Review Roundup: Lin-Manuel Miranda's HAMILTON Opens at the Public - All the Reviews!

The world premiere production of Hamilton, inspired by the book "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, with book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and directed by Thomas Kail, officially opens tonight, February 17 at The Public Theater.

The cast features Daveed Diggs (Marquis De Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson); Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler); Christopher Jackson (George Washington); Brian d'Arcy James (King George); Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy Schuyler, Maria Reynolds); Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton); Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr); Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan, James Madison); Anthony Ramos (John Laurens, Phillip Hamilton); Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton) and more.

HAMILTON is a wildly inventive new musical about the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: Alexander Hamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winner Miranda wields his pen and takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on a new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is. From bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, Hamilton is an exploration of a political mastermind.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld: Lin-Manuel Miranda may not have invented the concept of having historical characters speak and sing in contemporary pop vernacular, but in the explosively intelligent and pulse-pumping new musical Hamilton, he and his collaborators have lifted the idea to rarely achieved levels of musical theatre sophistication...It's a lot of ground to cover and Miranda does so with remarkable thoroughness. While the conventions of hip-hop allow for sound-alikes and slant rhymes, his raps predominantly hit pure ones. When the score switches to more traditional melodies, pure rhyming is always used. Though jaunty and full of clever wordplay, his lyrics are dramatically thick and rich with character. This is fine musical theatre writing disguised as freestyle.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "Hamilton," which is directed with vigor and finesse by Thomas Kail and features the multifarious Mr. Miranda in the title role, persuasively transfers a thoroughly archived past into an unconditional present tense. Written and composed by Mr. Miranda, this work...exudes the dizzying urgency of being caught up in momentous events as they occur...this confluence of what's heard on the American musical stage and what's heard on the airwaves and in the clubs hasn't existed for at least six decades...it convinces us that hip-hop and its generic cousins embody the cocky, restless spirit of self-determination that birthed the American independence movement..."Hamilton" consistently finds muted, blurring shades -- of feeling, of morality, of character -- within its incident-and-fact-packed story without ever sacrificing narrative clarity. And the sheer scope of what Mr. Miranda crams into his precisely but exuberantly chiseled lyrics is a marvel.

Mark Kennedy, Associated Press: Over-hyped? Perhaps. But this almost three-hour show, with some 50 songs, reprises and song fragments -- is also rollicking, messy, and earnest -- just like America's founding...It stresses the orphan, immigrant roots of "the $10 Founding Father without a father," his vices and ambition, and his almost Greek tragedy of a death. It's clever and ambitious, yes, and also in need of some editing. It's the kind of show that Broadway insiders are already applauding: Edgy without being scary, historical without being dry. It's hip-hop with a master's degree. Could it be the thing that rescues Broadway? When everything works, it's thrilling to watch...Miranda and Kail clearly know when to go big but also when to bring it down..."Hamilton" is nothing less than a reclaiming of America's founding story, a retelling of the 18th century story by a nontraditional cast wearing vests and cravats and singing about "dropping knowledge." In its own way, it's a revolution, all right.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: There's rarely been a history lesson as entertaining as Lin-Manuel Miranda's new hip hop-infused musical about Alexander Hamilton...Hamilton brings American history to musical-theater life in a style akin to the classic 1776, only with a hipper, more multi-cultural attitude...It's a dense, nearly entirely sung-through musical, featuring more than a dozen major characters and nearly three times as many musical numbers that incorporate myriad styles, including heavy doses of rap. But it all flows together beautifully in a torrent of music and language that is as exhilarating as it is educational. More surprisingly, Miranda has managed to make the material succeed in emotional as well as intellectual terms. His Hamilton is a supremely engaging character...Miranda's music and lyrics are consistently captivating no matter how dry their subject matter.

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: Creatively, Hamilton represents a giant leap forward -- not just for Miranda, who wrote the book, music and lyrics and plays the title role, but for the traditions he's drawing from. Rapping flows seamlessly into singing, with soaring melodies shifting to (and sometimes supporting) dazzling displays of rhythm and rhyme that mine the inherent theatricality of hop-hop...In Miranda's sensitive portrayal, Hamilton emerges as a man more comfortable with language and ideas than with people...Director Thomas Kail has enlisted a multi-racial cast to embody the promise and the challenges at the core of our democracy; and Miranda has given them a score informed by Gilbert and Sullivan to contemporary R&B divas...Live entertainment doesn't get more exciting than this, in any form. So believe the hype: Hamilton is revolutionary in its own right, and an extraordinary achievement.

