Why Lin-Manuel Miranda is not “Revolutionary”

When I was 16, I went on a school trip to see In the Heights . The music, the lyrics, everything seemed to align and connect with my lived experience. I heard Salsa, hip-hop, mention of piraguas and the play was set in New York City. And yet, I felt off. It felt uncomfortable being in the theater with my class from Bayside, Queens. I could see everyone laughing along to jokes and for some reason I just had the sense that this joke wasn’t completely for me. I never understood why. Fast forward ten years later and the same feeling returns when I listen to Hamilton.

I was first exposed to Hamilton the same way I am exposed to any successful Broadway as a New Yorker, through the constant buzz about ticket prices and lottery outcomes. As a teacher, Hamilton was touted as a way to reach minority students; a better way at connecting their lives to the seemingly unrelated history of this “great” nation. And then the initiatives came. Social Studies teachers were given the ability to bring their classes to shows. Suddenly, I had to indulge even more lame ass hip hopification of education topics. Culturally Responsive Teaching, a pedagogical framework that is complicated and requires deep reflection was replaced with rapping out the times tables to your students.

But that’s not Hamilton’s fault. Hamilton doesn’t purport to be an educational show. It’s a musical. And that’s what annoys me about both In the Heights and Hamilton. The medium of the musical aspires to reach the hallowed halls of Broadway and as a result, its target audience is clear: well endowed theater goers who do not mind shelling out three hundred dollars a ticket to be able to see a chandelier fall on them (glad to report Phantom tickets are far cheaper these days). As a result, making art that’s compelling for a particular minority group is, well, difficult.

That’s because while minority art does not require an all out hate fest on the controlling class, it at least needs to acknowledge the discomfort. And that’s the thing, in society the people with wealth who attend musicals do not particularly like musicals that well, completely trash them or ignore them.

The movie critic Lindsay Ellis talks about this trend in musical theater, specifically deep diving into the movie Rent (seriously check her videos out, a million times better than the nonsense I write and far more entertaining). She cites the theory of the “theater of the oppressed”, which holds that the theater, a medium designed for the privileged, inherently produces art that disarms the working class by creating false narratives that preach revolution, while tacitly reinforcing the status quo. I believe this theory can intersect with critical race theory in that poor people of color are alienated by art that seems to be made for them, but are actually made for wealthy predominantly white broadway audience.

You see when I was sitting in that In the Heights theater, I felt weird because it was weird seeing people laughing at inside jokes from my culture, who I knew didn’t share the same cultural capitol. It felt weird seeing the stereotype of the “Latina who isn’t smart enough to cut it at a prestigious school” come home to a community none the wiser of what she went through. Nina related to me insofar that I was afraid I would become her. Nina related to the audience insofar that it confirmed what some secretly thought: affirmative action admits have no place at Stanford (it’s suggested in the musical that her failure was a function of her having to work while being at school, but the song Breathe only displays her own self loathing).

And while the entire musical was about receiving agency, the end effect of the musical was there is no agency. There is no indication that things will be different. Nina will go back to Stanford, albeit different, but no more prepared to deal with the difficulties of being poor and attending a prestigious university ( she received money for tuition, not living). Usnavi, who lamented how the block was changing will hold out, but it does not change the fact that gentrification is an inevitable outcome.

Vanessa serves as the the symbol of what will eventually happen to all the height’s residents. She wants to “get out” of the barrio, playing on the theme of “getting out” of the hood. But she doesn’t want to lose her connection to el barrio, so she insists on Usnavi staying. But therein lies the contradiction. Why does Vanessa want to leave? It’s subtle, but the subtext behind her desire to leave speaks to the trope of “getting out” so commonly found in hood culture. The “getting out” theme implies that el barrio is a bad place to be escaped. Yet she wants to keep it. This contradiction is a common experience among people who grew up in the hood (See Daniel Beaty’s Duality Duel for an example of this contradiction manifested in a personal struggle).

To be fair to Vanessa, her fears are not unfounded. The danger of the heights are shown during the blackout when Sonny has to defend the store from looters. That being said, other than the blackout and the attempted robbery (which during a blackout crime is an expectation) what is so bad about el barrio that makes Vanessa want to leave? The show doesn’t provide use any answers. The aforementioned subtext of getting out is one that minority viewers would understand and perhaps Manuel is creating a double signifier, but doublespeak leaves two problematic pretexts for non-minority audiences. The first pretext, being the least problematic, is the notion that Vanessa, a young woman, wants to just leave the nest. Such longing is seen in students heading off to college, trying to get as far away from their parents as possible. While this subtext is innocent, it also misses the entire struggle the show is hinting at with the “getting out” trope. The far more insidious pre-text is the one that many affluent neighborhoods hold today. Poor neighborhoods like el barrio are rife with crime, drugs, and poverty and as a result anyone would want to escape. The show sanitizes these realities for the sake of making el barrio palatable, but we know that’s not really how the heights is. The audience rationalizes her want for escape not as a contradiction, but merely an attachment to the people. Vanessa even persists with this degradation of el barrio in the song Carnaval del Barrio, where despite a showing of unity and celebration, she proceeds to whine and restate her desire to leave. The audience does not gleam from her diatribe “el barrio is a complicated place where bad things do occur, but there is an inherent cultural and personal connection worth preserving.” It instead just thinks, the people of the community are great, but the place itself is bad.

