Hamilton Forum: Guest Editor's Introduction

This special forum in American Music responds to the show Hamilton: An American Musical, which premiered at the Public Theater in New York City on January 20, 2015 and opened on Broadway in August. One of the most popular and critically acclaimed productions in the history of American musical theater, Hamilton has attracted extensive attention from journalists, bloggers, and cultural commentators, as well as scholars of theater, history, American studies, ethnic studies, English, linguistics, and numerous other fields. The story of the founding of the United States, told through the figure of Alexander Hamilton in a rapped- and sung-through musical starring a nonwhite cast, has prompted abundant debate, among many key flashpoints, historical accuracy, artistic representation, citizenship, inclusion, immigration, and national identity. The cast recording of Hamilton—which innovatively adapts hip hop, R&B, and other musical styles for the Broadway stage—became the highest-charting cast album in more than fifty years and also topped the Billboard rap album chart. While Lin-Manuel Miranda—the show's creator, composer, lyricist, and star—has been broadly hailed for the show's distinctive score, sustained scholarly attention to the music and choreography of Hamilton and its creative offshoots has not yet crystallized. This forum seeks to propel this process through a set of articles that revolve around a single question: How do music and dance articulate and shape the messages and meanings of Hamilton?

Directing this inquiry toward aspects of music and dance, however, does not necessitate adopting a circumscribed mode of analysis or enforcing disciplinary boundaries. On the contrary, the contributors to this forum regard Hamilton as a complex, collaborative artistic work that requires various methodological approaches involving theater studies, the critical analysis of recordings, reception, ethnography, the study of dance and movement, genealogies of genre, and the interdisciplinary web that constitutes popular music studies. Trying to understand Hamilton in an aesthetic vacuum also proves unproductive. As a result, each article gestures outward, variously engaging with golden age Hollywood choreography, history-themed musicals, 1990s hip hop, the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Latin pop music, or tweets and Facebook posts from enthusiastic Hamilton fans. However innovative and revolutionary Hamilton may be, our contributors continually discover meaningful intersections with and departures from a notably broad range of existing musical, choreographic, theatrical, and artistic practices. In addition, these articles not only draw on but also interrogate the ways in which the show typically has been framed by scholars across many other disciplines. It proved impossible to proceed otherwise when attempting to account for the multivalent meanings of a landmark musical that engages so closely with the most substantial debates—artistic, historical, intellectual, political, social—of our contemporary moment.

Hamilton is openly historiographic: the refrain "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" is heard throughout the show and serves as the title of the final song. Yet the production has become known just as well for its anachronistic flair, from its multicultural casting to its reliance on present-day styles of language, music, vocal delivery, and choreography. Addressing this self-aware navigation between present and past, Elissa Harbert's article, "Hamilton and History Musicals," examines how Hamilton juggles historical credibility and fictionalization, strikes a balance between dramatic realism and theatricality, and seeks to address the needs of a contemporary audience while attending to a historical subject. Positioning the show as part of a lineage of "history musicals" helps to identify the distinct ways in which Hamilton negotiates issues of authenticity, aesthetics, and dramatic license. In similar fashion, Harbert's critical engagement with Hamilton also moves beyond the stage and across time to explore its relationship to theatrical history and to gauge its relationship to both the era of the nation's founding and its staging for twenty-first-century audiences.

Hamilton has been broadly embraced by the political Left for reimagining a foundational US narrative as an inclusive, diverse, proimmigrant portrait of the nation. But its political valence has not been set in stone. Rather, as Elizabeth Titrington Craft's article, "Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton," makes clear, the...