For the past 36 years, Gerard Alessandrini has been spoofing musical theatre in a revue called Forbidden Broadway. He now turns his attention to the big one: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which bestrides the West End and Broadway like a box-office colossus.
The result is a deft, fast-moving show that made me laugh occasionally but seems oddly torn between gobstruck admiration and cynical scepticism. As Max Beerbohm once said of a tailor who sent him a final-demand letter, Alessandrini is in the peculiar position of crawling on his knees while shaking his fist.
The show’s premise is that Miranda wants to revolutionise the Broadway musical in the same way that Alexander Hamilton, as secretary to the treasury, reshaped US identity.
This leads to highly specific send-ups of songs from Hamilton: what you might call parody by numbers. Echoing Hamilton’s determination not to throw away his shot, Miranda now sings: “I’m not going to let Broadway rot.” A fey British monarch later appears to ruefully inform us, in reference to Hamilton’s hetero agenda, that “straight is back”.
The ensemble also mimic the original’s most rousing number when they sing, with a certain desperation: “I want to be in the film when it happens.” All this is good fun if you’ve seen Hamilton, but pretty abstruse if you haven’t.
The show seems uncertain whether it has come to laud Miranda or to lord it over him. It acknowledges his audacity in using rap, hip-hop and R&B to record the birth of a nation. At the same, it slyly suggests that few people follow the plot of Hamilton or are able to comprehend all the lyrics.
This yields a choice encounter between Miranda and his hero, Stephen Sondheim, who preaches a verbal simplicity that he doesn’t always practise: something neatly parodied when, mocking a famous number from Company, a singer tells us: “Another hundred syllables came out of my mouth.”
The real problem with Spamilton, however, is its assumption that we are all steeped in the American musical and share Alessandrini’s encyclopedic frame of reference. He makes some sharp points about the transience of fame by showing how the praise heaped on The Book of Mormon has been eclipsed by that for Hamilton: even the latter, he suggests, may be knocked off its perch by Harry Potter, who tells Miranda: “My show is hotter than yours ever was.”
But Alessandrini cannot resist alluding to every show in the musical canon and throws in largely irrelevant items sending up singers from Elaine Page and Liza Minnelli to Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé.
It is all put across with great verve by a small cast in the writer’s own production. Liam Tamne captures Miranda’s mix of revolutionary fervour and smiling charm, Eddie Elliott embodies his Aaron Burr-like rival and Julie Yammanee is all quick-change vivacity as the women in Hamilton’s story.
Sophie-Louise Dann and Damian Humbley nimbly provide the cabaret guest spots, Gerry McIntyre choreographs inventively and Simon Beck at the piano provides 85 minutes of nonstop music.
The show is hard to dislike but, in the end, this is theatre about theatre. I prefer theatre about life.
- At Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 8 September.