And that’s fine for wealthy broadway goers. They don’t live in the heights (yet). Their kids do not struggle at Stanford. So we’ll bring them up problems, but we won’t actually resolve them because this is a show and everything needs to be resolved optimistically.

I want to be clear that I don’t think In the Heights is a bad show. I don’t think its insensitive or careless with the subject matter. I am suggesting that Lin-Manuel Miranda couldn’t make a musical that was for Latinos. It was a musical for wealthy theater goers about Washington Heights. And that’s exactly what Hamilton is.

One of the most ironic praises Hamilton receives is that it revolutionized the form. Musicals that used hip-hop and rap were exclusively reserved for urban settings and themes. Miranda showed the theater community that even the stuffiest of topics could be hip hopified. But didn’t he already do that when he created In the Heights? I mean certainly In the Heights was an “urban” setting, but it wasn’t non-stop rapping. It was selective in its use of hip-hop and rap and any director who was interested in embedding hip-hop into their show could have studied In the Heights. But no. They needed Hamilton to show them how.

And that’s the thing. Hamilton tries to mend the rift between a hip-hop culture that has always inherently been anti-authority with well, the most supreme authority in the land: the federal government. It recasts Alexander Hamilton as an immigrant, somehow claiming one for the minorities and recasts all our favorite slave owners as regressive selfish slavery lovers (except for Washington, apparently he’s fine regardless of his slaves). Hamilton, the revolutionary, is loud, brash and true to his beliefs and his foil, Burr, is the opportunistic parasite politician. The irony is in today’s politics we could see this narrative play out quite ruinously. Imagine a Hamiltonesque maverick saying he disagrees with Trump, but at least he has beliefs, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, moderate democrat have none (this is a false analogy, I’m not sure if Trump has beliefs either).

In the end Hamilton is still loyal to the country intent on disowning him. He is still pro administration. His wife, who was “put back in the narrative” is essentially relegated to a side character, while her husband flirts with her older sister constantly. Hamilton’s salacious behavior is effectively sanitized in the final song with Angelica and Eliza banding together to tell Hamilton’s “story.” Aaron Burr is painted as a sympathetic character who just wanted to make sure his daughter had a father. We aren’t left with the character flaws, we are left with character excuses. We are encouraged to see the “whole” character by conveniently giving redemption to everyone.

Even the play’s handling of slavery and race can be criticized. Starting with slavery, the play selectively tells the history of slavery with Hamilton railing against Jefferson for being a slave owner (who while being an ardent slaver owner, did try to curb its spread), while essentially remaining silent on Washington’s known reputation for having slaves. Miranda actually created a 3rd cabinet battle song which staged a debate over slavery. The debate highlighted the failure of the vaunted Washington administration. It was compelling and it is by far my favorite cabinet battle, but it is omitted from the show. Why? The reasons range from plot consistency (the end of the song mentions Hamilton’s infidelity, which is a reveal later on in the show) and just practical logistics (i.e. some songs need to get cut).

But what remains in the final cut is so telling of what the priorities of the show are. If the show was looking to give a balanced accounting of the Founding Era, surely it would keep its largest failure. Especially since we see in many conventional retellings of the Founding Father era, the failure of slavery is ignored, glossed over or relegated to a footnote. Hamilton is ok with using people of color culturally and physically, but refuses to highlight the country’s inability to serve them from its inception. This makes the use of actors of color so uncomfortable. The idea behind actors of color playing the founding father roles implies that the community of color also somehow inherits this founding history. And we do, just not the history Hamilton tells. The history of slavery, the history of poverty in America, American imperialism, these are the histories we inherit along with the declaration of independence. When you bring audiences of color to this play, it essentially disarms them into believing that they are being put back into the narrative, they aren’t.

Well, if you read up to this, good job. You were able to withhold judgement for a bit to here my rant about Miranda’s work. So should you throw away your Hamilton lottery tickets in solidarity? No, are you crazy? Those tickets are like 350 dollars a pop, you better take the lottery and tell me how it goes. I just want to be clear, I’m not saying Hamilton is an awful show or it completely misses the point. I’m not saying Lin-Manuel Miranda is a sell out who produces fake art. I’m merely suggesting that maybe the medium of the musical and the way we treat art puts pressures on art to be crafted in a manner that even with the best intentions, ends up alienating poor people of color. And by acknowledging that, maybe Miranda or the next playwright will make a show that aims to be revolutionary. Miranda seems to do this in the movie version of In the Heights which implied a larger discussion about immigrant rights in America from the trailer. Maybe Broadway inherently creates these pseudo-revolutionary shows because this is what the wealthy populous will consume? Maybe a musical movie such as In the Heights can take the form and sustain it with the support of the oppressed, thereby freeing the movie and the playwright to galvanize the masses.