Angelica eliza and peggy shirts8/17/2023 ![]() ![]() How did she use them? “I put myself back in the narrative,” she tells us-interviewing soldiers who fought with Hamilton, raising funds for the Washington Monument, and establishing the first private orphanage in New York City. The last verse-unexpectedly, and powerfully-belongs to Eliza, who survived her husband by a whopping fifty years. Hamilton has fatally lost the duel with Burr, and the characters return to size up Hamilton’s legacy. The finale brings the theme of storytelling to a crescendo. ![]() What was Eliza really thinking? Was burning her letters the only act of personal agency she had left? ![]() But in embracing the enigma the song points to the larger problem of women’s history: the public records are thinner, the milieu is mostly domestic, and there’s more need for speculation. Surely Miranda is poking fun at his own lack of primary sources when it came to dramatizing this moment in the Hamiltons’ marriage. Let future historians wonder How Eliza reacted when you broke her heart. ![]() As written by Miranda and performed by Cephas Jones, Maria isn’t much more than an archetypal femme fatale-sort of a sultry Rihanna type-and, while the show doesn’t let Hamilton off the hook, he comes across more as a dupe than as an adulterer. Now married to Eliza but intellectually bonded with Angelica through their letters, he meets one Maria Reynolds, a married woman with a sob story and bedroom eyes, and gets caught up in an affair-cum-extortion-plot. Hamilton’s personal life gets even juicier in Act Two. As musical storytelling, it’s a tour de force. Angelica’s unquenched desire for her brother-in-law has become her destiny. As Angelica navigates her conflicting emotions-regret, yearning, and some solace in the fact that Hamilton will be close by-we return to the wedding toast, now fraught with irony. Despite their mutual attraction, she passes him off him to Eliza, who is just as smitten. Knowing that Hamilton is penniless, she reasonably assumes that what he’s after is her social status. We rewind to the flirtatious moment when Angelica met Hamilton it’s electric, she tells us, like “Ben Franklin with a key and a kite.” Angelica and Alexander are equals in wit, but not in status, and she is well aware of her station and its demands:Įven as Angelica’s verbal dazzle is on display, so is her pragmatism: the best that her eloquence can get her is a wealthy husband. The song that Angelica then sings, “Satisfied,” has knocked me senseless each time I’ve seen it, both because of Miranda’s cunning construction and because of Goldsberry’s motormouthed delivery. Hamilton (Miranda) falls in love with Eliza (Soo), who is more demure than Angelica.Īt their wedding, Angelica proposes a toast, and the scene freezes as we enter her inner thoughts. But, soon enough, we’re on to matters of the heart. Of course, the “sequel,” in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment, wouldn’t come for another hundred and forty-four years. After sampling the newly written Declaration of Independence-“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”-Angelica raps:Īnd when I meet Thomas Jefferson … I’m a compel him to include women in the sequel!Īs Angelica, the incandescent Goldsberry makes it clear that she could rap Jefferson under the table if she got the chance: all that holds her back is a woman’s place in the world. In Miranda’s version, they look like society women in bustles but sound like a Destiny’s Child-esque R. The three actresses appear early in Act One, as the Schuyler sisters, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy: daughters of Philip Schuyler, the Revolutionary War general and later U.S. In a musical about Founding Fathers, Miranda has placed a pair of vividly imagined female characters, played by the dynamite performers Renée Elise Goldsberry and Phillipa Soo, with an assist from Jasmine Cephas Jones. The musical is also about history and how it gets told-in Miranda’s refrain, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” That, most often, is where the women come in, and they come in strong. It’s fitting that the musical opened on the same night as the first Republican primary debate: ten men who desperately need to bust a rhyme. There’s some strange comfort, in this age of Washington gridlock, in seeing the birth of the nation recast as a series of rap battles straight out of “8 Mile,” with Hamilton, Jefferson, and Burr's egos clashing as sharply as their ideals. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rightfully lauded hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” which has just opened on Broadway after a smash run at the Public, is about many things, among them men: how they fight, write, rule, and duel. ![]()
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