What is the phenomenon with Hamilton the musical? Why do they sell tickets two years in advance?
Have you listened to the sound track or watched the youtube videos?
My D loves it. I was trying to buy tickets and was surprised to see that it is impossible.
It’s hard to explain why one musical suddenly blows up and runs for years (look how long Wicked has been playing). But Lin Manuel Miranda is very talented, rap has tons of appeal these days, and Hamilton got exceptionally positive reviews. So it’s become the show that everyone HAS to see. There’s an element of fad in the whole thing. And of course you have to keep in mind that compared to say, a popular movie, a Broadway show can’t accommodate that many people at any given time. Broadway houses are relatively small–the theater where Hamilton is playing holds about 1300 people, and musicals usually play 8 times a week. Compare that capacity with how many people in the country want to see a smash hit, and you can see how the far in advance the show can sell out.
Personally I have zero interest in Hamilton–couldn’t sit through all the rap numbers if you paid me (and I’ve seen excerpts and heard some of the music). But I do have friends who enjoyed it (didn’t rave, just enjoyed it), and one thing they mentioned was that it’s really helpful to listen to the cast album a number of times before attending, because the lyrics go by so quickly they’re impossible to completely understand without some advance preparation. Two years should be enough time for that!
The Hamilton buzz actually started way back in 2009 when Lin-Manuel Miranda performed the “Alexander Hamilton” number at a rap session at the White House. Look for the YouTube video. That is when I became aware of it – one of my kids saw it, and before long our whole family had that song on our play lists. So we have been waiting for years for the musical – D1 saw it off Broadway a few weeks after it opened in New York a couple of years ago. Now it is, of course, on Broadway, and starting a tour as well. Nominated for 16 Tony awards this year, too. Lin-Manuel Miranda now had a Tony (from In The Heights, which started as his senior project at Wesleyan!), a Grammy, an Emmy, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer for drama. The Macarthur genius grants finally got around to an award for him in 2015 as well. And he has a slew of other “lesser” awards as well. The guy has talent, and not just at Hamilton, as he had a couple other Broadway hits before that.
Oh, and if you Google his wedding video, it is a show as well. 
Well, I don’t like rap so at least I don’t feel terribly disappointed. I would like to hear opinions sometime from those who feel as I do. My DH enjoys some rap, so in 5 years when it comes to town we will probably go see it.
Ruling it out because you “don’t like rap” is very silly. Who does at our age? It’s a brilliant musical and a game-changer - and I haven’t even seen it! I don’t find it hard to understand or follow.
Give it a chance!
I am not a rap fan and yet, I loved Hamilton. Please don’t think that this is a just a rap show. It isn’t. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of theatre productions, and probably the vast majority of shows on Broadway and off-Broadway for the past, probably, 30 years, including other very popular shows. Hamilton is different. It truly is. It is brilliantly written, superbly cast, exquisitely staged. The sound is terrific, the lighting just right, and the cast is probably the most uniformly beautiful cast of actors I’ve ever seen on stage.
I didn’t have any problem deciphering the lyrics and my hearing isn’t the best. The reasons behind the phenomenon of a hit show are difficult to discern. This type of thing happens maybe once in a generation. This is not Wicked. Probably the most recent show, and it was 20 years ago, to have this kind of buzz, was RENT. Before that, probably Hair. Knowledgable theatre-goers have been aware of Hamilton for several years now and have watched it develop and progress in its various incarnations. There is definitely a certain amount of interest simply because it’s THE show to see at the moment and that manifests itself in people who wouldn’t normally be interested in theatre feeling as though they HAVE to see it. Which, in turn, creates demand for tickets. My guess is that a good percentage of people in the Richard Rodgers every night will not be people who regularly attend the theatre.
A new block of tickets went on sale recently for shows in November through January. They aren’t selling two years in advance. Advance ticket sales are nothing new, they happen with every show in NYC. People plan trips and book tickets to shows that they want to see while there.
I highly recommend the show, having seen it more than once and will see it again this fall. I’m happy that I got to see the original cast. They are special and they have already begun to leave. With contracts being up soon and the recent resolution of the profit distribution dispute, there are likely to be changes in the coming months.
It probably didn’t hurt that the Obamas were early fans. I think “Hamilton” will go down as their Camelot.
