Originally published on WordPress on October 14, 2020. Revived April 2nd, 2021 at my express discretion because I am now boycotting WordPress because this shit happened:
After a very long winded adventure, LONG winded, because I know I always type up “word vomit” that I should never say out loud… Let’s get back to basics.
Too many people have begged me all over Twitter and social media to review this Broadway musical and somehow “get thou Disney +” or “Get thee to a Broadway theatre and reserve thy seat in New York City TODAY before they dost reopen in 2021” and hurry hurry hurry, because everybody else has seen it already- whereas I have no smartphone and no goddamn access to Disney + and not even HBO so I can finally watch my beloved His Dark Materials…
You know what- ju- FINE!
Jane Austen’s most famous book Pride and Prejudice cleverly begins with the single sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife,” presenting itself as a romantic novel for the age of the Regency Era, where women still didn’t have any rights at all, but they still wanted to take charge of their own. But in the case of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, it was true that even the proudest, smartest, haughtiest wealthy gentleman landowner who had more money than His Majesty King George, either the Fourth or III, George III was always known as “Mad King George” in Britain, even today in the 21st century; Darcy’s riches and money made him lonely. So with the brain of a woman like Miss Lizzie Bennet, who was witty, biting, maybe a tiny prejudiced, and outspoken, unlike her softspoken older sister Jane, she was able to melt the heart of the wealthiest bachelor of Pemberley and the “miserable half” of Derbyshire.
WELL, I did some digging, and the actual first draft of the romance of Lizzie and Mr. Darcy, which at first used to be called First Impressions until some doofus rich WHITE DUDE stole her title (jackass), was actually written and supposed to be published sometime during the, wait for it… War of 1812.
A few years before Britain, America, and France declared war on each other because of a failed negotiation of the United States opening for bigger trade guidelines and the westward expansion… 1804, to be exact and well within the parameters of Jane Austen writing her first drafts of Northanger Abbey, Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and possibly making finishing touches to her unheard-of-til-now novel told in letters, Lady Susan (published more than a century after her death from Addison’s in 1817)… was the year Founding Father and youngest Secretary of the United States Treasury and founder of our first American bank system… was brutally murdered in a duel. With guns.
As the musical soundtrack CD suggests, containing a whopping 46 tracks total, practically a 2-3 disk rap-music-opera “double album” of one hell of an “American Musical”, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the one and ONLY playwright who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, and starred as the famous title role himself in his first MacArthur-Pulitzer-Tony-Grammy and Kennedy Center Honors from President Obama winning juggernaut of genius (plbthbthbth! Ben Franklin is ROLLING IN HIS GRAVE!!!), asks you that in the end of your life… Who actually lives to tell your story in a book, a movie, a play, a- anything????
As Alexander Hamilton’s murderer Aaron Burr, played by Leslie Odom, Jr. in the original cast, sings, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story???”
Uh… Damn. Ok. Re evaluate, please. That is one heavy question.
Here is the breakdown of what I heard my first night, second night, and third night of listening to the complete 46-song set list of the Broadway musical Hamilton, practically two and a half hours long, completely unabridged. Here it is.
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*AOL dial up noise*
Connected!!!
Those of you who didn’t know- That was an inside Miranda joke from one of the songs in the original Broadway cast recording. If you haven’t listened to the recording, or you’ve never seen the show in New York City or on Disney + by now, don’t hurt yourself. I’ll explain.
And now I don’t care how long this takes. This might be a three parter. Hmm…
I have to skip the first song because “Alexander Hamilton”, the main theme of the musical, absolutely stinks. The constant wailing of those seven syllables of his first and last name over and over again in that horrible annoying tone is enough to grate your ears.
