The jarring musical number demonstrates how blackface minstrelsy embedded itself in popular culture long after the practice itself became taboo, and how, by cloaking its message in nostalgia, incarnations of the same hateful genre have continued to perpetuate sentimentality for a racist past to this day.

The blackface minstrel show is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in the United States. The spectacle, which began roughly around 1830 in the urban North, saw white performers blackening their faces to mock enslaved Africans on Southern plantations in a manner that depicted “the Negro” as lazy, stupid, hypersexual, and violent. These offensive performances helped white spectators justify enslavement and the general mistreatment of Black people while reinforcing already circulating myths of Black inferiority.

Blackface and minstrel shows successfully moved from stage to screen, where they proved central to many Hollywood plots for the first half of the 20th century. They elicited a strong sense of nostalgia for an uncomplicated past while maintaining a longstanding set of racial and social hierarchies. The 1927 film The Jazz Singer—the story of a Jewish blackface performer, played by and based on the life of Al Jolson—shepherded in the sound era. Through jazz music, it also offered blackface tied to sound as the key to national integration.

Over the next three decades, visible blackface within a minstrel context largely disappeared from American entertainment. But by then, the soundtracks accompanying blackface had become so recognizable that they could refer to the minstrel stage even in the absence of visual cues. The history of Irving Berlin’s song “Mandy,” famously performed by Crosby, Kaye, and Clooney in White Christmas, offers some clues as to how this came to be.

Irving Berlin wrote “Mandy” (originally named “Sterling Silver Moon”) for the 1918 army-themed live musical revue Yip Yip Yaphank. The song itself was a jaunty marriage proposal:

So don’t you linger
Here’s the ring for your finger
Isn’t it a humdinger?
Come along and let the wedding chimes
Bring happy times
For Mandy and me

Yip Yip Yaphank called for the song to be performed in blackface as a cakewalk, or walkaround. This type of number often ended minstrel shows and was an imitation of an imitation: a dance enslaved people invented that poked fun at plantation owners’ mannerisms, who then appropriated it for themselves without understanding its meaning.

“Mandy” became a hit a year later as part of a 10-minute minstrel segment in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, a revue packed with vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor and Bert Williams, both in blackface, opened the segment. The popular comedy duo of Gus Van and Joe Schenck (also in blackface) sang “Mandy” as part of the first act finale—known as “The Follies Minstrel”—alongside 45 shimmying choristers known as “The Follies Pickaninnies.”

The song resurfaced 15 years later in the 1934 Eddie Cantor film Kid Millions. The biggest differences between the “Mandy” number in Kid Millions and its previous uses was the sheer quantity of blackface and its place in the plot. Unlike the minstrel segment of Ziegfield Follies, only one performer—Cantor—was depicted in blackface as he performed in a recreated minstrel show that is only tenuously connected to the overarching story.

Eddie Cantor performs “Mandy” in blackface in Kid Millions. Courtesy of author.

By the time Kid Millions debuted, Hollywood was facing public backlash from the country’s cultural and legislative leadership for the content of its films, namely provocative imagery but also racism. The industry adopted the Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code after its creator William H. Hays, to regulate the “purity” of motion pictures, pushing everything from nudity and profanity to interracial relationships off the screen. But as Kid Millions demonstrates, the policy mostly censored matters that directly concerned the Catholic church, which is why instances of blackface and other forms of racial caricature occasionally managed to slip past the censors. Eddie Cantor is a perfect example of this subjective censorship: because blackface minstrelsy had become indelibly tied to his stage and screen persona, his use of such racial caricature almost always made it into the picture.

“Mandy” returned in a 1943 World War II film, This is the Army. The staging modeled that of Yaphank and Millions, but the use of blackface was more subtle—a reference to something nostalgic from the past. This whole performance is bracketed as an homage to Berlin’s original use of blackface in Yip Yip Yaphank. Just as Cantor’s stage performance of “Mandy” in Ziegfield Follies gave him “cover” to use blackface in Kid Millions, Yaphank’s use of blackface within an army-themed musical lessened the backlash the “Mandy” scene received from film censors in This is the Army. Furthermore, most of this 1943 production removed prototypical, derogatory minstrel show elements and instead packaged the whole number in patriotism. Jim Crow stereotypes were replaced by over a hundred white men dressed in uniform, ready to fight for America.

