Personally, I think the biggest highlight of the success of this play is the impartiality of each character: even though Hamilton was the father of the country, he was obsessed with the gentle township, which led to a career crisis. Aaron Burr seems to be a villain, but he actually has his own pursuit and persistence. Not to mention the seemingly forbidding but actually strong Eliza.
It does not evaluate, it just presents the character's life objectively and impartially before your eyes, allowing you to choose how to judge.
01
Aaron Burr
Among the founding figures of the United States, none is more elusive than Aaron Burr, who has never been able to figure out whether he is a good man or a bad man.
Having Aaron Burr, one of the show's "villains," tell Hamilton's story in the opening, LMM says he's paying homage to Andrew Lloyd Webber:
"I once told Lord Weber that having Burr tell the story of Hamilton is a tribute to the narrative structure of Mrs. Veron and Jesus Christ the Great, letting opposing characters tell the story of the protagonist hero. Story”, the confrontation between the unsettled villain narrator and the tragic heroic protagonist is very close to the tension created in “Jesus Christ the Superstar.”
In both stories, we can see that the two protagonists (Jesus and Judas) with their own idealism went from a close relationship at the beginning to a split due to the disagreement of ideals of consciousness, and finally one killed the other.
This narrative method is also used in the movie "The Biography of Mozart", with Salieri, the villain who killed Mozart in the plot, as the narrator from the beginning of the film. In addition, the Austrian musical "Elizabeth" is also the same, let the assassin Luccini, who killed the protagonist Elisabeth, act as the narrator from the beginning, to elicit the struggle between the protagonist Elisabeth and the two main characters of death.
The biggest drawback of popular works is that people are divided into simple good people and bad people. However, things in the world are complex and profound. As the saying goes: people believe that they are complex good people and others are simple bad people. And elegant works are good at showing the multi-faceted nature of people, which is the biggest difference between popular works and elegant works.
Aaron Burr seems to be the biggest villain in the show, the vice president who killed Hamilton. He was born in wealth and graduated from Princeton University. He is eager to achieve a career, but he always misses opportunities. Even if his heart is unhappy, years of good education have allowed him to endure it and comfort himself.
The same is true emotionally. The person he loves is someone else's wife, and he cannot be together openly.
Aaron Burr believes that Hamilton has always been unfair to him, but he tolerated it. Hamilton not only did not restrain, but also intensified, so he was determined to settle the account.
His years of resentment over being crushed by Hamilton destroyed his proud intellectual defenses, and he eventually fought Hamilton in a jealous duel, which he won, but he regretted his impulsive and reckless actions. .
He is the person who is most likely to become close friends with Hamilton. He is aggressive in his bones and is competitive, but it is precisely because his background is so different that he has to go his own way under the trend of personality. position, the final outcome of life and death is not unpredictable.
More than 70 years later, one autumn afternoon, two scholars came to Burr's grave to pay their respects. One of them muttered, "What a misunderstood man he is." The scholar was Woodrow Wilson, historian, Princeton. University president and later the twenty-eighth president of the United States.
02
Schuyler sisters
The eldest sister Angelica is independent-minded and attaches great importance to women's rights, while the younger sister Eliza is gentle and the only brave thing to do is to choose Hamilton.
Angelica is well aware of her sister's personality, and if she says she likes Hamilton, Eliza will opt out.
Out of her sense of responsibility as the boss, Angelica reluctantly introduced them to each other, watched them get to know each other, fell in love, and finally walked into the wedding hall. She could only express her affection in her imagination.
What shocked people was the song "review" she sang at Hamilton's wedding. She told Hamilton's affection one by one. She knew that Hamilton would achieve something, but they were too similar to be together. He would never be together. Satisfied, and so was she.
In the first few years of marriage, Angelica could not help but have a private meeting with Hamilton, but her guilt towards Eliza overcame the affair, she chose to separate from Hamilton, and then married a wealthy businessman.
Hamilton died at the age of 49. Eliza raised seven children and grew up alone. She lived a full half a century longer than Hamilton. Even though she is blind and deaf, she still maintains a noble and elegant temperament.
No one knows how Eliza survived the loss of her son and lover, just as we will never know what Eliza was thinking as she sorted out her relics.
