Hamilton the Musical: "Yes, it really is that good"

I have not seen so much hype for a Broadway musical as Hamilton has been getting.

Acknowledging the hype, The New York Times review begins, "Yes, it really is that good." I've seen press reviews with headlines proclaiming it as a "game changer," "even better than the hype," and "revolutionary" (a pun on the founding fathers theme).

The show opened on Broadway in August and is now virtually sold out through next summer, even with a big block of orchestra seats priced at $350 and more.

The cast album debuted at number 12 on Billboard's Top 200, the highest debut for a cast album since Camelot in 1963. Rolling Stone Magazine just published a 4 and 1/2 star review of the cast album (very rare they review a cast album).

The musical is about the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton. It's been called a hip-hop musical -- one scene features Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in a rap battle over federalism. But the music throughout covers many styles: King George's songs are British pop. The musical is a sung-through musical: all songs, no spoken dialogue, like many of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals. It uses hip-hop and rapping to keep the music flowing where the characters might otherwise do spoken dialogue.

 

I've listened to the soundtrack a few times now... it's great! I hope to see it live someday.

 

I'm going in December, so I've deliberately avoided listening to the soundtrack. Can't wait. This and Fun Home have changed the game as far as what a Broadway musical should be.

 

I thought maybe there would be a thread for this show. I was luck to see it recently and it really was that great. Even with a positive attitude going in, I must confess that about three songs into it I was saying to myself, ok this is nice and all, but I am not sure how my doors are going to get blown off... well by intermission I was hooked and by the end my doors were blown off; the performances were so perfect and the show was so expertly designed. We were in the mezzanine and afterwards said we were glad we were up there as it was helpful to look down on the staging. The cast recording is getting a lot of play around this house. Oh and on the sq front the PA was great, my guess is they mixed that pretty mono although our seats were pretty far to one side so I am only guessing; anyway it sounded fantastic live.

This was a cool article with comments from Sondheim, The Roots and most interesting, from the biographer Chernow. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...n-lin-manuel-miranda-roots-sondheim.html?_r=0

 

My daughter got the cast album shortly after it came out, since she was a big fan of Lin Manuel Miranda's In the Heights. She has been listening to it almost constantly for the last several weeks. I was skeptical at first, but it's won me over. Watched the awards ceremony where Miranda was presented the George Washington Prize on CSPAN a couple of nights ago.

 

For anyone interested, Hamilton begins a Chicago run this fall(September at the PrivateBank Theater), with tours going to LA (Pantages Theater August to December 2017) and San Francisco (SHN Orpheum Theater in March 2017 for 5 months). I know that seems a long way off, but the latest block of tickets for the New York show takes pre-sales into January 2017.
Shows in other cities to follow at some point.

 

The cast will do a song on the Grammys show February 15th, via satellite from the Richard Rogers Theater.

 

I seem to recall reading there were tentative plans for a multi-disc vinyl release at some point. Maybe it will be an "early release" on RSD?

 

As if that poor cast doesn't work hard enough, they have to perform the song on their night off.
If you can get to New York (or any of the cities I mentioned above) and get tickets, do it. Saw the show in December and it more than lives up to the hype, the energy coming off the stage grabs you almost immediately and the songs are amazing, everything from rap to hip hop to r&b to pop to more Broadway oriented tunes, the songs are so hook filled you'll have ear worms for days. As bmoregnr said above, sitting in the upper mezzanine had it's advantages as far as enjoying the staging, and sounded like a mono mix. My husband listened through the assisted hearing device and he also heard it as mono.
What I loved was the audience mix, from teens (how the hell could they afford it?) to grandparents, everybody was caught up in the excitement.
The cast album is beautifully done, the full 2 1/2 hours is there, and they took more time than usual to record it so they could get it right, it's getting a lot of play time in my house.
A truly brilliant show, the cast is uniformly superb, and my guess is Miranda is a shoe-in for the Pulitzer.

 

Our showing had a very young crowd with lots of high school and college age fans around us. One senior in high school next to us had learned the cast album over the past months and was seeing for the first time; it was fandom.

I don't live in NYC so maybe they do this at a lot of shows but I was surprised to see 30-50 fans waiting outside for what I assume was the cast leaving for a shuttle to take them home. The Ham4Ham $10 ticket lottery and performance seems unique as well.

 

I'm very happy & excited for all involved, but the music does absolutely nothing for me.
That said, I'm glad it's a big hit!

