On August 6, 2015, "Hamilton" the musical opened on Broadway. This last week, "Hamilton" celebrated it’s one year anniversary.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and former actor behind the main man “Hamilton,” tweeted that day, “'Hamilton' opened a year ago today,” next to a photo of fireworks. “Look at where you are. Look at where you started. #Grateful.”
Miranda took six years to write the hip-hop musical about the “10 dollar founding father.”
The musical was inspired by the biography "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, which Miranda read while at the airport on a quick vacation from his broadway show "In The Heights." He was only a few chapters in when he started to envision the life of Hamilton as a hip hop musical. Miranda started to research whether or not a musical had been done on Hamilton's life, which it had in 1917.
Upon Miranda's discovery he began a project entitled "The Hamilton Mixtape" and worked on it during his spare time. On May 12, 2009, Miranda was invited to perform music from "In the Heights" at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word. Instead, he performed the first song from "The Hamilton Mixtape," a rough version which would later become "Alexander Hamilton," the show's opening number. He spent a year after that working on "My Shot," another early number from the show. His performance at the White House, though he was already a Grammy-nominated writer, was met with laughter from the crowd, even president Barack Obama.
The musical made its Off-Broadway debut at The Public Theater in February 2015, where its engagement was sold out. The show transferred to Broadway in August 2015 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. On Broadway, it received enthusiastic critical acclaim and unprecedented advance box office sales. In 2016, "Hamilton" was nominated for a record-setting 16 Tony Awards, winning 11, including Best Musical. It was also the recipient of the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The prior off-Broadway production won the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical as well as seven other Drama Desk Awards out of 14 total nominated categories.
The biggest use for "Hamilton" the musical, other than entertainment, has been education. The Cabinet rap battles provide a way to engage students with topics that have traditionally been considered uninteresting. An elective course for 11th and 12th graders on the musical was held at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. KQED News wrote, "'Hamilton' is especially galvanizing for the student who believes that stories about 18th century America are distant and irrelevant" as it shows the founding fathers were real humans with real feeling and real flaws, rather than "bloodless, two-dimensional cutouts who devoted their lives to abstract principles." A high school teacher from the Bronx noted his students were "singing these songs the way they might sing the latest release from Drake or Adele." One teacher focused on Hamilton's ability to write his way out of trouble and toward a higher plane of existence: "skilled writing is the clearest sign of scholarship — and the best way to rise up and alter your circumstance."
The show's producers have made a pledge to allow 20,000 New York City public high school students from low-income families to get subsidized tickets to see "Hamilton" on Broadway by reducing their tickets to $70 for students, and the Rockefeller Foundation provided $1.5 million, before the expansion, to further lower ticket prices to $10 per student. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History created a study guide to accompany the student-ticket program. They have decided to title this “#EduHam.” The Rockefeller Foundation has pledged $6 million to the expansion, which was announced in June of 2016, allows funds that are meant to provide resources to local school districts, similar to the program piloted in New York City. The national program is set to take hold in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. with others joining as “Hamilton” tours. Like the NYC version, the national program will facilitate special, interactive matinee performances for students — at just $10 a ticket.
As a part of the #EduHam phenomenon in NYC, the Gilder Lehrman Institute developed the “Hamilton Education Program,” described as an in-class curriculum inspired by the lessons embedded in the musical. According to The Rockefeller Foundation, this curriculum will be integrated into participating Title I schools across the nation, where the majority of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches.
The Gilder Lehrman program also includes a “Hamilton Student Performance and Study Guide” and an online “Hamilton” portal that provides students with a creative platform for developing and producing their own original performances — be it poetry, rap, musical theater, or any other facet of performance they can think of. In New York City, students performed those original productions before their “Hamilton” matinees at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
The website EducationWorld writes that "Hamilton" is "being praised for its revitalization of interest in civic education."
In the last year, many things have changed. Many of the main actors, including Lin Manuel-Miranda are moving on to other projects, while the show goes on. This spring (Spring of 2017) the show will start touring. They will reach the following cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Costa Mesa, Denver, Des Moines, Houston, Las Vegas, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis and Tempe.
The bigger and more important changes we see happening are the education on the founding fathers, especially a look into the life of the young, scrappy and hungry, Alexander Hamilton.
If you haven't had a chance to listen to the musical, Spotify has the whole album for free with an account.
