I have never seen the show and have no wish to, but this outsized acclaim for this 'Hamilton' has never made any sense to me. Alexander Hamilton was many things, an illegal (and lily-white) immigrant and Danish subject from an obscure Caribbean island, a college dropout, a failure at every business adventure he ever tried with other people's money, an obsessive devotee of public debt as an engine for economic activity (hence the flat-broke DC regime borrowing more and more every few weeks to keep the lights on, to this day), and an absentee family-man who died intestate leaving a wife and nine children penniless after refusing to prepare for a duel against an expert marksman he'd insulted without cause in the 18th-century equivalent of twitter-x known as 'broadsiding' with hastily-printed pamphlets. His war record itself suggests he was a natural-born soldier as well, a man born to take orders who catastrophically ended up with way too much power giving them.... but the idea of that extremely complex and paradoxical man and one of the most portentous figures in American history (mostly for the harms his perverse and purely dictatorial policies as our first Treasury Secretary had doomed the American future to ever since) bursting into song (!) in the midst of the deadly-serious historic developments of his lifetime, strikes me as something between obscene and grotesque, and mostly as testimony of the giddy urbane aggressive historic ignorance the American upper-crust is so proud of. 'No accounting for taste' does not necessarily preclude some folks simply not having any, like whoever was the anti-historic marketing genius who decided to make some musical about Alexander Hamilton (???)
"I'm choosing to... not look at that part. I'm probably naive, but... I'm enjoying it too much to be tainted by anything..."
Truer words about that urbane aggressive American upper-crust ignorance of history were never spoken. People like that put me at risk of being brought up on assault charges: there is absolutely nothing about my fellow Americans (if I must have them as such) which I find more dangerous, stupid or offensive, than this insular and dismissive notion that so long as a thing is entertaining by pandering to their fantasist non-realities to no matter how obscene a level, it must therefore be a good thing.
I read Chernow's biography, twice, and will probably read it again, at least one more time. Nothing in it, absolutely nothing, lends itself to any portion of it being set to music for some folks to go cavorting around a stage insulting the very concept of historic comprehension or its dire necessity, in order to entertain folks at ticket prices which some other folks might be grateful to get a raise to in their monthly incomes.
I stand my ground: 'Hamilton' and all its acclaim are an insult to the very meaning and purpose of history, and all involved or all attending are complicit in a crime against history.
I have never seen the show and have no wish to, but this outsized acclaim for this 'Hamilton' has never made any sense to me. Alexander Hamilton was many things, an illegal (and lily-white) immigrant and Danish subject from an obscure Caribbean island, a college dropout, a failure at every business adventure he ever tried with other people's money, an obsessive devotee of public debt as an engine for economic activity (hence the flat-broke DC regime borrowing more and more every few weeks to keep the lights on, to this day), and an absentee family-man who died intestate leaving a wife and nine children penniless after refusing to prepare for a duel against an expert marksman he'd insulted without cause in the 18th-century equivalent of twitter-x known as 'broadsiding' with hastily-printed pamphlets. His war record itself suggests he was a natural-born soldier as well, a man born to take orders who catastrophically ended up with way too much power giving them.... but the idea of that extremely complex and paradoxical man and one of the most portentous figures in American history (mostly for the harms his perverse and purely dictatorial policies as our first Treasury Secretary had doomed the American future to ever since) bursting into song (!) in the midst of the deadly-serious historic developments of his lifetime, strikes me as something between obscene and grotesque, and mostly as testimony of the giddy urbane aggressive historic ignorance the American upper-crust is so proud of. 'No accounting for taste' does not necessarily preclude some folks simply not having any, like whoever was the anti-historic marketing genius who decided to make some musical about Alexander Hamilton (???)
It sounds like you might like this: https://youtu.be/O0oING7iV-E?si=14ycRcR0fJ0b543t
"I'm choosing to... not look at that part. I'm probably naive, but... I'm enjoying it too much to be tainted by anything..."
Truer words about that urbane aggressive American upper-crust ignorance of history were never spoken. People like that put me at risk of being brought up on assault charges: there is absolutely nothing about my fellow Americans (if I must have them as such) which I find more dangerous, stupid or offensive, than this insular and dismissive notion that so long as a thing is entertaining by pandering to their fantasist non-realities to no matter how obscene a level, it must therefore be a good thing.
I read Chernow's biography, twice, and will probably read it again, at least one more time. Nothing in it, absolutely nothing, lends itself to any portion of it being set to music for some folks to go cavorting around a stage insulting the very concept of historic comprehension or its dire necessity, in order to entertain folks at ticket prices which some other folks might be grateful to get a raise to in their monthly incomes.
I stand my ground: 'Hamilton' and all its acclaim are an insult to the very meaning and purpose of history, and all involved or all attending are complicit in a crime against history.