People have been banging on about it for ages. The tickets were impossible to get, expensive and I’d never won the lottery (the Hamilton ticket lottery not the National one that acts as a subtle tax on poor people.) I wasn’t that convinced it could be as good as everyone said and I had avoided listening to the music because I’d heard that it was hip-hop, which is a genre I don’t really understand. I feared that the buzz around this show was just hype.
Then I got tickets for my birthday and we went on Monday.
The truth is, I’ve been speechless.
It’s not hype. This is the best musical. Honestly.
I say that as someone who saw Les Miserables in 1985, when everyone watching (except the critics) knew they’d seen something special. Hamilton, however, is better than that. It has everything: the songs are perfect, lyrical earworms, the dancing is amazing, the costumes fabulous, the story is historically accurate, the staging is stripped down to a perfect minimum, it’s clever, it’s funny and it is sad. Nothing is wasted. It will make you feel everything. I actually think it is a work of genius.
Nothing I write will do it justice, so I should probably not bother. Just go and see it for yourself and decide. If you do go, would you take me with you because I could watch it again tomorrow.
“Do de dooo. Dooby dooby doo de do”
I know I shouldn’t write anymore but here is a funny overheard in the toilet afterwards between a mum and her teenage daughter.
M: That was quite sad wasn’t it, at the end?
D: At the end?
M: Uh huh. What?
D: Not just the end. THE WHOLE SECOND HALF!
M: Really?
D: What about when his son died?
M: Oh yeah but I just found him annoying, so I was glad he died really.
D: Mum! Well it just makes me sad when children die and their parents have to live on without them. I don’t know why, it just that always makes me sad.
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