thefederalistfreestyle:

The Next Best ‘Hamilton’ (New York Times):

It used to be New Yorkers complained most about real estate, but lately the griping is about the scarcity of tickets for the hit musical “Hamilton.” (The show’s creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, answers our By the Bookquestions this week.)

For those who may not get into the theater for a while, if ever, “Hamilton: The Revolution,” a lavishly illustrated new companion book, can help ease the pain. Its yellowed, rough-edged pages are redolent of the founding era, as is its serpentine subtitle: “Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, With a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America.”

The show’s lyrics are annotated by Miranda, who provides autobiographical and historical context, as well as lighthearted comments on his creative process. About the song “Aaron Burr, Sir,” Miranda writes: “I know every word that rhymes with Burr. It’s a long list. I tried to use all of them in this show.”

The book also includes photos from the production, interviews with many of the show’s actors and crew members, and excerpts from emails, like one Miranda wrote to his fellow librettist John Weidman in 2009: “I’m trying to turn Hamilton’s life into a hip-hop album. Inevitably, the more research I do, the more daunting the project seems.”

Miranda co-wrote the new book with Jeremy McCarter, a former theater critic and early champion of Miranda’s work who later worked at the Public Theater, where “Hamilton” premiered. McCarter writes in the introduction that though the phenomenon of “Hamilton” “looks seamless and effortless and inevitable, it was none of those things. . . . Thousands of choices and a fair bit of luck shaped the result. The same can be said of the 18th-­century Revolution: inevitable in retrospect, but unprecedented and all but impossible to imagine ahead of time.”

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