The New York Times called the film “the freshest, most endearing, the most rousing musical tribute to the American fighting man that has come out of World War II,” and a “warmly reassuring document on the state of the nation.” Almost 80 years after the passing of the 13th Amendment, This is the Army shows how the white press was still giving the minstrel show a standing ovation.

“Mandy” made its final appearance in 1954’s White Christmas as the film’s big holiday spectacular: a minstrel show that dressed the old racist classic up in ebullient costumes, familiar voices, and lots of bare, white skin. Twelve scandalously dressed women outfitted like Christmas gifts replaced the traditional ensemble of white men in blackface. Clooney played the role of interlocutor, and Crosby and Kaye adopted the traditional minstrel tropes Mr. Tambo, who played tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled bones as clappers, respectively. Vera-Ellen’s theatrical jazz dancing replaced the minstrel show’s conventional use of tap dance, offering a more mid-century take on appropriation.

By the time Americans saw White Christmas, the blackface mask had become a superfluous part of the minstrel show. “Mandy” has always been connected to the minstrel stage, its notes deeply embedded in a complicated nostalgia for white theatergoers. The long-entrenched pairing of “Mandy” with minstrelsy had laid the groundwork for perceiving racial caricature even in the absence of grotesque costume and speech. Race performance, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, need not be visible to be effective. And even as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam, these references to the minstrel show still had the ability to remind white theatergoers of a time when a good laugh and putting down “the other” shaped collective identity without fear of consequence.

Today, it’s still easy to get swept up in the nostalgia White Christmas is selling: lovers at a cozy Vermont cabin for the holidays, set against a backdrop of World War II service. But when romance and patriotism get tied up in the Christmas spirit, questioning even one part of the equation can feel downright sacrilegious. Rather than taking a jingoistic attitude toward what we feel the most nostalgic toward, let’s accept that American history is complicated, and that the American songbook can be rather unsettling—even, and maybe especially, at Christmastime.

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The opening is a perfect example of the “bursting into song” for which the musical genre is known (and occasionally maligned). Without cause or provocation, characters break out of their ordinary lives and into a heightened state wherein they express feelings of love and longing, happiness and despair. Except for the anti-sentimentalists among us, the musical lifts us out of our humdrum reality, if only for a moment.

Surprisingly, this tendency in musicals stems not from a desire to escape but rather the need to address what is lacking in our lives. This was a central concern of musical films made by Jews, Mexicans, and African Americans in the early days of sound cinema. Ministering to audiences who were dealing with the pains and anxieties of migration, ethnic musicals offered stories about people who burst into song as a way of establishing connections to one another and to their homeland.

In the late 1920s, Hollywood filmmakers routinely built an explanation of the use of song and dance into their films. Stories typically revolved around show business and took place in performance contexts, including the rare Hollywood film that acknowledged the experience of migration, The Jazz Singer (1927). The only time people burst into song without justification was in films about people of color, who were portrayed as naturally prone to singing and dancing (see Hallelujah!, 1929). Ethnic musicals operated within a different logic, one that assumed a cultural affinity with its audience. In these films, made outside of the Hollywood mainstream, ordinary people sing and dance as a matter of course, no special context required. Their characters perform with their audience, rather than for it.

As many already have noted, La La Land does indeed nod to the Hollywood musicals of old, such as An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and the French quotations of those films, such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). But the film’s emphasis on migrant characters in search of love, community, and belonging places La La Land squarely within the ethnic traditions that are foundational to the genre.

Characters sing together in Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936).

Take, for example, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936), the most popular Mexican film of its time. While Hollywood offered a cycle of films about chorus girls and stage door Johnnies (see 42nd Street, 1933; Gold Diggers of 1935; Stage Struck, 1936), director Fernando de Fuentes presented a simple story about Mexican ranch life with folk songs and dances. He quickly found that the film’s biggest audience was among Mexican immigrants living in the United States—they constituted a critical mass that hundreds of movie theatres, large and small, served in cities across the country.