 

You'll always see fans waiting at the stage door after a show, that's kind of standard on Broadway. The lottery ticket and performances are unique to the show, and every time they try to take the lottery online the system crashes. Ah, the price of mega success.

 

I've heard great things but $200 per ticket or so is just too prohibitive at this point in my life.

That's 15 or so new LP's!!!

 

Yeah, the prices have gone up considerably since last year. We got tickets in July just as things started to get crazy around the show, and prices will only get higher once the Tony Awards are given out.
This is one show that can be done as a concert and I would hope that at some point they do it just so more folks can see it live.

 

You know who is really missing out on the Hamilton phenomenon? Paul Revere and the Raiders. If they had come along 50 years later, their biggest liability - the Revolutionary War garb and tri-corner hats - would be a huge plus. They could recast each band member as a different founding father and rake in the dough.

 

Actually, it's an extremely complicated mix. From the February issue of Mix magazine:

Another change from the much smaller Off-Broadway house was a major speaker upgrade.

“Every aspect of speaker system is intended to keep excess sound offstage,” Crystal says. “Our speakers are incredibly good—we have 20 of the new d&b Y8s in our two main line arrays, and they are impressive in their directionality. We’re the first Broadway show to use them.” Two pair of L-Acoustics ARCs immediately offstage on both sides round out the core of the main system. Hamilton uses a total of 172 speakers, including six Meyer Sound subs.

“No one is hearing only a simple stereo left/right house mix [from around the proscenium],” Crystal adds. “We have tremendous control over individual speakers—how they are amplified and mixed. Each section of the house gets a special mix. Nevin sat in each section during previews and made these adjustments.” There are roughly 20 separate zone-specific mixes in the 1,319-seat Richard Rodgers Theatre, Crystal estimates.​

 

I'm still absorbing the soundtrack (2.5 hours is a lot!) but I love it. Can't wait to see the show when it comes to Chicago.

 

Wow. That would account for the incredible sound we got in the upper mezzanine. There was a whole row of speakers hanging from the ceiling above us.

 

Wow super cool info thanks for sharing. I could tell at the time it was really well thought out and was 100% engaging at your seat. As a longtime Grateful Dead fan I am extremely sensitive to well done sound reinforcement and also well familiar with Meyer subs. It does not surprise me they were used. During the bass drop in "Helpless" at the lyric "my heart went boom" it is killer deep. It comes across pretty we'll in the soundtrack. Meyer subs were used at Fare Thee Well and the Beam could play an intermodulation beat of 28 and 14Hz audibly. "Wiz" Leonard talks about doing that in a Harry Potter movie to create a "barometric event". I sure think that is what I heard as it was way beyond a normal bass note.
https://www.mickeyhart.net/news/all-about-beam-baby-5211

 

You may want to catch the opening number of the Grammys 2/15, that could be an amuse-bouche for someone working on the soundtrack. We don't watch the Grammys in our house, but this year the wife will surely demand at least that number; she still listens to and quotes the show expecting lyric responses from me months later.

 

The cast recording is really well done, everything that was sung/rapped onstage is there, and it holds up as a listening experience. The usual amount of time put aside to do these cast recordings is one day, supposedly they took several days to do this one and the extra care really shows. I'm glad that the Grammy number will be done at the Richard Rodgers theater in front of an audience, because the cast really does respond to their reaction.

 

The Hamilton cast is scheduled to perform at the Grammys, but not as the opener. Taylor Swift has been announced as the opener.

Fans misunderstood Lin-Manuel Miranda's announcement that the cast was doing the "opening number" at the Grammys to mean they were opening the Grammys. Miranda meant they were performing the musical's first song at the Grammys.

NY Post: Did Taylor Swift steal Grammy's’ opening slot from ‘Hamilton’?
http://pagesix.com/2016/02/09/grammys-mix-up-has-hamilton-fans-fuming-at-taylor-swift/

 

Good point @Turnaround

 

Put me down as obsessed. I haven't seen the show, and probably won't get to see it for years given how high the ticket prices are, but I bought the CD on a whim and have been listening to it nonstop for about 3 weeks now. The music is such a fascinating mashup of genres, from 90s rap (Biggie Smalls) to musicals (South Pacific, West Side Story) to pop/r&b (TLC).

It's so addictive it even got me to read Ron Chernow's 700 page book (also terrific) on Alexander Hamilton that inspired the whole thing. Best music I've listened to in a good long while.

 

>>It's so addictive it even got me to read Ron Chernow's 700 page book (also terrific) on Alexander Hamilton


Chernow did an amazing job on Hamilton.