The ‘Hamilton' Effect: 10 Revolutionary Years on Broadway

New York Times

06-08-2025

The American Revolution lasted seven years. 'Hamilton,' the groundbreaking musical about one of its unsung heroes, has now outlasted it.
It has also spawned a revolution of its own. Little on Broadway looks the way it did on Aug. 6, 2015, when 'Hamilton' opened; that's what happens when a show runs 10 years, sells more than four million tickets and earns more than $1 billion — not counting tours, international productions and the 2020 movie.
And though some predictions about 'the 'Hamilton' effect' have not panned out, the ones that did have dramatically altered musical theater, affecting casting, content, marketing, pricing, outreach and even stardom. Here are nine ways of looking at the changes that Lin-Manuel Miranda and his colleagues wrought; please share your own insights in the comments section. After all, as 'Hamilton' says, 'History has its eyes on you' — and now vice versa.
Race-Conscious Casting
To study the portraits of our founding fathers and their known associates is to face an unceasing parade of white men. 'Hamilton' had other ideas. Burnishing the bona fides of the musical as a hip-hop narrative and making a place in the show (and in American history) for the likes of Miranda and friends and collaborators such as Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson, the production cast actors of color in the roles of America's forebears and some of the women who loved them. This casting underlines the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants (even though the lead actors were not themselves immigrants) and questions the inclusivity and exclusivity of what these white men accomplished. 'Hamilton' is certainly not the first show to employ race-conscious casting (a 'photo-negative' 'Othello,' starring Patrick Stewart, is an early example), but this move has proved unusually influential, even as its playful, trenchant achievement has rarely been equaled.
— Alexis Soloski
New Music
Much as 'Hair' supposedly did with rock music of the 1960s, 'Hamilton' did with the sounds of the new century. Or so critics said, predicting that hip-hop would soon merge into mainstream musical theater. It didn't: We had misunderstood what Miranda was up to. His songs for 'Hamilton' (as for 'In the Heights,' which preceded it) certainly include hip-hop beats and rap-style lyrics, along with hat tips to stars like Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G., but they aren't pop any more than 'Hair' was. They are fully theater songs, filtered through an imagination that had long since absorbed Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim, Kander and Ebb. The lyrics do pretty much what they do in 'Fiddler on the Roof': insistently point the ear to key content. You hear it even in the title character's first utterance, linking the name 'Alexander Hamilton' to the phrase 'a million things I haven't done' — a wonky rhyme by traditional standards but a dead-perfect rhythmic echo that bonds the man to his ambition. (Say it out loud.) 'Hamilton' may have brought new tools to the craft, and succeeded where other efforts, like the Tupac musical 'Holler if Ya Hear Me,' failed, but it didn't start a trend. It's too wrapped up in the old one for that, and too singular to be copied.
— Jesse Green
That'll Be $849, Please.
It's hard to remember just how unhinged the lust for 'Hamilton' tickets grew when the musical was at the height of its cultural cachet. For Miranda's final Broadway performance, in July 2016, scalpers were asking an average of $10,900 for a single seat.
The public's willingness to pay serious money to be in the room where the show happened, especially with the original Broadway cast, was supply and demand in action — and the producers wearied of seeing secondary sellers rake in tens of millions of dollars on the back of the show's success.
Nearly a year into the run, hoping to edge scalpers out and keep more of the profits, 'Hamilton' jacked its top ticket price way up, from $475 to a record-setting $849, which seemed to be the sweet spot for scalpers. Smartly, the show paired that change with a promise of a lottery offering 46 tickets at $10 apiece for each performance.
But one production breaking a pricing taboo invites others to follow. Bruce Springsteen charged $875 for his Broadway show in 2017, and the Bette Midler revival of 'Hello, Dolly!' that year went even bigger, at $998 — the price 'Hamilton' had charged over the 2016 holidays.
So, last season's kerfuffle about $921 tickets for 'Othello,' and $799 seats for 'Good Night, and Good Luck'? 'Hamilton' got there first, and got away with it.
— Laura Collins-Hughes
Pop Culture Juggernaut
Even if you'd never seen a musical, 'Hamilton' was impossible to ignore, from Broadway to the middle of the country and beyond. Celebrities turned out in droves to see the show, including the Obamas, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Oprah, Emma Watson, Alicia Keys and Lena Dunham. The cast members became stars in their own right: Miranda hosted 'Saturday Night Live' in 2016, and he and others went on to have success on TV and in film and music. 'Weird Al' Yankovic released a polka medley of several songs from the show, 'The Hamilton Polka.' 'The Hamilton Mixtape' featured a who's who of hip-hop and R&B stars — Common, Wiz Khalifa, Nas, Alicia Keys and more — performing songs from the musical. Riffs on the show popped up on popular television series, like 'The Simpsons,' 'Succession,' 'And Just Like That … ' and 'Ted Lasso.' On 'Modern Family,' a parodic version of 'Alexander Hamilton' was recorded as part of a character's college application ('How does an artsy, well-read, child of divorce … '). For the first time in years, a musical's popularity transcended not only New York City, but the theater world.
— Sarah Bahr
Ham4Ham for the People