In Los Angeles, the film attracted English-speaking audiences, too, yet elicited back-handed compliments from reviewers in the mainstream press. Variety applauded its efforts, but ultimately declared that it was “not a musical in any sense of the word,” objecting to the “casual way” in which songs and dances entered and exited the story without explanation. So unfamiliar was the reviewer with this approach that he dismissed the film as a rudimentary attempt at the musical. He ended his review by condescending to de Fuentes, advising him to look to Hollywood for “a more thorough lesson.”

Other ethnic musicals similarly departed from the status quo. Clarence Brooks and Harry Gant’s black-cast film, Georgia Rose (1930), surprised audiences and critics by rejecting the stereotypical imagery of “the Negro singing spirituals, eating watermelon and shooting craps,” as one reviewer noted. Instead, Brooks and Gant told a story about a modern black family who leave the South in search of opportunity up North. And as an answer to the assimilationist message of Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer (1927), Joseph Seiden released Mayne Yiddishe Mame (My Jewish Mother, 1930), the first Yiddish sound film. Made for an audience of Jewish immigrants, Mayne Yiddishe Mame demonstrated that while American success was alluring, nothing replaces the sanctity of the family.

In these films, as with Rancho Grande, ethnic filmmakers revealed a new purpose of the genre: to serve the needs and desires of a people for whom migration is a reality. With the coming of the U.S. entry into World War II and the ensuing separation of families, the Hollywood studios realized that changing times necessitated a shift in the musical as well. As MGM producer Arthur Freed recounted in an interview, “Gone were the gigantic production numbers, the trick camera angles, the dances and songs that stopped the plot cold until the last chorine waved her last ostrich feather in the camera’s focus.”

Instead, stories about small-town communities and the endurance of home dominated the genre, epitomized by Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). In Vincente Minnelli’s musical, the lives of the Smith family of St. Louis are disrupted by the prospect of migrating to New York City at the turn of the century. This film resonated deeply with World War II-era audiences and its theme of social unity in the face of change shaped later classics, including The Music Man (1962) and The Sound of Music (1965).

La La Land begins by introducing characters who have already ruptured their lives by leaving home and are striving to make it in a new place. As the opening number shows, these young hopefuls are as diverse as the city in which they live and they are seeking careers in L.A.’s many creative industries. Mia, the main character played by Emma Stone, embodies their journey. She left Boulder City, Nevada in order to become an actress. But making it is an uphill battle, she soon realizes. At her lowest point, she tells her boyfriend Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist, “I’m going home.” When he insists that she is home, she responds, “Not anymore.” As these moments suggest, L.A. is full of migrants who enter and exit the city. But these migrations come at a significant cost to the maintenance of relationships, which Mia and Seb soon understand.

As “Another Day of Sun” reveals, the musical allows characters to shift from a state of isolation to one of inclusion. It creates a sense of belonging for both its characters and its audience in the process. Ethnic musicals did this as a matter of course. Often, audiences sang along to songs they already knew—these early musicals typically included a mix of familiar songs and original numbers—effectively transforming the movie theatre into a musical community of its own.

This tradition extended to the Hollywood musical in films like Meet Me in St. Louis, in which the use of folk songs, “Skip to My Lou” and “Meet Me in St. Louis,” fostered a connection between the Smith family and its 1940s audience. Even today, the annual The Sound of Music sing-along at the Hollywood Bowl brings together audiences from all walks of life. They happily sing “Do Re Mi” and “My Favorite Things,” songs that have over the years become part of an American folk heritage. La La Land, like the musicals that precede it, brings people together again and again, from the opening song, to Mia and her roommates in “Someone in the Crowd,” to the impromptu reprise of “City of Stars,” casually sung by Mia and Seb at the piano.

To understand La La Land’s appeal, we might well look to the genre’s long history of speaking to people on the move. The struggle between pursuing dreams and sustaining relationships, leaving home and staying put, is a recurring theme. Delving into the musical’s origins, we find that this was of particular concern to migrant communities. Just like Mia, musical film audiences are searching for a better life.

