‘Hamilton’ Heads to Broadway in a Hip-Hop Retelling
The Broadway musical can seem as oldfangled as the founding fathers. But an audacious hip-hop retelling of the life of the nation’s first Treasury secretary lands on Broadway Monday poised to become the rarest of theatrical phenomena: not only a hit, but a turning point for the art form and a cultural conversation piece.
The show, “Hamilton,” arrives with a powerful tailwind. It has already brought in $27.6 million, with just over 200,000 tickets sold — huge numbers for Broadway, and among the biggest pre-opening advances in history.
An Off Broadway production of the musical, which ran this year at the Public Theater, was a critical darling that sold out 119 performances, attracted a who’s who of cultural and political figures, and collected a trophy case of awards. And the show’s creator, a 35-year-old New Yorker named Lin-Manuel Miranda, has already won a Tony and a Grammy for an earlier show he had begun while still an undergraduate.
Thus far “Hamilton” has been seen by relatively few people — a total of 34,132 seats were available over 15 weeks at the Public, fewer than at a typical Yankees home game, and there remain uncertainties about how it will be received by broader audiences over time.
“The question we have to answer is: ‘Will the word of mouth be as good, or better, on Broadway? Will we measure up?’,” said the show’s lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, who has won Tony Awards for the groundbreaking musicals “Rent” and “Avenue Q” and Mr. Miranda’s debut, “In the Heights.”
The show’s appeal to in-the-know New Yorkers is clear; its challenge now is to broaden its appeal to tourists from around the nation and the globe who dominate the Broadway audience and are essential to the longevity of a musical. Early indications are positive.
“There’s a huge appetite, definitely, and it’s pretty much across the board,” said Scott Mallalieu, president of GreatWhiteWay.com, a group sales and marketing company. “The word of mouth has gone out: This is a game changer in musical theater history.”
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