@MomofWildChild …I don’t think it’s silly to rule it out if you don’t like rap. Why is that silly? I asked the question…for those of you who don’t like rap either and have seen it…what say you? @alwaysamom answered that question. I will now go see it when able. But there is no sense in paying hundreds of dollars for something when the music is something you don’t particularly care for. If she had said…I don’t like rap, and didn’t particularly care for it…I definitely would think twice before going.
one of the best plays that I know of tied with “next to normal” (IMO)
Listen to the soundtrack, especially if you don’t like rap and so think you won’t like the show. It is amazing.
If you have Amazon Prime, you can stream the cast recording for free. While quite a bit of it is rap, there are songs that I would not label rap. I am not a rap fan, but am a huge fan of this music. I think it’s easy to pick up the story via the cast recording and I am moved by many of the songs, particularly “It’s Quiet Uptown” which describes how the Hamiltons react to their son’s death in a duel.
Hope I get to see it live someday! I am headed to NYC for a conference in August, but can’t justify the enormous price charged by the resellers for even the back of the house seats. I have a friend who saw it a few weeks back and she says it’s the best Broadway production she has ever seen.
Listen to the whole thing. I do that through Spotify. My daughter was raving about it and then wife got on board. They put it on the Sonos one day and of course the first song I heard was one of the rap songs and one of the worst of the musical. Once I heard the whole thing I love it.
Try “The Schuyler Sisters,” The Story of Tonight," and “Dear Theodosia.” “History Has it’s eyes on you” is a nice ballad that leads into “Yorktown” which is a good rap song.
D has it on Spotify and listens almost daily. I have to admit that I listen to the music mostly for the melody, so this is not my cup of tea. I was trying to get her tickets as a graduation present, but resale price is outrageous.
I am reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography now. I’ll listen to the songs too. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. :-*
Not a rap fan, but I loved Hamilton. Plus, I found it amazing that someone could take a pretty dry subject (in the eyes of most people and a topic about which people are unfamiliar or forgot after hs civics class) and make it come to life in the most interesting way. Also, a good friend of my daughter’s (they studied together at the Moscow Art Theater) is in it (Austin Smith–he’s in the ensemble and an understudy for Burr and George Washington). He has an amazing voice. We got to go back stage afterwards to see him and then went out later–very cool!!
@Bromfield2 Austin is a very talented young man. Unsurprisingly, as he is a Juilliard grad. Glad you enjoyed the show!
Agree, I don’t like rap but love Hamilton. You sound determined to dislike it because it is popular. But sometimes things are popular for a good reason – because they are actually good.
I am not a fan of rap, I don’t listen to it, just not my thing (and what constitutes rap/hip hop is a very, very broad category these days, Alicia Keyes’ “Empire State of Mind” could be considered hip hop for example, because it has rap in it). I haven’t seen Hamilton, so I can’t comment on how it is in person (other than the performance they did live I believe at the Grammys). The reason it works is very much why Hair and Rent worked, to quote Clive Barnes, the reviewer for the times, it is a musical that speaks to today, rather than yesterday or the day before yesterday. People derided the music in Hair as being “lousy rock”, but it wasn’t, the music in Hair like Hamilton is not cheesy crap (Galt McDermott, who wrote the score for Hair, wrote a ton of amazing music, and he wasn’t a hippy, he was a middle aged married guy from Staten Island when he composed the music for Hair).
If you listen to Hamilton, the music is quite brilliant, in that I think Miranda appeals to a lot of different things. Some of the music is quite conventional, it wouldn’t be out of place on Broadway in the 1950’s, yet he also uses rap/hip hop as well, but it also isn’t exactly what you would hear coming out of a boom box car at 2am, it is musically pretty sophisticated. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is young, and yes, a lot more diverse than most shows on Broadway, and I think that appeals to a lot of people, and I don’t think it is just young people. Especially in recent years, Broadway musicals have become very, very conventional in most cases, the music is no different than a Rogers and Hammerstein score or worse, the Disneyfied meh of Lion King and Beauty and the Beast(and I am not knocking Rogers and Hammerstein), Wicked has a fun book, but the music isn’t different, and most of the musicals have pretty conventional scores (I just heard snippets of the new Cique Du Solei-themed musical on NPR, and the music was mind numbingly bland). I don’t know if Hamilton will stand up to the hype, but I think it will, I don’t use the term often but I think that Lin Manual Miranda is a musical genius in that he is fluent in a lot of forms of music, and I think he does have a vision. He already showed that with “In the Heights”, which not on the scale of Hamilton, was a hit, and I hope that he gets passed his medical issues, because I think he is going to be around for a while, he could be another Rogers and Hamerstein or Lerner and Lowe. I often wonder if the guy who wrote Rent, Jonathan Larson, if he had lived what would have happened, he had that touch I think,too.