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The brilliant new film musical La La Land is being celebrated as a love letter to Los Angeles. But the darker heart of the movie lies in a brief and devastating critique of Southern California, delivered by the jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling.

“That’s L.A.,” he tells his lover, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone. “They worship everything and they value nothing.”

There has been no better recent summary of the California struggle—with the very notable exception of the 2015 novel, The Sellout, whose author Paul Beatty recently became the first American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

La La Land and The Sellout seem very different. On the surface, the film, an Oscar favorite, might appear to be a glossy escapist romance about white artists who hang out in Griffith Park. The novel is a taboo-trashing racial satire about an African-American urban farmer of watermelons and artisanal weed who reintroduces segregation to his neglected South L.A. neighborhood, ostensibly in hopes of putting it on the map. (His real agenda is even more deliciously subversive).

But the film and the novel are two of the most thought-provoking and entertaining documents of today’s California. And both are about the same big problem: that for all our celebration of successful game changers in this state, we offer precious little space or support to those who dare to upset our blissful status quo.

The film and the book also make the same provocative argument about how to break through the Golden State’s stacked deck: Don’t be afraid to do things that are totally nuts.

To make an impact here, you must embrace, and express, your inner madman. Both works specifically champion a self-sacrificing craziness, a willingness to surrender yourself and the people you love to focus on making your mark. Here, hitsville and heartbreak are two sides of the same heavy coin.

La La Land makes a straightforward case for crazy. Gosling’s musician is the film’s romantic hero, because of his uncompromising commitment to restoring traditional jazz even though he can’t pay his bills because the rest of the world is abandoning the form. Stone’s frustrated actress only inches closer to the red carpet when she devotes herself, against conventional wisdom, to producing her one-woman play in a theater she can’t afford to rent.

And in the audition scene in which she finally breaks through, she embraces the virtues of craziness in song: “A bit of madness is key to give us new colors to see. Who knows where it will lead us?”

Beatty’s novel similarly suggests that, to smash through the California looking-glass world, the sanest course may be to go right over the edge. The farmer refuses to accept the city of L.A.’s erasure of his minority neighborhood (it’s called Dickens, in one of Beatty’s winking allusions to artists who embraced thorny social themes). And so the farmer fights this fire of systemic discrimination by violating dozens of laws and cultural norms. Most outlandishly, he takes a slave, who helps him segregate the local school, hospital, bus line, and businesses to the advantage of racial minorities. (He puts up signs reading “Colored Only” and “No Whites Allowed” all over Dickens).

Beatty’s satire is so rich and layered—no one is left unskewered, from white supremacists to our first black president—that it’s futile to attempt to convey it in a short column. But I will mention two of the most provocative parts of the politically incorrect plot—how long it takes for anyone outside the community to notice the farmer’s segregation edicts, and how, through the farmer’s loopy and unconstitutional acts, seeds of tolerance and kindness (lower crime, higher test scores, more polite behavior) take root.

“The racism takes them back,” the farmer explains. “Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go.” And it is only through embracing racism that the farmer makes his impact—and a point. As a judge in the novel remarks, “In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality.”

The Sellout and La La Land keep the reader and viewer enjoyably engaged and off-guard because they leaven their tough messages with comedy (the movie takes on screenwriting and the Prius, while the novel imagines “the Untouchables” in its caste system as starting with Clipper fans and traffic cops). And both works, for all their high ambition, fall back on some wondrous magical realism as an escape hatch from the difficult tonal and political juggling acts they perform. The La La lovers literally float into the stars through the ceiling of the Griffith Park Observatory, while The Sellout Metro bus becomes a rolling party that ends with the vehicle being driven into the Malibu surf.

The Sellout feels especially current because it breaks political ground, even becoming the first artwork to satirize our state’s fastest-rising representative, Attorney General-turned U.S. Senator-turned-presidential wannabe Kamala Harris. Once the farmer is finally arrested, an unnamed black-and-Asian-American California attorney general shows up in Prada shoes to prosecute him for violations of major civil rights laws, the 13th and 14th amendments, and six of the Ten Commandments.