She spent the rest of her life saving Hamilton's reputation, sorting out Hamilton's vast legacy, and building the first orphanage.
As a little-known and infamous founding father, Hamilton was unfortunate, but Hamilton was lucky to have such a great wife.
03
Alexander Hamilton
The opening of "Hamilton" is a three-minute introduction to Hamilton, Hamilton's early experiences, important events in his life, characters, and later comments, without a single redundant word.
The protagonist of this play, Hamilton, is the epitome of a typical American dream: he came from a humble background, his family members died one after another, and he was helpless, but he finally achieved great things; he worked hard and never missed any opportunity, so he could stand out and become The Founding Father on Ten Dollars, changed the course of history.
He is eloquent and eloquent. He overwhelmed the overall situation at the Constituent Assembly. With his three-inch tongue, he formulated and revised the constitution, and established a strong central government and central army. Not only that, but the financial mechanism he created has enabled the United States to quickly move in and out of the country. The economic prosperity achieved after the war also swayed the elections of the first three presidents.
But he is also flawed like ordinary people, because choosing his wife Eliza, who he doesn't like so much in the future, will almost ruin his entire political career because of the peach news.
Emotionally, Hamilton is a bad debt. He has no choice but to cling to Eliza. After a few years of marriage, he still can't let go of his eldest sister Angelica. He chooses to have a private meeting with her. Trust, and have a deep friendship with the eldest son Philip.
Anxiety about death runs through the whole play. Hamilton saw his family members die when he was young, which made him feel that life is impermanent, so he studied hard day and night, for fear that he would die young before his great cause was completed, and he told himself even on the battlefield I can't die, I have to live and see my newborn child.
For his lifelong opponent Aaron Burr, Hamilton approached him with an open-minded attitude at first. He was so eager for an opportunity that he even expressed his feelings at the first meeting. Aaron Burr, who has always shown people with a conservative attitude, was naturally unable to I agree with Hamilton. Unlike Aaron Burr, Hamilton knows what he wants. Even if the two break up, it does not affect his next judgment.
His self-confidence and decisiveness made him unstoppable along the way, but the root of the curse that was planted many years ago has already quietly sprung up.
As described in "Hamilton Biography": He has never learned to be as comfortable as a mature statesman. His leadership philosophy was noble, but limited: he believed that a true statesman should not bow to popular opinion when necessary, but would help the populace out of a state of fantasy or narcissism. Hamilton lived in a purely moral world and was not good at compromising or reaching consensus.
It stands to reason that Hamilton can live longer. It is precisely because of his contact with Aaron Burr that he dislikes Aaron Burr's hesitation and fierce words, which undoubtedly planted a seed of jealousy in Aaron Burr's heart. The spring breeze on the field made Aaron Burr even more jealous, until it was gradually swallowed up, and finally, on impulse, he made irreversible actions.
The conclusion at the end looks back on Hamilton's life from multiple perspectives. But he raised the question of "who dies, who lives, and who tells your story".
At last
As an audience, the success of this play is largely due to the disenchantment of historical figures: the magnificent history, the unreachable great men, who were once flesh-and-blood people like us, they have their own stories and their own feelings , their charm is not only the last remaining personal introduction, but more importantly, the traces they once left in this world, they once lived in this world like us, laughed, lost, struggled, the same Experience, even in the 21st century, to empathize with the audience.
The success of this drama, in addition to the solid script, the refreshing way of acting, and the full dedication of the actors, I think American audiences will unconsciously feel a sense of pride through watching the movie. An invisible patriotic education was carried out.
You can be whoever you want to be, even though Hamilton is still a great man in such a harsh environment, you still have countless unfinished business, and as always reveals the American mentality: optimistic, confident, never give up.
This is the meaning of cherishing the memory of the great men. Every piece of land under their feet is what they have truly stood on.
The film version breaks the limitations of time and space and presents the unreachable past history to the audience in a real record way.
Great works have different backgrounds and stories from our times, but they reveal the same humanistic care behind them, about love, death, and life, which are closely related to each of us.
From a historical point of view, today, when the world is in a crisis under the influence of the epidemic and feels lost, this is undoubtedly a stimulant, which comforts our lonely hearts.
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