1 HIP-HOP MAKES HISTORY Twelve figures in clothing reminiscent of the 1700s whirl across a stage surrounded by brick and beams that suggest the rough-and-tumble long-ago port of New York City For more than an hour these dancers have controlled time racing through decades of history and slowing bullets to a snail’s pace And they won’t stop for nearly two more hours They are passengers in New York Harbor soldiers in a ragtag army They cheer the main character as he disses his enemies and minutes later laugh at his failures Their constant motion crosses boundaries At various moments they break krump pop waltz and do a thousand other things all in the service of telling a story through movement 4
Lin-Manuel Miranda center was the first actor to play the role of Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton 5
Hamilton opened on Broadway on August 6 2015 at the historic Richard Rodgers Theatre in Times Square 6
According to Lin-Manuel Miranda the writer of the musical and original lead actor Alexander Hamilton’s life story embodies hip-hop It is only natural then that Miranda used the words attitude culture practitioners and dance of hip-hop to tell the story of the first US treasury secretary Second only to the rapid-fire record number of words for any musical dance is the engine that drives this high-energy show to its many climaxes tearful lows and fateful conclusion Performances of Hamilton had been sold out since its off-Broadway opening at the Public Theater in January 2015 Still in 2017 the show was sold out months in HIP-HOP AND HAMILTON Alexander Hamilton grew up in a low-income single-parent household in the Caribbean When he was 10 or 12 he and his mother contracted the same severe illness and his mother died Orphaned he got a job as a clerk for a trading company As a teenager he wrote an account of a hurricane that won attention and donations from residents of the West Indies to send him to school in North America He landed in New York From there he eventually became General George Washington’s right-hand man during the American Revolution 1775 1783 Afterward he helped ratify the US Constitution and found the US Treasury all largely on the strength of his own writing and brainpower As Miranda puts it any story of a person who comes from nearly nothing and reaches great success through his or her use of language is a hip-hop story 7
