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Letter from Broadway

 What a thrill to go to "Hamilton"--for a third time--for my husband's birthday. The current star, Miguel Cervantes, is said to be the definitive Alexander (whatever that means); one thing that helps is that he has actually lost a child. When--as Alexander--he mourns the death of little Junior, you sense an unusual level of actorly authority.


My main lens for watching was a consideration of Lin Manuel Miranda's relationship with Sondheim. Miranda has said that Sondheim urged him to look for opportunities to surprise. (A surprise would be moving from "Sweeney Todd" to "Merrily." Or from "Merrily" to "Sunday in the Park.") When Miranda told Sondheim that he was working on a rap musical about the Founding Fathers, Sondheim apparently laughed, with delight, and said, "That's exactly what you should be doing." (Not a shock, then, that Miranda is now pivoting toward a musical adaptation of "The Warriors.")

Sondheim went on record with his distaste for intermissions. He thought that something happened to a show's momentum--something difficult--in those twenty minutes of silence. One response was to erase the intermission, as in "Follies," "Passion," and "Assassins." Another response was to begin a new story, in Act Two, so that the link between the show's two halves is subtle and strange (as in "Sunday in the Park with George").

I think Miranda borrows from Sondheim; the figures in Act Two of "Hamilton" are different from (yet also linked with) the Act One figures. "Sunday" gives us Marie; she both is and is not a new version of "Dot." "Hamilton" gives us Jefferson, who (in some ways) reproduces Lafayette's charisma. "Hamilton" also gives us Madison, who is superficially different from Hercules, but who actually does evoke thoughts of Hercules's fighting spirit.

Mostly, I was happy to spend three hours with a crazed protagonist, someone with outsized wants. I'm seeing "Here We Are" tomorrow--and I'm worried that "the dynamic center" will be missing. We won't get to follow someone like Alexander Hamilton. Time will tell. I'm keeping an open mind.
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