Thursday, April 21, 2016

Complaints were inevitable …

… Rapping the Legend - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I’ve been waiting for just such a reaction to “Hamilton” ever since it opened last year. Why? Because, as I wrote in my review of the original off-Broadway production, the show “is at bottom as optimistic about America as ‘1776.’ American exceptionalism meets hip-hop: That’s ‘Hamilton.’” Whether Mr. Miranda knew it or not—and he surely knows by now—such a point of view is by definition anathema to those who see America as a country so tainted with the original sin of class privilege as to be irredeemable. To such folk, the fact that the founders were rich white men is reason enough to sneer at the underlying optimism of “Hamilton.”

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