CRITICS NOTEBOOK

Will
Hamilton
Save the
Musical?
Dont
Wait for It

JOAN MARCUS

Black music has

long shaped
the Broadway sound.
But can hip-hop
really have it all?

BY JO HN MCWHO RTER

F
48

Daveed Diggs and the cast of Hamilton on Broadway.

OR MUSICAL THEATRE FANS, HAMILTON HAS

already become Holy Scripture. Only the professional
contrarian who revels in being despised takes the shows
name in vain, as did the New York Posts Michael Riedel in a
rare note of dissent. Hamilton deserves the status: It is one of
the most innovative, energetic, and expert pieces of musical
theatre in human history. Part of the aura surrounding it is
the sense that we are seeing history in the making: that this
show marks raps entry into the basic language of American
musical theatre.
Hopefully it will. But might Hamilton augur something
more? For 125 years, American musical theatre language has
been driven by serial infusions of black pop energy, creating
the sound of Broadway so familiar today, including manifestations now processed as thoroughly white. Given that
hip-hop has been the mainstream for young Americans of all
colors for at least 20 years, isnt this when we would expect
Broadway music to come in for its next injection of, as it were,
flava and evolve into a whole new direction?
Actually, not. The pitfalls of presentism acknowledged,
it is worth venturing that rap is crucially different from the
musical genres that transformed show music in the past. Rap
is likely to take its place in Broadway music but not transform
it, because for all of its glories, rap offers more limited dramatic possibilities than ragtime, jazz, or even rock.

Such a judgment obviously risks recapitulating the blinkered prejudices of people with three names in America just
past the Spanish-American War, clutching their pearls as
ragtime became theatre musics lingua franca. The ragtime
we now hear as a quaint, courtly music reminiscent of straw
hats and lemonade was the rap of the preWorld War I era.
Encountered by most not as elaborate piano pieces like Scott
Joplins but as jolly stage songs with sassy lyrics, ragtime was
considered a threat to bourgeois propriety. Ragtime creates in the young a distaste for that which is more staid and
solid, one critic huffed. Its victims, in my opinion, can only
be treated successfully, like the dog with rabies, with a dose
of lead, wrote another.
What all the fuss was about was the ragged time that
gave the form its namethe slight displacement of the strong
beats in the melody from the regular pulse on the bottom, creating an infectious sense of rhythm termed syncopation. To
our ears, this oppositional quality in the beatwhich makes
it seem as if we are moving and dancing in and against the
music rather than squarely driving it along ourselves solidly
on beats one and three, jig styleis the heart of music itself.
But to those experiencing it for the first time, it was a novel
and almost disturbing sensation; a typical review noted that
the catchy ragtime refrains kept the head nodding and the
toe tapping all over the theatre by means of their irresistible
AMERICANTHEATRE MARCH1 6

PHOTOFEST

Hattie McIntosh, Geo W. Walker, Ada Overton Walker, Bert A. Williams, and Lottie Williams in the
1903 Broadway production of In Dahomey.

rhythm. Today this reads like someone marveling that a dessert is sweet, but before ragtime, American pop consisted of waltzes, weepy
ballads, marches, and jigs. There is a reason
there are no recordings of loving reconstructions of musical theatre scores that entranced
Americans in the Gaslight Era, such as Robin
Hood (1891) and The Prince of Pilsen (1903).
These scores, despite passing charms, qualified
largely as second-drawer Gilbert and Sullivan.
What was missing was that, in a postReconstruction America, these scores had
yet to benefit from a black touch. The gift
arrived in the form of Clorindy in 1898. It
was composed with ragtime essence by classically trained black violinist and conductor Will Marion Cook, who was convinced
that Broadway would be where black music
could make a decisive mark on America. He
was right: The scores syncopation, set in stirring choral arrangement and accompanied by
correspondingly raggy dance moves, lit up
white attendees in exactly the way the rap in
Hamilton gets audiences going today. Cook
later recalled, At the finish of the opening
chorus, the applause and cheering were so
tumultuous that I simply stood there transfixed, my hand in the air, unable to move.
From here on, ragtime gradually became
a standard element of Broadways musical
language. It started in trickles, with ragtime
numbers interpolated into conventional scores
as novelties. A typical example: In the otherwise conventional operetta Babes in Toyland
in 1903, Victor Herbert had a male singer
rag Rock-a-bye Baby.
By 1914, Irving Berlin could compose
a whole score infused with the ragtime language, Watch Your Step. Here is the first
Broadway score that, heard a hundred years
MARCH16 AMERICANTHEATRE

