Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rightfully lauded hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” which has just opened on Broadway after a smash run at the Public, is about many things, among them men: how they fight, write, rule, and duel. There’s some strange comfort, in this age of Washington gridlock, in seeing the birth of the nation recast as a series of rap battles straight out of “8 Mile,” with Hamilton, Jefferson, and Burr's egos clashing as sharply as their ideals. It’s fitting that the musical opened on the same night as the first Republican primary debate: ten men who desperately need to bust a rhyme.
The musical is also about history and how it gets told—in Miranda’s refrain, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” That, most often, is where the women come in, and they come in strong. In a musical about Founding Fathers, Miranda has placed a pair of vividly imagined female characters, played by the dynamite performers Renée Elise Goldsberry and Phillipa Soo, with an assist from Jasmine Cephas Jones. The three actresses appear early in Act One, as the Schuyler sisters, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy: daughters of Philip Schuyler, the Revolutionary War general and later U.S. senator from New York. In Miranda’s version, they look like society women in bustles but sound like a Destiny’s Child-esque R. & B. girl group. After sampling the newly written Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—Angelica raps:
As Angelica, the incandescent Goldsberry makes it clear that she could rap Jefferson under the table if she got the chance: all that holds her back is a woman’s place in the world. Of course, the “sequel,” in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment, wouldn’t come for another hundred and forty-four years. But, soon enough, we’re on to matters of the heart. Hamilton (Miranda) falls in love with Eliza (Soo), who is more demure than Angelica.
At their wedding, Angelica proposes a toast, and the scene freezes as we enter her inner thoughts. The song that Angelica then sings, “Satisfied,” has knocked me senseless each time I’ve seen it, both because of Miranda’s cunning construction and because of Goldsberry’s motormouthed delivery. We rewind to the flirtatious moment when Angelica met Hamilton; it’s electric, she tells us, like “Ben Franklin with a key and a kite.” Angelica and Alexander are equals in wit, but not in status, and she is well aware of her station and its demands:
Even as Angelica’s verbal dazzle is on display, so is her pragmatism: the best that her eloquence can get her is a wealthy husband. Knowing that Hamilton is penniless, she reasonably assumes that what he’s after is her social status. Despite their mutual attraction, she passes him off him to Eliza, who is just as smitten. As Angelica navigates her conflicting emotions—regret, yearning, and some solace in the fact that Hamilton will be close by—we return to the wedding toast, now fraught with irony. Angelica’s unquenched desire for her brother-in-law has become her destiny. As musical storytelling, it’s a tour de force.
Hamilton’s personal life gets even juicier in Act Two. Now married to Eliza but intellectually bonded with Angelica through their letters, he meets one Maria Reynolds, a married woman with a sob story and bedroom eyes, and gets caught up in an affair-cum-extortion-plot. As written by Miranda and performed by Cephas Jones, Maria isn’t much more than an archetypal femme fatale—sort of a sultry Rihanna type—and, while the show doesn’t let Hamilton off the hook, he comes across more as a dupe than as an adulterer.
In any case, the Reynolds affair, which blows up Hamilton’s political career, along with his marriage, is more fuel for the complicated saga of the Schuyler sisters. Angelica rushes home from England to comfort her sister, and Eliza sings a fearsome anthem, “Burn,” taking revenge on Hamilton by destroying their correspondence—which Miranda cleverly casts as a self-aware historical act:
Surely Miranda is poking fun at his own lack of primary sources when it came to dramatizing this moment in the Hamiltons’ marriage. But in embracing the enigma the song points to the larger problem of women’s history: the public records are thinner, the milieu is mostly domestic, and there’s more need for speculation. What was Eliza really thinking? Was burning her letters the only act of personal agency she had left?
The finale brings the theme of storytelling to a crescendo. Hamilton has fatally lost the duel with Burr, and the characters return to size up Hamilton’s legacy. The last verse—unexpectedly, and powerfully—belongs to Eliza, who survived her husband by a whopping fifty years. How did she use them? “I put myself back in the narrative,” she tells us—interviewing soldiers who fought with Hamilton, raising funds for the Washington Monument, and establishing the first private orphanage in New York City. Most crucially, and with Angelica’s help, she sorts through Hamilton’s papers and helps secure his legacy, much as Miranda is doing with his musical. In the show’s final moment, he motions Eliza to the lip of the stage, where she steps beyond him and takes the light. The last image we see is of her awestruck face, gazing out into some blissful beyond.
Is it a feminist ending? Almost. The notion that men do the deeds and the women tell their stories isn’t exactly Germaine Greer-worthy. (Look at the history-making women being considered to replace Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill.) But, in placing Eliza front and center, Miranda is reinforcing his over-all project, which is in part to displace the founding story as the province of white men. By setting the tale in a hip-hop vernacular, acted entirely by people of color (King George III is the only main character played by a white actor), Miranda is reclaiming the American story that got told—and still gets told, on currency, in statues, and in textbooks—for the people whom history habitually forgets. As a Latino working in the Broadway theatre, he knows the importance of who tells the story, and how. And, by implicitly equating Eliza’s acts of narration with his own, he’s acknowledging the women who built the country alongside the men. You’re left wondering whether the “Hamilton” of the title isn’t just Alexander, but Eliza, too.
