Hamilton’s unlikely rise to global success and its digital premiere during lockdown paved the way for a new generation of theatre lovers, including Cardiff’s Levi Tyrell Johnson, part of a touring production coming to the WMC. From one superfan to another, Hannah Collins looks back on its decade-long legacy while Johnson shares his experience with the blockbuster musical.

My first experience of Hamilton wasn’t in a hushed auditorium with a tiny ice cream, as the West End gods intended: it was hunkered down on my sofa with my two cohabitants, an American-themed buffet in front of us, and a TV. The original production, starring creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, was then approaching its fifth anniversary.

The show made its London debut in 2017, but location, ticket pricing and scarcity still made it inaccessible to a swathe of British audiences. Having it available at home, therefore, was a big deal: finally, fans who’d had to be content with the soundtrack got the full thing, while the curious could see what all the fuss was about.

July 3, 2020 was the perfect time for its digital premiere. Not only was it Independence Day weekend, thematically shrewd given the show’s subject matter (fully embraced by us and our ironic-but-not-ironic ‘yeehaw’ snacks as ancestral colonisers), it was also peak lockdown. In March, everyone had been glued to Tiger King – now it was Hamilton’s turn to capitalise on a captive audience. 

It was also a pivotal time in the so-called streaming wars. Only a few months old in the UK then, the latest combatant in the fray, Disney+, was growing sluggishly. The service needed to prove that it was more than just a surrogate babysitter for pandemic-drained parents binging cartoon classics.

Stage musicals for home viewing traditionally appeal to a niche audience – one notable exception being an early 2000s VHS version of Cats, which went multi-platinum in the UK – and nowadays, it can be harder to gauge the popularity of home media, as the likes of Netflix are secretive with such data. However, Variety reported that Disney+ app downloads rose 72-74% on the weekend of Hamilton’s release, compared to the previous four weeks, and a survey of 15,000–25,000 US households found that nearly 40% watched it that July.

Whether those subscribers stuck around is unclear, but the growth spurt that a single stage musical (let’s not forget the niche appeal, there) created for a corporation of Disney’s magnitude is significant in assessing Hamilton’s status as a bona fide cultural phenomenon, a title both highly sort after and highly rarified.

Now approaching its 10th anniversary, Hamilton is one of those success stories that had all the makings of a dud: its title character, Alexander Hamilton, was a total nobody compared to fellow superstar Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who also feature in the musical. The show is also historically dense, approaching textbook levels of detail to serve as both biography and humanisation of its real-world players and the turbulent period in which the American colonies fought for freedom from British rule. Then there’s the delivery of it all. Hip-hop.

Hamilton is not the first musical to utilise hip-hop, but it’s certainly become the standard-bearer for it. Arguably, 1957’s The Music Man featured one of the first ‘raps’ in a stage musical, but in the same way Rapture by Blondie was the first rap song to top the US charts, if it’s true from a technical standpoint it’s still lacking everything that soulfully makes rap and hip-hop what they are.

Off-Broadway productions started to incorporate actual hip-hop in the 1990s, as did 2007’s In The Heights, created by Lin-Manuel Miranda and later adapted to film. The most popular pre-Hamilton example is Rent (1996): one of the biggest musicals of its era, it reset La Bohéme in 90s Lower Manhattan, shifting Puccini’s highbrow setting and operatic medium for a grittier look, feel and sound.

In using a modern music genre (which remains uncommon in musicals), one primarily associated with urban environments and marginalised peoples, to soundtrack a period piece about the United States’ mythologised origins, Miranda’s Hamilton was conceptually even less likely to succeed. Yet it did on a spectacular scale, banking $30 million in presale tickets before it even opened on Broadway.

It’s also repeated this success in productions around the world, one of which is currently touring the UK and Ireland and will play in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre for two months. At a time when culture is becoming more homogenised thanks to technology-fuelled globalisation, a story about a specific time and specific man in a specific country’s history, told via a specific point of view and musical influence, still translates incredibly well to the widest possible audience.

Someone who counts himself among this audience, and now part of Hamilton’s legacy, is Cardiff’s own Levi Tyrell Johnson – an Alexander Hamilton alternate in the incoming touring production. Like me, Johnson got his first taste of the show via Disney+. Already a working musician in the band Blackelvis, he was sceptical but found himself watching it multiple times the weekend it came out, obsessively memorising the soundtrack.

An acapella rendition of My Shot earned him a place at the Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama, and the songs became part of his audition repertoire. When the dream opportunity came to audition for the tour – only his second professional West End job – he jokes to me that he could’ve been cast in any role, even a Schuyler sister. “Hamilton’s why I’m here,” Johnson says, adding that the whole cast are superfans.

There’s so much to be said about why Hamilton’s hype hasn’t waned in a decade – and when I ask Johnson this unfairly sizable question, he struggles to think of an answer. But looking back on our conversation, that answer might be in the one he gave about favourite character.

“When I first saw the show, [Aaron] Burr [Hamilton’s rival] was who I always wanted to be. He had the best songs, the most conflict… I guess he was a very complicated character, and I loved that about him, but the more I listened to it and will do as the years go on, I realised how parallel I was to Hamilton in the way that I’ve done everything I can to push myself ahead. That’s when it shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still love Burr. I think the songs are incredible. But I think when it comes to being emotionally connected to a character, it’s Hamilton, Hamilton all the way.” 

Where musicals are generally stereotyped as campy, escapist melodramas, Hamilton is an emotionally driven story about underdogs, revolutionaries, legacy, history and the human drive to put one’s ambitions over one’s happiness. Hamilto} is real and genuine, and its lead character and author are figures of genuine inspiration for people like Johnson, a multiracial creative from Llanrumney.

“After I saw Hamilton, I was like, ‘You know what? If one guy could [write a musical], I could give it a try,’” he says. “I actually wrote a musical for my dissertation during my undergrad. It was about Cardiff, about the people of Cardiff – there was a busker, people of the street, there were the lovers, there were the roadmen who were the hoodlums. It was about how music can bring magic to the mundane, how it lights up the streets and brings colour to everybody’s life, how it can heal and how it can hurt.” 

Miranda said in a 2020 interview that Hamilton is “America then, as told by America now”. It’s the history of winners (white colonists) retold by its ‘losers’ (oppressed people of colour). However you discover Hamilton, forget the discourse and hype: the only thing that matters is what it says to you, how you connect to its music, characters and themes in The Room Where It Happens.

Hamilton, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Tue 26 Nov-Sat 25 Jan.

Tickets: £25-£106. Info: here

words HANNAH COLLINS