Linda Winer, Newsday: Thanks to "Hamilton," a thrilling, audacious, deliriously overloaded invention by Lin-Manuel Miranda, this lost founding father has not only been found alive beyond the $10 bill. His story is suddenly a cross-cultural milestone in musical theater...Miranda...combines subtle, complicated, playful storytelling with the jagged rhythms and unexpected lyricism of hip-hop. Yes, he probably could take out two of every 10 ideas and still be left with piles of startling character development. And perhaps Hamilton's backstory, passed around different narrators, can be made easier to follow and the final scene lifted to the power of the rest of the show before the inevitable Broadway transfer. Or maybe the musical and every charismatic actor and each swirling, popping dancer should just be left as they are...Hamilton could never have imagined who would tell this one. He is in brash and brilliant hands.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: In Lin-Manuel Miranda's brilliantly inventive bio-musical, "Hamilton," the great man is winningly imagined as an orphaned immigrant, a political rebel, a reckless lover, and a non-stop talker -- clearly, a born rapper...Although the premise sounds outlandish, it takes about two seconds to surrender to the musical sweep of the sung-through score and to Miranda's amazing vision of his towering historical subject as an ideological contemporary who reflects the thoughts and speaks the language of a vibrant young generation of immigrant strivers. It's a wonderfully humanizing view of history...The music is exhilarating, but the lyrics are the big surprise. The sense as well as the sound of the sung dialogue has been purposely suited to each character...For a character-centric bio-musical, "Hamilton" really spreads the wealth around...in the end, Miranda's impassioned narrative of one man's story becomes the collective narrative of a nation, a nation built by immigrants who occasionally need to be reminded where they came from.

David Cote, Time Out NY: History ticks to a syncopated beat in Lin-Manuel Miranda's jubilant, overflowingly rich Hamilton...The cast in Thomas Kail's bravura, dance-filled staging is all-star: Christopher Jackson's Washington is an affable demigod; Phillipa Soo's tremulous Eliza, the long-suffering wife to philandering Hamilton; Daveed Diggs a deliciously conceited and fatuous Jefferson. And Brian d'Arcy James brings down the house with each appearance as the sneering British overlord King George...What Miranda does with rhyme is simply staggering...Not just for its lyrical virtuosity, but also structural elegance and fierce topicality, the piece is a signal achievement, expanding the subgenre of tuneful takes on national identity (1776, Assassins and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson). Even more than that, it offers a template for the fully integrated hip-hop musical (also mixing in R&B and indie pop) that repurposes the social and verbal strategies of rap and slam poetry for supposedly off-limits topics. In remixing the past to his own beat, Miranda shows us the future.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: At its best, "Hamilton"...is giddily exciting. Miranda's lyrics burst with smart internal rhymes and wordplay...Miranda's also great at pulling seemingly disparate strands of pop music into a convincing whole -- it's hard not to admire a show under the influence of the Notorious B.I.G. and Stephen Sondheim, R&B and "Rent." The production itself is sterling, energetically directed and choreographed by fellow "In the Heights" alum Thomas Kail and Andy Blankenbuehler, respectively. And you won't soon forget Brian d'Arcy James' hilarious turn as a smug King George. Yet too many of the numbers are exposition-heavy lessons, as if this were "Schoolhouse Rap!"

Matt Windman, AM New York: Having finally seen "Hamilton" for myself, I can report that it's dynamic and smart but hardly a masterwork -- at least not yet. In its current form, it is raw, overstuffed as a narrative and far too long (just under three hours)...Unlike "In the Heights," where rapping was mixed with great pop songs, "Hamilton" is comprised primarily of rap. In spite of the witty wordplay, it gets tiresome after a while. The actors, though vibrant, seem to just be playing themselves. It's as if Miranda and his pals decided one day to dramatize Hamilton's life in a hip-hop idiom, just for fun...In the end, you feel like you've experienced a rambling Wikipedia article read aloud to a rap beat rather than a carefully integrated musical based on famous historical figures, like say "1776."

Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: Hamilton, which acknowledges its debt to both those musicals among others, is the rare show critics leave the theater thinking, This is the future of Broadway. We're almost always wrong. Not this time, I think...Those stakes set the tone of a musical that never stops moving...and rarely pauses the story-telling to catch its breath...Miranda has so much story to tell that he rarely steps back to take the long view or to go deep inside his character. That's a flaw in the show -- it's breathlessly expository and resists self-contemplation despite a couple of tips of the hat to Miranda's heroes Oscar Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim...And yet this phenomenal production honors the inexhaustible verbal wordplay and musical breadth that connects Miranda to Broadway's greats. At unexpected moments the score just soars onchoral wings...I left Hamilton not only exhilarated and eager to see it again but also full of anticipation about where Lin-Manuel Miranda will take us next.

Jesse Green, Vulture: I don't mean to suggest that you're unpatriotic if you aren't moved by Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's sensational new hip-hop biomusical at the Public. But in order to dislike it you'd pretty much have to dislike the American experiment. The conflict between independence and interdependence is not just the show's subject but also its method: It brings the complexity of forming a union from disparate constituencies right to your ears...But for all its complexity -- its multistrand plotting and exploding rhyme-grenades -- Hamilton is neither a challenge nor a chore. It's just great.

