As a longtime theatrical person (who is xerself white), I feel like Hamilton is, easily, the RENT of the 2010s.
RENT reinvented much of Broadway—Jon Larson’s insistence on $20 “lottery” seats for the two front rows allowed broke college kids, low-income families, and budgeted-to-death folks to enjoy real live theatre for the first time (a concept other shows, including Hamilton, have adopted). This is also how the really classist “theatre dress” concept started to break down—you could toss out one kid in jeans and a tee shirt, but what did you do when half the theatre was kids in jeans and tee shirts? RENT also drew attention to the then-contemporary and very large intersectional problem of poverty-meets-AIDS, and actually won awards for its sympathetic and complex portrayal of HIV/AIDS-positive folks.
We also saw a move away from the Hammerstein/Sondheim/Webber model following RENT; while all of these composers have their merits, RENT showed that a relative unknown, not from a rich or classically-trained background, could produce an amazing show not bound by classical music styles and leitmotifs. How much did this change things? Enough that Avenue Q and Wicked might have existed without RENT, but Hadestown, Great Comet Of 1812, and, yes, Hamilton, probably wouldn’t have, at least not in such a way that we could all enjoy them. Imagine a world where Broadway was nothing but Disney, jukebox musicals, 1960s revivals, and Phantom of the Opera. Depressing, no?
What RENT did for broke-ass students, Hamilton did for actors of color: it challenged the concept, down to its very bones, that “urban” music styles can’t be theatrical and generative (consider Hamilton’s rap battles in Congress and the showtunes/R&B mashup that is Schuyler Sisters, for example—will anybody argue that these aren’t great theatrical moments that also show off genres usually associated with people of color?), and that people of color aren’t “expressive enough” or “don’t show well enough on stage” to be cast in major, non-tokenized roles.
Further, it provided a rich wealth of quotes that ensure it a place in long-term theatrical canon; my favorite is “and when my time is up, have I done enough? Will they tell my story?”, but there are easily half a dozen more WHAM lines like that I can think of. That means that for a long, long, LONG time, the show that will define the latter half of the 2010s (if not the whole decade) in terms of Broadway theatre is a show in which every role except King George went to an actor of color, many if not most of them Black—and not an Uncle Tom, magical negro, or Mammy among them. All just….PEOPLE, playing roles of dignity and humanity.
Like RENT in the 1990s, and HAIR in the 1970s, and Porgy and Bess in the 1930s where it all began, Hamilton rewrote a very basic tenet of theatre. History has its eyes on Hamilton, and the legacy it has created.
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