before Hamilton hit the boards Off-Broadway,

sounds like what we now think of as American
musical theatre. Its approachability lies in that
devilish syncopation: the contrapuntal duet
Play a Simple Melody, still familiar, tells the
story, setting an old-fashioned melody someone could have sung in Robin Hood against a
jagged, hot little rag that makes yougasp!
want to tap your foot. Hot on the heels of
Watch Your Step, Jerome Kern (with librettist
Guy Bolton) initiated his foundational series
of small-scale musicals staged at a certain tiny
Princess Theatre, populated with studiously
respectable middle-class personages giving
in to songs like Very Good Eddies (1915) Ive
Got to Dance, Left All Alone Again Blues,
and even gentle numbers such as Some Sort
of Somebody, all of which have a lift-of-theheels lilt on beats two and four rather than
one and three, a sound thats more Joplin than
Sousa. By 1920, ragtime was no longer one
piquant element a Broadway composer might
break out now and then, but Broadway music
itself, to an extent a Gilded Age theatregoer
would have found inconceivable.
Meanwhile, ragtime, with a strong shot
of blues harmony, had evolved into jazz: faster,
louder, and busierin a word, hotter. The
guardians of culture remained uncomfortable, especially as jazz was even more vividly associated with black people and sex (the
original meaning of the very word jazz being
to have sex with). And once again the new
music transformed Broadway musical style.
The starting point of this new wave was
George Gershwins Lady, Be Good in 1924,
whose centerpiece, a jagged, rhythmically
complex tune called Fascinating Rhythm,
would have been unthinkable in any show
written before.

But this was actually only the beginning

of Broadway jazz in an official sense. The
Gershwin historiographical tradition tends
to imply that this jazz infusion sprang from
Gershwin himself. But he had been writing
theatre music for several years before this,
and playing through his early stuff today, one
is perplexed that almost none of it sounds
anything like the Gershwin we know. By the
time Gershwins show music took a new turn
in 1924, black theatre composers had been
doing so for three years running. Gershwin,
fond of sitting at the feet of black stride piano
giants, was the follower here, not the inventor.
To wit, it was black people who brought
not just ragtime but also jazz to Broadway
in 1921. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissles allblack Shuffle Along, initially considered a
long shot, sequestered in a theatre blocks
uptown from the theatre district, took New
York City by storm, crackling through items
like Baltimore Buzz, Bandana Days, and
Im Just Wild About Harry (a song today
hardly considered hot stuff but saliently syncopated for 1921). The show initiated a 1920s
vogue for black shows with jazz scores and
hot dancing; as early as 1922, a Ziegfeld Follies song observed that Its Getting Dark on
Old Broadway, sung by (white) Gilda Gray.
Just as Lady, Be Good was in development,
the black show Runnin Wild was finishing a
long run, introducing the Charleston as both
a song and a dance.
This jazz infusion created the uptempo
showtune and bluesy Broadway ballad as we
know them, as well as the indefinable quality
of Broadway electricity that distinguishes
American musical theatre scores from their
European equivalents. Such 20s sensations
as No, No, Nanette and the early hits of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter,
and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson (of Good
News fame) sounded like jazz to contemporary ears. Many people just didnt get it.
Here is one critic on No, No, Nanette of 1925,
with music written and scored very much like
Lady, Be Goods:
Saxophone players (in the limelight)
worked with the energy of a savage
religious festival, and when there was
any chance that you might mislay the
melody it was emphasized by the brass
with mutes. A little of a muted trombone
or trumpet is good for certain effects, but a
whole melody played as if the instruments
were melodious steam saws cuts into my
brain and produces a mild nerve storm
If this piece be ever discovered in the far
49

future it will be made the text for learned

discourses on the nervous breakdown
of the American and European nations
after the great war.
But the die was cast and the rest was
history: The underlying language of musicals ranging from Anything Goes to Guys and
Dolls to Sweet Charity traces its genealogy to
the shot in the arm that Shuffle Along and its
progenitors gave to American theatre music.
Reading that peculiar and backward
critical assessment of No, No, Nanettes music
now is a good reality check as I think about
the innovations of Hamilton and make the
case that rap has limited compatibility with
musical theatre. With the shortcomings of
earlier gatekeeping judgments now so obvious, we must beware of reproducing the same
notions that music from the streets isnt really
music or is best off in its place. After all,
there is an even more recent precedent for
the American musical incorporating a sensibility found alien at the time by many: when
the musical met rock.
When Hair introduced the rock of the
late 60s (as opposed to rock n roll) to Broad-