Possibly what is more tolerable is the Aaron Burr main theme “Wait For It”. According to interviews about the show, particularly from one video by the Wall Street Journal, when Lin-Manuel Miranda was talking to high school students from Bronx Theatre High School, Miranda said that he was on the subway listening to his headphones and on his way to his friend’s birthday party when he suddenly thought of the phrase, “Death doesn’t discriminate,” which became the entire theme of the song. He took out his notebook right in the middle of the subway on the L train down to write the whole song, and when he got off the train, suddenly the entire song came all at once. He recorded his voice singing the main refrain that Aaron Burr sings, got to the party, drank half a beer, told his friend, “Happy birthday, man, I gotta go,” and left immediately for the subway to write the rest of the song on the L and A trains back to his house on 207th.
In the documentary series Song Exploder on Netflix, Lin explains in his episode of how “Wait For It” actually came to him and he started formulating the entire musical around that while sitting in Aaron Burr’s chair at the historic Hamilton Grange before sending it to Thomas Kail for putting the entire music around it together.
This is the finished product they came up with, from the original Broadway cast recording:
The sound quality of this song is even better than I expected. Leslie Odom, Jr. actually has the same tone as R&B 90s singers Seal and Boys II Men. The choir echoes are perfection, the piano and strings make it even more poignant… and did the people in Song Exploder actually say there was an old dulcimer from the 1700s incorporated in the song as well???
Uh… wow.
Around the third or fourth day I began listening to the soundtrack, I stumbled on actual video clips from the Broadway musical featuring the original cast (Lin-Manuel, Daveed Diggs, and Odom included in this particular scene) starting with this one, and it actually gave me a huge fit of the giggles. And yes, you can hear a real old-timey harpsicord and pianoforte in “Farmer Refuted” as Hercules Mulligan hilariously says in a perfect hip-hop rap dude tone, “Oh my god, tear dis dude apart!”:
(video deleted by YouTube because of copyright, sorry :( )
Wait- wha-
“I pray the King shows you his mercy!”
“Is he in Jersey???”
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.
The next song that comes after is where the king, “Mad King George”, gives out his message that he’s going to kill people that you love, your family and your children, to show you how much the king loves you. Almost in the deranged style of Sir Elton John’s poppier love songs, kind of borderline on “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me”, which honestly is the worst Elton John song I can think of, because this king is a total PRICK. The king in the show is also so deadpan when he sings “You’ll Be Back” that you just know that he’s got the “serious crazy eyes” look on him, like the psycho girls Barney, Ted, and Marshall dated in the How I Met Your Mother episode “Swarley” in season two, the episode where Marshall and Lily get back together and Morena Baccharin destroys Marshall’s apartment. Dude, the eyes- they’re CRAZY. Dis dude has GOT to go!
That’s not even the half of it, in the music sense. I’ve always considered rap music to have “too many beats” just like in the Milos Forman movie about Mozart, Amadeus, Mozart’s music had “too many notes”.
Strangely enough, Mozart’s biography and the Forman-directed film (which also became a Broadway play featuring Star Wars’s Mark Hamill playing the role of Wolfie) also took place in the exact same time period of Jane Austen AND Alexander Hamilton- because when Mozart was writing music for the King of Austria-Germany (back then, Austria and Germany was still all one country and ruled by a monarch), a teenage duchess by the name of Marie Antoinette was betrothed to the King of France, thus leading to the upcoming French Revolution that happened after the Americans declared independence from England.
Guess who was leading said French Revolution, by the way? Hamilton’s best buddy Marquis De Lafayette, who read Hamilton’s letters and papers and sent him to New York to protest against the King of England and help the American government write the Declaration of Independence.
Thus, it brought the attention of General George Washington, the main general leading all the battles against England before he was President of the United States, who asked Hamilton personally to be his first aide du campe, which is basically like a secretary-second-in-command who writes down all the plans for the troops like a football playbook to plan surprise attacks and sneaky inside tactics to kill off the Brits and send them packing back where they came from.
Holy shit. That just hit me for what I’m about to write next…
Liiiiiiight buuuuuuuullb.
To be continued…
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