COV E R
ARTS & CULTURE
His shot
For Marcus Choi, playing George Washington in Hamilton: An American Musical is an opportunity and a responsibility. By Jeremy Martin
As part of the cast of a different Broadway musical opening the same year, Marcus Choi got a good idea of how popular Hamilton: An American Musical is. “No other show mattered,” said Choi, who played Johnny Goto in Allegiance, a musical about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which closed in 2016 after 111 shows. “It was all about Hamilton; 2015 was the year of Hamilton. Every other show was just happy to be at the party.” Now Choi plays George Washington in the touring production of Hamilton running July 30-Aug. 18 at Civic Center Music Hall’s Thelma Gaylord Performing Arts Theatre, 201 N. Walker Ave. He said he believes the show — written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and based on the life of Founding Father and first secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton — is so popular because audiences have never seen or heard anything quite like it. “For so long, musicals have kind of maintained the same equation,” Choi said. “You know what works, but this kind of broke the mold in a lot of ways. This show is a musical for people who love musicals. It’s also a show for people who love hip-hop and a show for people who love history. … I say broad appeal because it really kind of hits on every level. That really kind of makes it unique and sets it apart from shows of the past.” In a review that begins, “Yes, it really is that good,” New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote, “I am loath 24
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to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show. But Hamilton … might just about be worth it — at least to anyone who wants proof that the American musical is not only surviving but also evolving in ways that should allow it to thrive and transmogrify in years to come.” Choi — who previously appeared in Wicked, Sweet Charity and Miss Saigon — said he has never performed in anything similar to the historical sungthrough hip-hop musical, but Miranda’s blending of disparate influences seems intuitive in retrospect. “I’ve never done a hip-hop show,” Choi said. “I’ve never done a musical where I had to rap. Going into it, I guess, one of the things that I didn’t really realize was how much rap lends itself as a vehicle of storytelling. I grew up in the ’90s, and I was a huge fan of R&B and rap. I should have put two and two together because all the songs growing up, they were all narrative-driven songs. Biggie was one of the best storytellers. Tupac and all these rappers from the ’90s and even the ’80s, ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ and all these classic hip-hop songs told stories. Hamilton, I feel like if you were to strip away all the music, it’s just a very intense play, and it’s told in prose. It’s kind of like a Shakespearean play set to hip-hop music. In essence, I’ve never done a show like that.” While Choi said the show’s music bears some similarity to patter songs by composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim,
learning to rap the complex lyrics based on Ron Chernow’s more than 800-page biography Alexander Hamilton was a challenge for a performer accustomed to more traditional musicals. “I’m the best rapper in my car,” Choi said, laughing. “With the rap, it’s not a question of if you make a mistake; it’s a question of when you make a mistake. There’s so many words … a staggering number. They’re densely packed, and [musical supervisor] Alex Lacamoire really kind of broke everything down into rhythm and specificity of phrasing. It’s the most technically challenging show that I’ve ever been a part of.”
Hip-hop revolution
In an interview with Grantland, Miranda said that rapidly rapped lyrics were “the only way” to tell Hamilton’s full story, which follows the title character (played in this production by Joseph Morales) from his youth through his time as Washington’s “Right Hand Man” in the Revolutionary War to his coauthoring of the Federalist Papers encouraging the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the Washington and Adams presidential administrations, the election of 1800 and his death in a duel with rival and former friend Aaron Burr (played by Nik Walker). “You could do a Les Mis– type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long because the amount of words on the bars when you’re writing a typical song — t h at ’s maybe
Joseph Morales as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton: An American Musical | Photo Joan Marcus / provided
got 10 words per line,” Miranda said. FiveThirtyEight’s Leah Libresco counted more than 20,000 words in the lyrics in Hamilton’s two-hour-and23-minute original Broadway cast recording — an average of 144 words per minute — but Choi said he knows how