way in 1968, the music felt as primitive, sexual, and unclean to fans of South Pacific and
The Pajama Game as rap still does to many
beyond a certain age today, despite its increasingly mainstream status since the late 90s.
And despite the meteoric success of that show,
an opinion later common among thoroughly
enlightened people was that Broadway and
rock were inherently incompatible. Musical
theatre historian Ethan Mordden wrote that
rock was intense but narrow, too complete
in itself to adapt to the needs of a larger form
that would have to contain it. The late theatre composer Elizabeth Swados opined that
the elements that make good rock make bad
theatre. You should not want to get up and
dance with a character who is not even supposed to know youre there.
As plausible as such opinions could seem,
subsequent developments invalidated them.
To be sure, Broadway has only fitfully incorporated rocks ostensible antiestablishment
cultural commitment, its focus on the adolescence, or its most high-volume sounds. This
has been predictable: The American musical,
a capitalist enterprise expensive to mount and
requiring years-long runs plus tours to make

PHOTOFEST

CRITICS NOTEBOOK

Adele Astaire and Fred Astaire in the 1924

Broadway staging of Lady, Be Good.

a serious profit, is an inherently conservative

form. That it does not reflect downtown sensibilities ought occasion no more comment
than the fact that musical theatre didnt follow jazz into its evolution into bebop.
But to say that the sound of the Broad-

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COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Cover of sheet music for Im Just Wild About

Harry from Shuffle Along (1921).

way musical has not been transformed by

rock is to not have ones ears open. From
Stephen Schwartz to Andrew Lloyd Webber, from American Idiot to Hedwig and the
Angry Inch, the very term rock musical is
now meaningless, in that the rock sensibil-

MARCH16 AMERICANTHEATRE

ity is now so default in the form that even a

glum story about a suburban womans battle with clinical depression (Next to Normal)
was couched in a rock idiom; Lloyd Webbers current hit, School of Rock, only further
makes the point about rocks ubiquity and
essentially innocuousness. Historian Mark
N. Grants comment that a new show cannot be commercially produced as a musical
today on Broadway unless it is rock groovebased may be overstated, but that a writer
would even venture the statement should be
evidence enough that the Broadway score
without that reference to rock is the exception, not the rule.
Why not rap, then? Today, with rap
played at even the most vanilla of weddings,
with even people over 50 happily taking to the
dance floor, its safe to say that most of raps
listeners are white, and that rap has become a
staple musical form for Americans now both
young, youngish, and even many now classifiable as older. So isnt it time for show music
to start rapping as much as it started rocking
50 years ago? Notably, this would not mean
a Broadway language devoid of song, as rap
often alternates between sung figures and spo-

ken word, as Hamilton does. Why cant this

be Broadway musics latest new beginning?
BECAUSE R AP IS , DESPITE THE
artistry and craft it requires, different. For one,
rapping is not technically musicit is stylized
speech. This will limit raps application to
musical theatre, because speech styles cannot
permeate a culture and cross its demographic
boundaries as easily as musical styles.
To sing is automatically to step away
from ones most natural form of expression,
speaking. It feels natural, then, to sing in ways
unconnected to ones everyday vernacular.
Operatic singing is the most obvious example. Less overt is the way that a black American cadence is tacitly expected of most pop
singing in English, to the extent that nonAmerican singers ranging from Mick Jagger
to Amy Winehouse to Adele spontaneously
sing in a dialect spoken by no one they knew
when learning how to talk, with Iggy Azalea
even mimicking black English grammar so
well that experts on the dialect are impressed.
Its harder, though, to talk much differently than we normally do, because it is more
integral to our personhood. All people talk;

