Hamilton (Touring)

Hamilton follows an orphaned clerk who arrives in a new country in 1776 with no money, no family and an unusual talent for writing, and who talks his way into a revolution within a week of landing. Alexander Hamilton wants a war, because a war is the only opening available to a man with his background.

He gets one, and then the harder part. Independence is won and the work becomes argument: a financial system to invent, a constitution to defend in print, a cabinet to out-manoeuvre. He marries Eliza Schuyler, whose sister Angelica saw him first and stepped aside. And across every stage of it stands Aaron Burr, equally clever and constitutionally cautious, waiting for a moment that never quite arrives while Hamilton takes every one that does.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the book, music and lyrics, drawing on Ron Chernow's biography, and the show reached the stage in 2015. The score is built mainly from hip hop, with R&B, Britpop pastiche and traditional show writing where the story calls for them, and the founders are played by a company cast without regard to the ethnicity of the historical figures.

The writing is dense: the songs run at speed, motifs return years later in other characters' mouths, and phrases dropped early are paid off in the second half. The staging is spare by design, a wooden set and a turntable, with the ensemble moving furniture, bullets and time itself.

The second act is about what a person leaves behind and who is left to write it down. The last word in the show belongs to Eliza, and she has been standing there the whole time.