on the brilliant book by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Ron Chernow.
The show was announced as coming to Des Moines back in the Spring of 2016. It was then that the anticipation first began to build into the ground-swell that burst forward Wednesday night with the first performance of a three-week stay at the Des Moines Civic Center.
The “Philip Company” is one of two touring companies of Hamilton that are making their way around the country. The second company, the “Angelica Company” is in the midst of performances in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Think about that for a moment. There are currently 5 places on the planet where you can see a production of the world’s most popular musical – New York, Chicago, London, Washington, D.C., and Des Moines, Iowa. That’s pretty special.
Hamilton is the story the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, who came from hurricane-ravaged St. Croix to eventually shape America’s economy and was famously killed at the hands of the then Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel. The show casts primarily African-American and Latino actors performing hip-hop and R&B songs as they tell the story of the early days of the United States. It’s a re-telling of American history that is actually connecting with audiences that have either forgotten or were taught little about these revolutionaries outside of the broad brush strokes.
Alexander Hamilton is probably the most often overlooked Founding Father of them all. When you’re competing with the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, you’re likely to be relegated to second fiddle. In Hamilton, the “Ten dollar Founding Father without a father” gets his comeuppance. This is a story of perseverance over tragedy, ascension to power and glory, unimaginable heartbreak, and a life cut short before its time. Add hip-hop beats and you’ve got contemporary storytelling that has been thrilling audiences of all ages.
The cast of the show are marvelous in their historical roles and thrill their own sold-out crowds night after night. You’ll find yourself cheering for the likes of Hercules Mulligan, the Marquis de Lafayette, and John Laurens. You’ll fall in love with the Schuyler sisters Angelica, Eliza, AND PEGGY. You’ll also find a newfound fondness for Hamilton – an extraordinary immigrant who was brilliant, stubborn, and brave, but also had his demons.
The music in Hamilton is some of the best and most memorable produced for a Broadway show in years. Both Billboard Magazine and Rolling Stone put the cast recording in their top ten best albums of the year in the year of its original release. You’ll beam with pride during “My Shot,” you’ll be overcome with patriotism as the Americans defeat the British in “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” and your heart will break during the show’s two most poignant numbers – “Burn” and “It’s Quiet Uptown.”
Attending the Thursday and Friday evening performances gives one a chance to really get into the minutiae of the show. You take the show in during the first go-round, then really dig in deep at the second. You notice that the ensemble cast is often times used as set pieces themselves in addition to characters in the show. You recognize the intricacies of the choreography, especially during Angelica’s “Satisfied” which uses the unique spinning stage to “rewind” back to the show’s previous number, “Helpless” in such a way that you want to ask the cast to do it over and over again so you can see how they make it look like you’re actually seeing real life itself rewind.
You pick up on the additional emotion that actors like Nik Walker, who plays the story’s narrator and antagonist, Aaron Burr and the wonderful Shoba Narayan as Eliza Hamilton bring to the respective roles that fill them out in such a way that listening to the cast recording could never do. You’ll also smile in delight as you see Jon Patrick Walker’s King George III walk on stage. The level of physical comedy brought to a tyrant such as England’s 18th-century king is a high point of the entire production.
A word of warning for those that have filled your days listening to the original Broadway cast album of Hamilton over and over – be ready to shift your expectations. Your ear has been trained to hear the voices of Miranda, Leslie Odom, Jr, Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs and more. You have to get past that and know you’ll be hearing some of your favorite performed in a way you’ve never heard before. You can’t let the judgment of how the songs sound cloud your feelings toward the show. Regardless of who sings/raps these words, it’s still one of the most genius pieces of art put on stage in decades.
Hamilton packs an astonishing 20,000+ words into a 2 hour and 45-minute performance. Sometimes you need more than one performance to really catch everything, especially when you’re trying to absorb all of the visuals. For long-time fans of the show and original cast recording, you’ll be able to follow along quite well. For those that are new to the show, prepare for an all-out assault on your senses. You’ll have an incredible amount of information and action thrown at you in a short period of time, and it’s never been more satisfying. Hamilton is one of the most important musicals in Broadway history, certainly the most important of this century. Miranda has done the impossible by making life in the 1700s sound so relevant to life in the 2010s. It’s a show that is important now and will be for generations to come. It’s a show that for once, is not hyperbole to say cannot be missed.
