Why exactly is this a masterpiece?

“Hamilton” is the exuberantly-performed, exciting, race-challenging hip-hop musical sensation from Lin-Manuel Miranda that we’ve all been hearing about and dying to see. It’s also confusing as hell.

Miranda is Alexander Hamilton, the impoverished foreigner who comes to America, meets eventual rival Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), fights alongside Washington (Christopher Jackson) in the American Revolution, and builds the constitution and our financial system while clashing with Virginian, Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs).

The conceit here is that all of these founding fathers are portrayed by black and hispanic actors, which has been done deliberately since the rapping would just look foolish otherwise. Even as is, the music is very much exposition-heavy, hard to even follow without subtitles, and even then it’s a vague view, predicated on rap battles, of the history it’s trying to teach.

Not nearly as bad as what it does to the ideologies of the characters, however. Hamilton is being portrayed as an abolitionist, pro-immigration, and a man who believed in freeing people from political bondage. In actuality, he participated in the trafficking of slaves for his in-laws, would later argue that immigrants don’t have the same love of liberty that “nationalists” do, and was an elitist and monarchist who believed the higher class should still have ruling power over the lower class.

Additionally, black actors playing roles of the Founding Fathers comes off as particularly confusing as the Fathers are still rooted in a discriminatory history that now makes it seem like black people are just screwing themselves. Oddly, slaves or actual black abolitionists never make it into the narrative, which is particularly aggravating in regard to the wealthy slave-trading family Hamilton marries into, The Schuylers. Miranda never tells us what the "family business" is and makes Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler (Phillipa Too) seem like the Obamas, their meet-cute at a ball meant to distract from the horrific shit, probably, happening right outside that plantation. If this racism-downplay isn’t on a level of “Gone with the Wind”, I don't know what is.

But this is really “Hamilton”. Miranda can make easy villains out of Jefferson and Burr, their misdeeds have been well-documented. But for Hamilton and others this is all rose-colored glasses for fear nuance may turn audiences of today off. What’s weirder about this whole thing is more people are willing to tout this show’s hipness than really delve into its race-bending vision of history, much less its hypocrisy. In a time when false idols are being torn down left and right, i’m not terribly sure if “Hamilton” isn’t doing the exact opposite.


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