The hottest ticket in New York is a hip-hop musical devoted to one of America’s Founding Fathers — who happens to be the Founding Father of the New York Post.
“Hamilton” premiered last week, and its three-month run at the Public Theatre is practically sold out. The animated production comes from the remarkable mind of Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Historian Ron Chernow, whose epic “Alexander Hamilton” biography inspired the show, praises its accuracy, saying that where Miranda has had to “deviate from the facts, I have found that there is always a very good reason for him doing it.”
Miranda’s lyrics celebrate the life of an illegitimate son of the Virgin Islands who grew up to be George Washington’s right-hand man and the nation’s first treasury secretary: “the $10 Founding Father without a father / Got a lot farther by working a lot harder / By being a lot smarter / By being a self-starter.”
So how is it this dead white male can strike such a chord with a modern audience?
Another biographer, Richard Brookhiser, puts it this way: “Hamilton is the most modern of the Founders. Of them all, he most understood modern economics and how modern capitalism could spread opportunity to all kinds of people.”
As we at The Post have special reason to appreciate, Hamilton could also write: His first story saw print at age 15 — about a hurricane that struck St. Croix. “Writing’s in his blood,” Brookhiser notes. “He writes well, copiously and can hit deadlines.”
Such a man was destined to launch a newspaper and — with a tempestuous love affair and his death in a duel — to become the subject of many headlines himself.
As principal writer of the Federalist Papers, he declared in the very first, “My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all.”
More than 200 years after he wrote those words, this spirit still animates The Post. Count us delighted to see his story revived on stage — and resonating with a whole new generation of Americans.