“Hamilton”, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Mark Brown on Clydeside
2 November 2025
★★★★★

It is 10 years since Hamilton – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s famous hip-hop stage musical – first hit the stage. Since then, the show – which traces the biography of the American revolutionary, lawyer and statesman Alexander Hamilton – has risen to become the sixth highest grossing musical in Broadway history.

Marley Fenton as Alexander Hamilton.
Photo credit: Danny Kaan.

Miranda’s opus has garnered merited critical plaudits and audience ovations everywhere it has gone. The show even found itself at the centre of a political storm in November 2016, after Broadway cast member Brandon Victor Dixon read out a post-performance statement addressing then vice president-elect Mike Pence who was in attendance. The statement – which spoke for Hamilton’s cast, creative team and producers – expressed fear that the forthcoming Trump administration would not protect the “inalienable rights” of America’s diverse communities.

Trump responded by describing Hamilton as “highly overrated” and demanding that the producers apologise for “harassing” Pence. No apology was forthcoming.

That episode – which came less than two years into the life of the show – spoke volumes to the distinctiveness of Miranda’s remarkable piece. As Dixon said at the time in rejecting then president-elect Trump’s demand for an apology, “If people are coming to see Hamilton to leave their politics behind, you came to the wrong show.”

In his aphoristic ‘Forty-nine Asides for a Tragic Theatre’, English dramatist and theatre theorist Howard Barker asserts that “The authoritarian art form is the musical.” Given the commercially-driven formulae and the narrow, divertingly “entertaining” priorities of the typical Broadway/West End musical, I tend to agree with him.

However, Hamilton is somewhat different. As Dixon suggests, one cannot – or, at least, should not – attend Miranda’s show in pursuit of a luxurious escape from the increasingly distressing realities of the world in which we live.

With a cast that is always constituted predominantly of performers of colour, the piece seeks to be “a story of America’s past told by America today”. For instance, in this latest staging – which ends a tour of the UK and Ireland with a two-month run at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal – George Washington is played by Akmed Junior Khemalai while the role of Thomas Jefferson is taken by Ashley J. Daniels.

Black actors playing these Founding Fathers (both of whom were slave owners) is inherently powerful. So, too, are a musical score and choreography that are shot through with the sensibilities of hip-hop culture.

Hamilton’s phenomenal success is rooted in a series of original choices (regarding subject, casting and cultural expression) that are simultaneously political and artistic. Crucially, as the show’s success has become stratospheric, it has remained true to its origins.

Its brilliant period(esque) costumes and impressive-yet-utilitarian wooden set (which enjoys a cleverly employed revolve) reflect the financing that comes with smash hit status. However, unlike many blockbuster musicals, it never seeks to merely dazzle with expensive spectacle.

In Hamilton, the emphasis is on the story of a flawed founding father who, crucially, advocated for the abolition of slavery, and died in ludicrous circumstances in his late forties. It is also – with increasing significance during Trump’s second term – a story of a revolutionary war to establish a representative democracy in the United States of America.

In Glasgow – as in every staging of the show – the tale is told with extraordinary pace and precision. Such is Hamilton’s success that, one imagines, the producers can choose from an array of top musical theatre talent.

For sure, there is an embarrassment of performative riches here, not least in a chorus that executes a dynamic and challenging choreography to perfection. The lead performers – from Marley Fenton’s frenetically driven Hamilton, to Sydney Spencer’s wonderfully sympathetic (and gloriously sung) Eliza Hamilton, and Louis Maskell’s deliciously satirical King George III – are universally marvellous.

The complex technical requirements of the show are made to look simple, and the lighting is, needless to say, impeccably responsive.

As it heads into its eleventh year of extraordinary success, this excellent staging attests to Hamilton’s unique and enduring place in the annals of musical theatre.

Until 27 December: https://hamiltonmusical.com