A limited edition Knicks cap, and an examination of Broadway politics
Emma Adler on the historical musical after Hamilton
It’s a good time to be a small magazine, and an even better time to be a small point guard. Our limited-edition Championship Cap is available for purchase now.
As celebrations in New York continue, it’s also a good time to read Emma Adler on another local phenomenon gone national.
There is no shortage of reasons why the effort to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has felt like a slightly embarrassing national sideshow instead of a flashpoint for a broad patriotic revival. The current occupant of the Oval Office is surely chief among them, along with the widespread sensibility that, as a pollster famously put it in 2024, America is “a dying empire led by bad people.” But it surely doesn’t help that we have already spent a lot of time over the past decade examining this country’s founding and litigating all the debates it engenders, thanks in large part to Lin-Manuel Miranda and the success of his blockbuster 2015 musical Hamilton.
In Issue Seventeen, Adler examines the bind that musical theater artists have found themselves in since then: faced with audiences eager to see history presented on stage, forced to reckon with years of both aesthetic and political criticism of Hamilton, and also tasked with delivering an entertaining theatrical product. Adler argues that the posture of overt mockery adopted by recent works like Slam Frank and Oh, Mary! opens the door to a musical theater that no longer feels compelled to use history as a proxy for present-day concerns. It’s a strategy that may be working: Oh, Mary! has won numerous awards, and, according to Playbill, the “incendiary” Slam Frank will return to the stage this fall.
History Has Its Eyes on You | Slam Frank and Musical Theater’s Hamilton Bind
EMMA ADLER
In a much more cheerful moment for American liberalism, Hamilton held out the hope that Americans could recuperate their fraught history by remaking it to conform with contemporary values. But the Hamilton ripoffs that rushed in to capitalize on this hope — and now Slam Frank, in satirizing progressive retelling — have instead revealed, in varying ways, that this aspiration is futile.