Charles Upton Sahm, City Journal: The new off-Broadway musical Hamilton is pure genius...Miranda tells Hamilton's story in an intelligent and historically accurate way, while also making the show enormously entertaining...In Miranda's hands, Hamilton's story is a crowd pleaser...Hamilton the musical is largely focused on the story of Hamilton the man. My only wish? I would have liked more about Hamilton's legacy...Hamilton runs three hours, with an intermission; the producers are looking to shorten it, someone involved with the show told me. They shouldn't cut a word...What Lin-Manuel Miranda has created could introduce a new generation of young people to the Founders. Especially the coolest one.

Dave Quinn, NBC New York: Miranda's a genius with words and melody, and each song in "Hamilton" is rich with emotion and wit. His layered arrangements (created with "Heights" musical director Alex Lacamoire) will draw you in, and his clever lyrics will leave you hanging on every word. Many of the songs - especially those infused with a hip-hop or R&B beat - sound like they could live at the top of today's music charts, easily with Ne-Yo or Pharrell behind them.

Robert Feldberg, Bergen Record: Rap, it turns out, is particularly well-suited to storytelling, and that's what Miranda ("In the Heights") - who wrote the music, lyrics and book and also plays Alexander Hamilton, in a great personal triumph - is doing with this production. He's relating a grand tale of the country's founding, focusing on Hamilton as the "other" kind of American: an immigrant, born out of wedlock, orphaned, who has to be smarter and work harder to achieve success.

Michael Giltz, Huffington Post: You might call Hamilton brash and irreverent. The Founding Fathers in rap battles, dissing one another? Scandalous. Or at best clever-clever. But you'd be wrong.Hamilton is brash and very reverent, which is crucial to its success. It's not mocking those old white dudes in wigs, it's celebrating the battle of ideas and the actual battles they engaged in, the freedoms they fought for and the freedoms they would give themselves and others like them while wittingly or not creating a fluid political system that would slowly expand those freedoms to more and more members of society until people of color in this cast could play them onstage and it would feel natural and inevitable and right.

Adam Green, Vogue: Much of the production's success belongs to the director and Miranda's longtime collaborator Thomas Kail, who also staged In the Heights and, like Miranda, seriously steps up his game with this one. He keeps the two-hour-and-forty-five-minute, through-composed proceedings moving swiftly, with almost cinematic fluidity and variety, along with a keen sense of when to pull back the lens and let the stage percolate with the explosive energy of the ensemble, and when to zoom in and slow down to create a more intimate, quietly emotional moment. Kail also has an impeccable sense of theatrical storytelling, shown to masterful effect in a sequence that takes us from Hamilton's first meeting with society sisters Eliza and Angelica Schuyler (Phillipa Soo and Renee Elise Goldsberry) to his marriage to Eliza, and then doubles back to show us the same events through the eyes of Angelica, who is in love with her brother-in-law. (Kail is helped immeasurably byAndy Blankenbuehler's sexy, soulful, and kinetic choreography and Howell Binkley's lighting, which evokes with equal artistry the candlelit glow of an eighteenth-century drawing room and the electric flash of a rock concert.)

Peter Marks, Washington Post: Make no mistake: "Hamilton" is indeed a history lesson, and the jaw-dropping reams of detail Miranda packs into the 34 musical numbers (plus reprises!) do walk right up to the edge of overkill. (The show is inspired byRon Chernow's 818-page best-selling biography.) But such is the exhilarating level of theatricality exhibited here, in everything from Andy Blankenbuehler's supercharged choreography to Howell Binkley's marvelous lighting to the magnetic portrayals of Hamilton, Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs), among others, that the musical's 2 hours and 45 minutes whizz and swirl by in a captivating rush.

Alexis Soloski, Guardian: This isn't parody and it isn't even pastiche. Sure, a lot of the lines are borrowed from elsewhere and a lot of the music sounds very familiar. (George III's pop ballad You'll Be Back, performed by the superlative Brian d'Arcy James, is a duplicate of the Monkees' Daydream Believer.) But the styles complement and clash so extravagantly and exuberantly that they create new genres of their own. It takes real dash to write a song like The Schuyler Sisters, almost a throwaway number, which somehow combines TLC with the Andrews Sisters and a hat tip toThree Little Maids From School Are We. Didn't expect to see a show that could pay homage to both Stephen Sondheim and Biggie Smalls? You're welcome.

Jason Clark, Entertainment Weekly: The show's instantly memorable, freestyle-flavored score could have carried the evening plenty far on its own, but what makes Miranda and Kail's collaboration so exciting (along with Blankenbuehler's vibrant choreography) is the innate understanding of how we define history as much it defines us. The decision to cast the show with an eye on multiculturalism-actors rarely bear any resemblance to their real-life counterparts-is nothing short of inspired; you're constantly nudged into acknowledging the American landscape as interpretive and ever-changing. The hulking, hunky Christopher Jackson as George Washington? Sure, why not. Said casting is often subversively witty too, especially in the delicious choice to represent Thomas Jefferson (a fleet, funny Daveed Diggs) as an African-American man (think about it).

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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