When the Hamilton musical opened on Broadway in 2015, it was a game-changer. Setting the story of an American founding father to a ’90s-era hip-hop beat was an audacious move by creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, but it paid off. Crowds lined up for days for the chance to see it live. The show amassed awards and lavish praise from critics and the media, including a lot of coverage from Vox. Like, a lot.
The show’s stature only continued to grow with the 2015 release of the original Broadway cast recording and the 2020 premiere of the live-capture version of the musical on Disney+. The filmed version is now in movie theaters for the first time, where diehard Hamilton fans will undoubtedly show up in Revolutionary War-era cosplay to belt out their favorite numbers.
But 10 years later, how does a progressive, flag-waving, Obama-coded hip-hop musical hold up?
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner teaches English and theater at Portland State University and is the author of “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist.” He told Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram about how the musical’s legacy is tied up with Obama’s, and what it feels to watch the show in 2025 in the second Trump term.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How much time have you spent in the last several years thinking about Hamilton?
God, this feels like that meme about “how often do you think about the Roman Empire.” Like, daily.
Kind of hard to avoid this phenomenon for the past 10 years. Now that it’s coming to theaters for the first time, we have an excuse to talk about how this musical feels different in 2025 than it did in 2015. Your thoughts?
So Hamilton has these two acts and I felt like we got to live in act one Hamilton for a while, where we had this hope of a country that was welcoming immigrants into a coalition that was going to dream of a better future. And for the last few years, I feel like we’ve been living in act two Hamilton which is, “Is it all going to fall apart? Are we going to become so polarized that we end up in a state of political violence and is everything that got built before going to collapse?”
Where did this even come from, before we talk about the politics?
So Lin-Manuel Miranda, 28 years old, wins a Tony Award for his first musical In the Heights and takes a vacation in 2008. And he’s a fast reader, so he brings along one really big book to sustain him on vacation, which is Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. And as he is lying on a hammock on the beach above Playa del Carmen, he tells me that he has these three insights. One is he didn’t know that there was a Founding Father who was born outside the continental US in the Caribbean. Hamilton’s own journey from impoverished orphanhood on this little island to becoming an architect of the American government reminded Lin-Manuel of his own father, who was born in Puerto Rico and became an important political figure in New York and national politics. So he starts to envision the parallels between Hamilton’s story and the world he lives in.
“Hamilton shared their ultimate faith of pissing people off and getting shot.”
His second insight is that Hamilton’s story is a hip-hop story. The rise of a wordsmith from humble beginnings to making a name for himself and turning his own impoverishment into success is a story that mirrors the ’90s hip-hop artists that Lin-Manuel grew up loving, Biggie and Tupac especially, and that Hamilton shared their ultimate faith of pissing people off and getting shot.
The third insight was that this show Lin-Manuel originally conceived of as a concept album, like musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar or Evita that would be sung through on a record. He premiered what became the first number of the show at the invitation of the White House in the East Room 2009. And over the next six years, he built up the whole arc of Hamilton’s life with his collaborators and the show opened in 2015.
How big did this show get? When was peak Hamilton? I think it’s come and passed, yeah?
It started as a, I would say, elite cache phenomenon where celebrities and political leaders were bragging that they could get what were scalped, very expensive tickets. But by the time the cast recording came out in the fall of 2016, it became a mass phenomenon and the album was on top of the Billboard charts. It was even on top of the rap charts. The show won all the awards, the Tonys, Grammy, Pulitzer Prize, and it became a conversation beyond even Broadway geeks like me, so that people who just cared about American culture more broadly and how we tell American stories had an opinion about the show.
Now, let’s talk about how for a while it felt like we were living in act one of Hamilton. How directly was this show entwined with the Obama administration and the promise of hope for America?
It was pretty intimately connected, Sean. Not only was the White House the venue for the initial performance of the first number, but Obama’s own speeches helped to create a kind of template for some of the show’s musical numbers. Lin-Manuel loved the way that will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas set Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech to music and turned it into a music video. Miranda thought that would be a cool way to musicalize George Washington’s farewell address. And he even got Obama to record a cover of George Washington’s number “One Last Time” after he left the White House. So it was pretty intimately connected to the world of the Obamas, even as it had a lot of shoutouts and parallels to earlier historical and musical eras.
We should point out though that it wasn’t just the left who enjoyed the show. Obama famously said it was the one thing he and Dick Cheney agreed on was how great Hamilton was.
That’s true. Dick and Lynn Cheney both praised the show. George W. Bush likened himself to Hamilton in a wonderful documentary about the musical and the Clintons and the Bidens were coming too. So it became the show to see, and a show into which a lot of people could read their vision of America, whether that was a more traditional narrative of a country where you could pull yourself up by your bootstraps or whether that was even a slightly more radical vision where Black hip-hop artists are quoting from the Black Lives Matter movement.
And what happened with Hamilton during the Trump administration?
After the election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence came to see the show on Broadway. Miranda, along with his producers and director, decided to write a speech for the actor playing Aaron Burr at the time, Brandon Victor Dixon, to give after the show in which Dixon said to Mike Pence, who was sort of leaving the lobby at the time, that “we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us…but we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us.”
Even that feels kind of dated that anyone thought that that would work.
Right. Perhaps that is the fantasy of musical theater that we can all come together for a curtain call. Pence was fine with it, but the next morning Trump started tweeting that the cast had been very rude to Pence, that Hamilton was overrated, that Hamilton needed to apologize. From then on, it really became a kind of counter-Trump show.
Trump also comes down quite hard on Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricane that devastates the island, blames Puerto Ricans for their own suffering. Lin-Manuel, who’s usually a pretty sunny and temperate person on Twitter, tells Trump that he’s going straight to hell for the comments that he’s made.
“When I see it, I see less this kind of celebration of America and more a sense of how quickly the American Dream can fracture.”
The latest chapter in the saga is that Hamilton was supposed to have an upcoming performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, but after Trump got rid of all of the Democratic members of the Kennedy Center’s board, Miranda and his producers pulled their show, saying that they didn’t want Hamilton to appear at a Trump puppet venue.
Has Trump seen Hamilton, do we know?
Not that I know of. I think his favorite show is Evita, a show that has nothing to do with the rise of populist fascism and stardom in service of authoritarian government.
Has the effectiveness of the message of Hamilton dwindled over time? Do people feel less in love with the notion of the potential of the American experiment in 2025 as exemplified by Hamilton than they did in 2015 or 2016?
That’s certainly been a question about the show and criticisms of the show that back in 2015, 2016 were kind of the province of left-wing academics, my people, which was that Hamilton wasn’t really the progressive revolutionary hero that people wanted to take him as. Actually, they argued, he was an elitist, was propping up the institution of slavery, was anti-immigrant; he wasn’t the Lin-Manuel Miranda version of him. I would say that kind of left-wing critique became much more widespread in 2020 in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over time, has Hamilton come to feel kind of cringe to people? Too hopeful, too in love with the United States and the American project?
I mean, man, the thing that feels most dated about it to me, Sean, is the notion that having a sex scandal would ruin your political prospects. But when I return to the show, what really strikes me is that it’s a tragedy. It’s set up from the start of, how did this horrible thing happen, which is that one friend and political rival murdered another one. And that tragedy hangs over the whole show. And so when I see it, I see less this kind of celebration of America and more a sense of how quickly the American Dream can fracture.
One thing I keep remembering is that the show starts with a question: “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” And it ends with a question: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
And I don’t think the show provides a single answer to those questions. I think it leaves those as open questions and they’re questions that are open for us in America today.