51

many, even most, do not sing. It is natural

for humans to talk all day; no humans sing
all day. Speech is subconsciously controlled;
music involves more conscious engagement.
A great many people enjoy many kinds of
music but speak only one language. We
are the way we talk to more of an extent
than we are our music.
The characters in Next to Normal
can express themselves in rock because
we readily accept people singing in styles
unlike their speech. Those characters would
seem much less plausible expressing themselves in rap, even in rhymes as cleverly
composed as those written by Lin-Manuel
Miranda for Hamilton, because the rap style
of expression would be so far from the way
those contained, suburban whites would ordinarily express themselves. Because speech is
so intimate a marker of cultural membership
(as well as individuality), we would be disinclined to accept as much of a gulf between
the natural and the stylized in the speech of
characters in Grey Gardens, Passion, or Fun
Home as we do in their singing.
Rap would be limited as a theatre language in ways more specific as well. Mordden wrote, Rock inevitably carries certain
cultural associations in its very sound, whatever the lyrics say. This is even more true of
rap. Its association with young black people is
actually not the issueraps warm welcome
by white men, especially, makes the music
more race-neutral by the year. But a confrontational cadence is the warp and woof
of rap. Even the most conscious, constructive, or even puckish rappers retain a chipon-the-shoulder tone in their delivery (not
accidentally termed spitting among fans).
Each rhyme at the end of a line implies a
So, there! Rapping is, to an extent, sport.
This works so well in Hamilton because
most of the characters are men in competition. It isnt an accident that two debates
between Hamilton and Jefferson, amenable
to recasting as rap battles, are among the
high points of the show. But argument, topping, and display are only one part of being
humanor of being a character in a musical.
In a musical like Fiddler on the Roof, say, rap
could work in scenes of strife between Tevye
and his daughters. But for tenderer, rangier
scenes like Do You Love Me? or If I Were
a Rich Man? Not so much.
Whats more, rap is inherently a vernacu
lar medium. It arose from the streets and is
steeped in a long-established performance
practice that reflects its origins. But the ver52

PHOTOFEST

CRITICS NOTEBOOK

The authors of Shuffle Along, clockwise

from left: Eubie Blake, F.E. Miller, Noble Sissle,
and Aubrey Lyles.

Rap will be most

artistically valuable
as a medium for
depicting young people
in vernacular contexts
For instance, rap is
clearly the language
that a musicalization of a
Spike Lee movie
something long overdue
would be written in.
nacular is only one facet of humanity. Again,
this works in Hamilton because of the theme
of Hamiltons status as an immigrant battling his way into the mainstream, and just as
much because of the mostly black and Latino
casting. But the notion of Founding Fathers
rapping still requires a certain suspension of
disbelief, feasible partly because of the distance in time of the events. That suspension
would be harder to pull off for stories in times
more immediately felt. Vernacular expression would probably conflict with characterization in a musical about suffragettes; in
almost anything Stephen Sondheim or even
Jason Robert Brown would write; even in a
Ragtime. Though black Coalhouse Walker Jr.
prides himself on striving, rap would no more
work for him than for the white characters.
In short, rap is most likely to enter the
Broadway musicals toolbox as a handy and
welcome new option. It will be most artis-

tically valuable as a medium for depicting

young people in vernacular contexts. For
example, until now, black pop composers
have justifiably tended to feel that Broadway aesthetics were alien to what they seek
to express. And indeed, contemporary
young black characters expressing themselves in the musical language of Alan
Menken or Flaherty & Ahrens would feel
hopelessly fake in our modern, diversified musical climate. Paradoxically for a
show set during the American Revolution,
what Hamilton does is open up a space for new
black musicals that are neither jukebox celebrations (Motown) nor set in the distant past
(The Color Purple, Dessa Rose). For instance,
rap is clearly the language that a musicalization of a Spike Lee moviesomething long
overduewould be written in.
Rap will also be useful beyond black
and Latino voices. A West Side Story for
today would most effectively be written in hip-hop, for both Jets and Sharks
of whatever race, rather than any nowconventional musical theatre language. Rap
also offers the possibility of hybrid scores,
in which characters for which rap is plausible spit their lyrics while other characters
sing in other musical theatre languages (this
is already in effect in much of Hamilton, in
fact). Working out such a division of labor in
a multiethnic, studiously contemporary piece
like If/Then would be interesting, for example.
But rap is a direction the Broadway
musical as a whole likely cannot follow,
and the heterogeneity of show music compared to the old days is not the only reason.
There is a musical commonality between
scores from shows as tonally varied as Fun
Home, Aladdin, School of Rock, Finding Neverland, Kinky Boots, Matilda, Something Rotten, and The Book of Mormon. For all the new
sounds theyve incorporated, they all descend
from the core Broadway language that Kern
in the 1920s called good Jewish music, but
which, as weve seen, is as much black as Jewish: the showtune, born of cultural miscegenation during the first quarter of the 20th
century. Rap, despite its crossover appeal, is
something more distinct from the showtune
than even Hairs score was. Which is why rap
on Broadway, while more than welcome, may
be less a game-changer than one new move
out of many.
Critic and commentator John
McWhorter teaches linguistics at
Columbia University.
AMERICANTHEATRE MARCH1 6

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