Ten years ago Wednesday, “Hamilton” premiered on Broadway. In light of President Trump’s attacks on the show’s cast and the producers’ decision to cancel a run at the Kennedy Center after Mr. Trump’s takeover, it’s hard to remember that back then, “Hamilton” was a bipartisan success.
The musical was closely associated with Barack Obama’s administration: Lin-Manuel Miranda performed its opening number at the White House and took inspiration for musicalizing George Washington’s Farewell Address from a video in which will.i.am set Mr. Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech to a melody. But it didn’t appeal to liberal audiences alone. Lynne and Dick Cheney praised it as much as Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 documentary “Hamilton’s America,” Paul Ryan and George W. Bush shared their appreciation alongside Elizabeth Warren and Mr. Obama.
“Everyone could take their own thing from it,” Mr. Miranda told me when I interviewed him for a forthcoming biography. Conservatives, he recalled, might say, “‘I don’t agree with Lin’s politics, but the way he wrote about Washington was great,’ or people on the left could go, ‘These guys were all slaveholders, but it’s thrilling to see people of color telling the story.’”
But it was hard for it not to get swept up in the partisan divide. In 2016, when Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show, the cast addressed him afterward, expressing hope that “Hamilton” would inspire him “to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us.” The next day, Mr. Trump called the cast “very rude.” The show started to receive threats from Trump supporters and had to bring on extra security.
“When Trump lies about your show, suddenly you become the ‘left show,’” Mr. Miranda said. “I don’t think we’re a ‘left show.’ I don’t think my personal politics are in this.”
For the past decade, I’ve been a bit of a journalistic “Hamilton” groupie. In addition to writing about the musical in New York, I reported on its opening in London after the Brexit vote and Mr. Trump first assumed office, caught a companion exhibition in Chicago that filled in the history it left out and covered it in Puerto Rico when Mr. Miranda returned to the title role for a fund-raising run to help his parents’ island recover from Hurricane Maria.
Each time the context shifted, the show seemed to be telling a different story, though its script and staging remained nearly unchanged. And as the musical became a billion-dollar global box office hit and a chart-topping cast recording, scooping up Tonys, a Grammy, a Pulitzer Prize and even a couple of Emmys, an interpretation began to solidify around “Hamilton.”
It was seen to represent the promise and limitations of the Obama era, a celebration of America as the land of immigrant achievement, expanding and fulfilling the founders’ imperfectly realized plan. This year, in these pages, Ezekiel Kweku called it “the Hamilton consensus”: a vision of “an America whole but unfinished, waves of progress bringing it closer and closer to its founding ideals” as “a meritocracy wrung clean of bias, whose creed is both a promise and invitation to anyone talented and hardworking enough to lay claim to it.” Has the tumult and backlash of the ensuing decade rendered the Hamilton consensus a fantasy — and the musical itself a monument to naïve liberal optimism?
There is a degree of truth to this, but I also want to argue against that being the only interpretation. As I watched “Hamilton” again last week on Disney+, I wondered if some of its original complexity, its willingness to leave questions unresolved, had been left behind. I was reminded how its America isn’t just the place “where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints and rise up.” It’s something more familiar to us now: a fractious, fragile republic where a logorrheic proponent of executive authority faces charges of corruption, gets mired in a sex scandal, taunts his opponents, and ends up in a partisan environment so rancorous that his enemy shoots him in a duel.
The first act of “Hamilton” tracks the rise of a statesman whose personal ambition comes to align with America’s ascent; the second follows a fatal arc downward as Hamilton’s failings jeopardize the legacy he’d built. (There are echoes in the plot of the cut-short lives of Mr. Miranda’s hip-hop heroes Biggie and Tupac, whose flow he infused into the musical’s bars.) “I don’t think it’s an ‘up with America’ show,” Mr. Miranda told me. Later, he said, “I knew I was writing a tragedy.”
Ten years on, “Hamilton” feels less like a fantasy than a warning: This is how quickly America’s promise could curdle.
And yet the show is also filled with brio, from its kinetic choreography and spinning turntable to the high-low wordplay of its lyrics and its brilliantly distinguished musical stylings for each character. Cheering for Aaron Burr’s second-act showstopper, “The Room Where It Happens,” may be a little morally dubious, as he exalts personal ambition over any political ideal, but it’s theatrically thrilling.
The characters are “all so flawed,” Mr. Miranda reflected, “and yet they built something that we live in. And we’re all so flawed, so maybe we can also continue to build toward a better country and a better world.” That was his “revelation,” he said. “It was not ‘Let’s sanctify these men.’ It was ‘Oh, these were men.’”
Of course, the creator’s intentions don’t necessarily script the show’s reception. But in a way, they did. Having no control who tells your story, Mr. Miranda said, is “what the show’s about!” Hamilton is Washington’s right-hand man, but then he finds himself at odds with the ensuing Adams administration. “The thing I remind myself is: The next guy’s president, and you’re worthless,” Mr. Miranda said. “And then the next guy’s president, and your stock goes up.”
“Hamilton,” he added, has “gone through versions of that too: ‘Oh, it’s the Obama show!’ ‘Oh, it’s actually the resistance-to-Trump show!’ It’s a musical. If it’s well written, whether it’s ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Cabaret’ or ‘Chicago,’ different things are going to hit you depending on where we are as a country.”
The key to keeping that possibility alive is the show’s ending. Instead of the galvanizing hip-hop numbers that propel its multiracial cast through the American Revolution, instead of the soaring ballads and sultry R&B and jaunty jazz that expand the soundscape of our country’s history, instead of the defiant resolution that caps the first act with Hamilton scaling a staircase as he shouts, “I am not throwing away my shot!” the show ends on a hushed, uncertain tone. There’s no resounding orchestral chord, no “Oklahoma”-style promise of a beautiful morning to come in America. Rather, “Hamilton” concludes with the entire company singing, a cappella, a haunting, open question: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
When I saw it 10 years ago, I was floored by its final beat. Eliza, Hamilton’s widow, who tried to rescue his legacy from oblivion, looked out toward the audience and gasped. We sat in silence, stunned.
Originally, the show ended with a minor chord. But then, before it got to Broadway, Mr. Miranda and his orchestrator, Alex Lacamoire, worked out a different arrangement. There wouldn’t be a final chord at all. They played with the a cappella section so that “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” tapered to a single note, neither decisively major or minor, optimistic or elegiac. America’s story would still be up for grabs.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a theater teacher at Portland State University, is the author of the forthcoming “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist.”
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