Both the film and the book wrestle with the conflict between loyalty to one’s dreams and selling out—and in the process point out just how hard it has become to tell the difference between the two. And both get at a painful paradox. We know we must hold onto real people and real things, to be truly human. But in L.A., we learn we must loosen our grip on reality to get noticed, and get ahead. It’s not just lonely at the top; it’s lonely on the whole journey up the California mountain.

In this way, both masterpieces ultimately raise the question of whether making your mark here is worth the cost. It may be that the real winners in this California are those who don’t bother to play the game and navigate the hurdles to ambition—and instead plop themselves down in unfancy places where they can enjoy warm weather and their loved ones in blessed obscurity.

No character in the book or the movie is happier in Beatty’s satirized world than the farmer’s slave, an aging actor named Hominy from the 1950’s TV show Little Rascals who refuses all efforts to free him. Trying to be a star in L.A. is so confounding that he prefers the simplicity of servitude.

“I’m a slave. That’s who I am,” he insists to the farmer. “It’s the role I was born to play.”

After all, if you’re going to live in a place that values nothing, then why fight so hard to be something?

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The musical follows an old playbook that divides the founders into heroes and villains. This started after the Revolution when Charles Willson Peale began compiling portraits of “Revolutionary Patriots” and displayed them in his renowned Philadelphia Museum. In 1818, a Russian diplomat and artist, Pavel Petrovich Svinin, observed that “every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.” In death, Washington figuratively became a god, when an artist attached his iconic face and head to a classic pose of Jesus sitting on a cloud and ascending into heaven. The impulse to glorify the founders is still with us. They were romanticized in the silent film era, and in innumerable, hokey Hollywood movies since. The Patriots awed New York theater critics during World War II, and 1776 rocked Broadway in 1969, with Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin singing and dancing their way to independence. Have we already forgotten HBO’s gushing tribute, John Adams?

“The Apotheosis of Washington,” an 1800 engraving of the first U.S. President by David Edwin.

 
The drama of the founders has overtaken the reality. In the undergraduate seminar I teach, “America’s Founding Myths,” I ask my students to identify the life masks of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, produced in 1825, which is as close as we can come to capturing their likenesses. None of my students recognized them. Why? They are old. Adams is jowly and bald. There isn’t an ounce of glamor in these unflattering busts. The reason that Hamilton is so popular is that the theatergoer is treated to vigorous youth, brazen sex appeal, macho brashness, capped by so-called genius—all wrapped up in a loving and whimsical portrait of a Hamilton who “tells it like it is” in the pounding, nonstop rhythms of hip hop. Which guy do you want to be? A shrunken Jefferson, or the dashing and daring Hamilton who, like Peter Pan, never appears to grow up?

No one watching Hamilton will want to be Burr, one of the most interesting figures of early American history. Leslie Odom, Jr., who plays Burr, has a lovely voice, but his portrayal echoes a familiar slur: the opportunist. Or to use Hamilton’s favorite insult of Burr (and others): a “cunning” man, who carries himself with aristocratic airs. In Hamilton, Burr is a mere prop, a villainous foil, his personality an overblown caricature. He is portrayed as a man who lacks principles, unwilling to believe in, or fight for, anything that matters.

The historical Burr was no less passionate about the Revolution than Hamilton, eagerly joining the arduous 350-mile march through Maine wilderness to Canada in 1775. He was appointed aide-de-camp to General Richard Montgomery, who died during the invasion and lived on as a Revolutionary martyr. For courage under fire, Burr received a commendation from Congress. Contrary to the song lyrics, he wasn’t “waiting” for anything.

The men he later commanded admired him, and he believed in expanding democratic rights to uplift and empower poorer men. He was not pompous or aloof, nor a man of mere surfaces, nor a Chesterfieldian dandy, as his slanderous enemies pretended. His New York wing of the Jeffersonian party, the “Burrites,” were men of mixed class backgrounds, whereas the Schuyler-Hamilton Federalist faction was a top-down organization favoring elite interests. Falsely casting Burr as an aristocrat is a rhetorical ploy: It incorrectly shifts the blame for class prejudice onto him.

