How Will “Hamilton” Play in England?

This article originally appeared on this site.

When the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, launched a campaign this fall to boost tourism during the city’s relatively unpopular autumn, the promotional video began with the distinctly non-British voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “London’s one of the most exciting places in the world,” Miranda announces from a seat in a dark theatre—a visual cue to the impending arrival of his hit musical “Hamilton” in the West End. Tickets have already sold out for the London production, which opens December 21st; previews began last week and received rapturous standing ovations. The Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye claimed that the London company bested any U.S. cast he’d seen, calling the performance he saw “the best first preview of a musical” in a generation. “Remortgage your house and get a ticket, it’s that good,” a self-professed “serial theatergoer” named Danny Lewis tweeted. (With resale tickets purportedly touted for six thousand pounds, a remortgage might be necessary.)

“Hamilton” has been a smash in multiple American cities—first New York, which it serenades as “the greatest city in the world,” and then Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—but London, of course, is another matter. The musical, after all, offers a decidedly patriotic American perspective on the Revolutionary War, with the Founding Fathers presented as a rainbow-hued band of immigrant brothers rapping against King George III, who is depicted as a foppish British Invasion crooner. The American colonists we initially meet—Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, the Schuyler sisters—are played by actors of color, singing in a range of contemporary New York accents. The first British-identified figure we see in “Hamilton” is a preening loyalist named Samuel Seabury, who’s played by a white actor, and whose mincing diction is accompanied by a tinkling harpsichord and a string quartet. After Seabury delivers an eighteenth-century recitative against the Continental Congress, Hamilton’s hulking bro Hercules Mulligan growls back, “Oh my god. Tear this dude apart,” and Hamilton does, rapping nimbly between Seabury’s verses, spitting wry retorts. And then out comes King George. On Broadway, played by Jonathan Groff and decked out in a crimson frock coat, an ermine cape, high heels, and a bejewelled crown, he looked like a cross between a Gainsborough portrait and the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” He smirked at the audience, then launched into “You’ll Be Back,” a breakup ballad sung over Beatles piano chords. It’s the comic high point of the show—and it allows Miranda to declare American independence from British pop as well as British rule, albeit in a delicious homage.

As a British person, will I be offended?” the Telegraph asked, in its “Ignorant Brit’s guide to the hit musical.” The paper’s conclusion: only if you have “a severe sense of humor failure.” The image of royalty in “Hamilton” isn’t entirely out of place in London: King George III is remembered primarily for losing his mind as well as the American colonies; Alan Bennett’s deconsecrating play “The Madness of George III” was a West End hit in the nineties. Last February, “You’ll Be Back” was trotted out by a contestant on a British singing competition, and the crowd adored it. “English people love to take the rise out of each other so there is no offence taken,” Craig Duncan, who runs a Twitter feed for London fans anticipating the show (there is more than one of those), wrote to me.

What’s more, at the moment, “Hamilton” may present a vision of America as many Britons would like it to be. It is widely regarded as the musical of the Obama era—Miranda famously débuted the show’s opening number at a spoken-word celebration that the Obamas hosted in 2009—and the historian Niall Ferguson wrote an infamous piece asking if the election of Donald Trump was “a vote against ‘Hamilton.’ ” In recent months, Miranda has become a very public critic of Trump, most notably tweeting that the President was “going straight to hell” for suggesting that Puerto Ricans had not worked hard enough to recover from Hurricane Maria. With Trump retweeting anti-Muslim videos from the ultra-right organization Britain First, and sniping at Khan and Prime Minister Theresa May over their responses to terrorism, the journey of “Hamilton” across the Atlantic may appear as an appealing counter-delegation, the promised answer to Khan’s #LondonIsOpen campaign.

The more pertinent question may be how a musical that celebrates America, in the words of a dying Hamilton, as “a place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints” will resonate in post-Brexit Britain more broadly. As in the U.S. productions, the U.K. cast features black and Asian actors in the leading roles, except for that of King George, who is played by the white actor Michael Jibson. The role of Hamilton went to Jamael Westman, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art whose mother was born in Ireland and whose father came from Jamaica. (A recent piece in a right-wing tabloid felt the need to clarify that the historic Hamilton, however, was “in fact white.”) When his political rivals catch Hamilton in a scandal, they mock his origins with a faux-Caribbean patois that recalls the xenophobia of the Brexit campaign: “An immigrant embezzling our government funds . . . ya best g’wan run back where ya come from.” And Miranda’s hybrid score, bridging the Beatles with Beyoncé and Biggie Smalls, may play, right now, as the sonic analogue to Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry, which has been treated in the tabloids as a progressive fantasy and a reactionary nightmare. “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton” ran an absurd headlinein the Daily Mail.

In some ways, though, “Hamilton” is surprisingly British in its sensibilities. Miranda grew up on the spate of U.K. imports that ruled Broadway in the nineteen-eighties—“Cats,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Misérables.” (The producer who brought those shows to New York, Cameron Mackintosh, is also the one taking “Hamilton” to the Victoria Palace Theatre, not far from other long-running Broadway transfers like “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” and “The Book of Mormon.”) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” helped give Miranda the idea for a sung-through historical pop opera narrated by the hero’s nemesis. (The original casting description for King George called him “Rufus Wainwright meets King Herod.”) Miranda’s George Washington gives a shout-out to Gilbert and Sullivan, dubbing himself “the model of a modern major general, / The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up, to put me up on a pedestal.”

And it’s entirely possible that “Hamilton” will end up like “Les Mis”—playing endlessly, embraced around the world for its stirring romance, battles, and ballads, with little sense of the specific history it stages. (Off the top of your head: Which French revolution do Marius and his comrades join?) After Miranda’s first musical, “In the Heights,” opened in London and became a moderate success, he said that the story of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants in gentrifying Manhattan could transfer to the West End because “the specific problems of this community feel universal”—although the musical’s book writer, Quiara Alegría Hudes, told me that the absence of a Puerto Rican diaspora community in London made that production feel like a story more about class than race. It could seem like a diminishment of “Hamilton” if its specific ideas—its redefinition of patriotism as pluralism, its elevation of hip-hop to the status of national chronicle, its championing of urban Hamiltonian federalism over louche Jeffersonian agrarianism—faded into generic universality. But, then, one could argue that that’s what happens with Shakespeare, too: questions of leadership, nationalism, and military morality in “Henry V” still resonate in heightened, punchy verse, even if we can no longer tell the Earl of Westmoreland from the Duke of Exeter.

Perhaps, though, the specificity of “Hamilton” will find a sharper analogue in the U.K. A few days after the 2016 Presidential election, Miranda released “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done),” a single that takes its title from Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette’s applause-earning line at the Battle of Yorktown. The track—part of “The Hamilton Mixtape,” an all-star anthology of covers and remixes—features verses about contemporary immigrant struggles from Somali-Canadian, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and British-Pakistani rappers. The last of these, Riz Ahmed, links the British and American governments through a shared history of oppressed migrant labor: “Buckingham Palace or Capitol Hill / Blood of my ancestors had that all built.” At one point, Ahmed adopts the voice of a Trump supporter or a Brexit voter dismissing Muslim “fugees”: “They flee war zones, but the problem ain’t ours / Even if our bombs landed on them like the Mayflower.” Here the founding act of American colonial history becomes a simile for modern Middle East policy. We’re far from Yorktown, but the universalizing impulse is pointed and precise. (A music video of the song released this summer features ICE officers arresting migrant workers.) Perhaps a British-accented “Hamilton” doesn’t have to lose its heft.

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