Not because of the shopping or the Yankees or the subway system. No, if I lived in New York I would go to see musicals all the time. Toronto has plenty of musical theatre, but rarely are the really big shows in first runs, so it can be a long time from Broadway to Mirvish.
So I satisfy myself with soundtracks for the shows that I hear about through the news. Back in June, when Fun Home swept the Tonys, I bought that album and listened to it non-stop for a week. Over the past couple days, I've been doing the same with Hamilton, a hip-hop musical about the life of the American revolutionary and politician Alexander Hamilton. It's incredible.
For a taste, check out this video. I think I may write up my thoughts more thoroughly when I've settled down a bit - I'm still in the love-at-first-listen phase right now. There's just so much energy and originality through the whole thing. Most musicals have points where they drag, especially "sing-through" musicals like Les Mis, where most of the dialogue is sung. It's just hard to explain plot, develop characters and have interesting music all at the same time. Hamilton never runs into this problem. Pretty much every song is killer, from the slam-poem overture "Alexander Hamilton" to King George acting like a jilted lover in the pop ballad"You'll Be Back" to the rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson in "Cabinet Battle #1".
I think the reason everything works so well is that there's so much rap and hip-hop in the music. I feel like I complete idiot that I never considered how perfect rap is for a musical. Whereas other musicals struggle to have their characters sing mundane dialogue, Hamilton just takes dialogue and fits it into a rhythm and rhyme. Everything's understandable and everything keeps moving forward. There's still plenty of melody in some of the numbers, but allowing the connecting bits between songs to be mostly rapped means they never feel out of place. It's really brilliant.
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