Tickets were expensive from the start, spurring hundreds of fans to line up outside the Richard Rodgers Theater each day to enter a live lottery for $10 seats. To keep the hopefuls from going stir crazy while waiting, and to thank them for their support, Miranda started Ham4Ham, an informal entertainment that turned him into a kind of showman for the people, a 46th Street Ed Sullivan. But from the first installment — on July 15, 2015, two days after previews began — Ham4Ham was not much about Miranda himself; he was more a host than a star, sharing what he called the theater's front stoop with 'Hamilton' cast members, performers from other shows and even the Classical Theater of Harlem singing Christmas carols in the cold. Sometimes using taped elements, and going fully virtual during the pandemic, Ham4Ham has been produced intermittently ever since, most recently on May 30, when two Norma Desmonds blew the street down with nothing but moxie and a bullhorn. What has made the series so joyful, and also a brilliant marketing tactic, is just that combo of maximal showbiz and minimal means. It's a reminder that Broadway is not just a business but a neighborhood, and sometimes even a street party.
— Jesse Green
A Political Legacy
One of the earliest public glimpses of 'Hamilton' came several months after Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, when Miranda delivered the first track off his Alexander Hamilton concept album at a White House poetry night. He returned to the White House in 2016 with a full cast for a performance that included 'One Last Time' — in which George Washington, played then by Christopher Jackson, prepares to step aside — as Obama, in the last year of his presidency, nodded along.
Miranda wasn't looking to write a partisan show, he told The New York Times in 2015; the musical attracted public officials from across the political spectrum, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. But even with a 250-year-old plot, the show and its themes opened a door for more contemporary debates: Mike Pence's attendance when he was vice president-elect prompted an onstage plea from the cast 'to work on behalf of all of us.' (President-elect Donald J. Trump tweeted the next morning that Pence had been 'harassed.') And as the Broadway run stretches into a second Trump term, the show has canceled plans to perform next year at the Kennedy Center in Washington following the president's sweeping changes at the institution. But 10 years in, even when the partisan tangles extend offstage, the underlying political legacy of 'Hamilton' remains one not of opposition, but of energetic optimism: a symbol for the Obama years as 'Camelot' was for the Kennedys.
— Nancy Coleman
A New Era for Live Capture
A live capture of 'Hamilton' premiered on Disney+ in July 2020. Four years later, the musical's Broadway and London productions are still going strong, and it has tours in North America and Britain. First, 'Hamilton' put an end to the idea that Broadway was allergic to hip-hop; then it killed the long-held belief that making a show available for streaming would kill its live prospects. Not only that, but 'Hamilton' also firmly established that a live capture would make people want to see the stage version more, not less. Of course, it helped that its producers had the funds for a high-quality capture, and that they filmed most of the original 'Hamilton' cast at the show's Broadway home, the Richard Rodgers Theater, in June 2016. Still, releasing a live film has worked for other productions since, most notably 'Come From Away,' 'Heathers: The Musical' and 'Frozen: The Musical.' Any exposure is good exposure nowadays, and fans seduced by streaming can morph into ticket-buying customers. The marketing wheel never stops turning.
— Elisabeth Vincentelli
An Ongoing Influx of Talent
You change a field by changing what possibility looks like. Of all the ways that 'Hamilton' has altered the theater, probably the most radical is in its elevation of a critical mass of brilliant young actors of color — and not only in the original Broadway cast.
That fact landed with me viscerally when I saw Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the 2018 Broadway revival of 'My Fair Lady,' and read in the program that he'd played Lafayette and Jefferson — the Daveed Diggs roles — on tour. Well, no wonder he was fantastic. I also think of the British actor Jamael Westman, who was 25 when he played Hamilton in the original London cast. He told me, in an interview then, about 'the bite back' that he and some friends encountered in drama school when they decided to put on an all-Black play, having seen so many all-white ones.
Had 'Hamilton' not become a monster hit, it would still have been one of the relatively rare musicals with multiple capacious and challenging roles for performers of color, mostly men. But its prospering has made it a vehicle for an ongoing influx of talent. It has seeded the field with a wealth of artistry. If the theater has any sense, we will see the flowering of that for decades to come.
— Laura Collins-Hughes
Miranda's Post-'Hamilton' Career
You might have expected that the man once credited with 'changing the language of musicals' would have continued to imprint the musical-theater canon. But his lone Broadway songwriting credit in the past 10 years is additional lyrics for the stage adaptation of 'New York, New York.'
If one thing dominates Miranda's post-'Hamilton' career, it's his enduring, multipronged relationship with Disney, a company hardly known for poking the artistic bear. Over the past decade, his Disney contributions include voice work on 'DuckTales,' writing songs for the animated features 'Moana' and 'Encanto,' the latter of which spawned the chart-topping 'We Don't Talk About Bruno' and the Academy Award-nominated 'Dos Oruguitas,' proving that he has not lost his hit-making touch. If anything, this confirms that Miranda has always been, in formal and aesthetic terms, more conservative than firebrand. But no matter how far he's wandered, he is particularly inspired by New York City, which is why it was encouraging to see him back on home turf last year, when he and Eisa Davis released the concept album 'Warriors,' which gender-switched the film 'The Warriors,' from 1979. A stage version would be intriguing: After all, flipping roles has worked for Miranda before.
— Elisabeth Vincentelli