By taking sides in a mudslinging fight for power that goes back more than 200 years, Hamilton misses Burr’s actual contributions. He was a skilled innovator of democracy, working to make elections, financial services, and even the U.S. Senate more fair and transparent. In New York, he was charged with “revolutionizing the state,” because he backed progressive policies for funding internal improvements, debtor relief, and establishing a more democratic method of electing state senators. He founded the Manhattan Company, the first bank to extend financial services to ordinary merchants and mechanics outside the ruling elite. As vice president, he presided over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. His judicious behavior, which helped to maintain the impartiality of the judiciary, won him grudging praise from many Federalists; one called him “one of the best presiding officers I ever saw.” A man with sophisticated ideas, respected for his impartiality and scrupulous conduct—this Burr never appears in Hamilton.

An 1802 portrait of Aaron Burr by the painter John Vanderlyn.

 
Reducing Burr to a villain turns the musical into a lopsided morality tale, glossing over the complexity of early America in favor of characters we can cheer for. Thus hip-hop Hamilton unabashedly celebrates the American Dream; the conceit that the country has always been the land of opportunity. Hamilton represents the immigrant made good, because he was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Left out of the upbeat story is that Hamilton—and the Federalist Party he headed—were hostile to the idea that the United States should ever be led by newcomers. It was the Federalists who pressed for a constitutional amendment barring naturalized foreigners from elected offices, and it was that villain Burr, in the New York Assembly at the time, who gave an eloquent speech defending the liberal promise of the young republic. “America stood with open arms and presented an asylum to the oppressed of every nation,” he said. “Shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our Constitution?”

The musical puts feminist words in the mouth of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law, presuming she wanted to tell Jefferson to rewrite the Declaration to include women. This is absurd. In truth, Aaron Burr was far ahead of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams in advancing the ideas of English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the leading Enlightenment advocate of women’s rights. Burr and his wife Theodosia educated their daughter as they might have a son: She could read and write at the age of 3, then mastered French, Italian, Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, and geography. The idea that women were the intellectual equals of men was a radical one, and Hamilton attacked Burr for it, calling him a proponent of “Godwinism.” (William Godwin was Wollstonecraft’s husband.)

Finally, Hamilton wrongly claims that the duel with Burr was over the election of 1800, and that Burr knowingly shot Hamilton after he saw him fire a bullet in the air. Wrong again. The real cause of the duel was that Hamilton attacked Burr’s character (and refused to apologize) when Burr ran for the New York governorship in 1804. Conveniently missing is the fact that Hamilton supplied the pistols, and the one he used had a secret hair trigger. This gave him an unfair advantage and violated the gentlemanly code of conduct.

Can we expect a more accurate musical someday? Probably not. Interestingly, in times of political turmoil, the pop-culture pendulum often swings in a critical direction. In the 1930s, the iconoclastic painter Grant Wood (best known for his American Gothic) mockingly reworked the Parson Weems tale of George Washington, as the cherry tree slayer who would not lie. The same artist turned Paul Revere’s ride into a surreal jaunt through a fairytale town, with Revere astride a miniature rocking horse. Wood’s point was simple: In the midst of the Great Depression, bedtime stories about the founders were suitable for children but not adults. It was time for Americans to grow up and embrace their real history, a darker one. Gore Vidal did the same in 1973, when the breakdown of Nixon’s Watergate was in full sway, publishing Burr, a fictional history, in which Jefferson is savagely shown as a Janus-faced, dilettantish, ruthlessly power-hungry politician. In times of trouble, a little skepticism (and sarcasm) goes a long way.

Hamilton may be delight to watch, but let’s not convince ourselves that it honors the discipline of history. When he interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda, Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked: “I didn’t have to read the Bible, because I saw Jesus Christ Superstar.” That pretty much says it all. The musical Hamilton is to the historical Hamilton what Charlton Heston’s Moses is to … well, you get the picture.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that Elizabeth Hamilton wanted to tell Jefferson to include women in the Declaration of Independence in the musical Hamilton. It was Angelica Schuyler, her sister.

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