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Here's what the audience of Hamilton's first preview had to say.Hamilton is a race revolution in the West End, says Cameron Mackintosh.Michael Jibson’s George III earns some of the biggest laughs with his foppish trolling of the American rebels. Jason Pennycooke doubles brilliantly as the rapidly rapping Marquis de Lafayette, the self-styled ‘Lancelot of the revolutionary set’, and a preening Thomas Jefferson. Obioma Ugoala has the towering authority needed to play George Washington. Rachelle Ann Go has a lovely vocal purity as Hamilton’s demure and earnest wife Eliza, and Rachel John brings wit and spark to her passionate sister Angelica. There’s quality all around the central pair. But there are notes of resentment, awkwardness and longing in his performance - Burr’s appetite for politics is quickened by a thwarted desire to be, as one second-half song emphasises, in ‘the room where it happens’. He’s both enterprising and studious, and Westman is particularly good at suggesting his shift from adolescent daring to maturity.Īs the ambitious Burr, Salieri to Westman’s Mozart, Terera has a cool shrewdness. The tall and elegant Westman captures Hamilton’s cockiness and piercing gaze, as well as his tendency to lapse into a pensive quietness. As a result it hurtles along, the dance and movement as urgent as the vocals, yet the cast’s energy is matched by its poise. Thomas Kail’s finely tuned production takes place on a single set, and there’s athletic choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler. At times the show’s tone is lushly operatic, and it's punctuated with bluesy moments, bar-room rowdiness, R&B ballads and even some twiddly harpsichord, richly orchestrated by Alex Lacamoire.

But he's also sensitive to the history of musical theatre, with nods to Les Misérables, Stephen Sondheim and the tongue-twisting patter of Gilbert and Sullivan. For rap fans there’s the pleasure of spotting references to Grandmaster Flash, Mobb Deep, DMX and the Notorious B.I.G. The lyrics are densely packed, layered with puns and embedded rhymes, and their bristling intricacy justifies Miranda’s thesis that hip-hop is - or at any rate can be - the authentic sound of the American Revolution.

It’s giving nothing away to mention his death, since it’s referenced in the opening song, and the show’s first three minutes - expository yet invigorating - make it clear that Hamilton’s linguistic artistry is something Miranda shares. Yet once he arrived in New York, he ascended swiftly, buoyed by his charm, fierce intelligence and facility for language - before being killed in a duel, aged forty-nine, by fellow orphan and politico Aaron Burr. Raised in poverty on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, the young Hamilton was abandoned by his Scottish father and orphaned following the death of his half-French, half-British mother. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.