Overview

Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015 and quickly became one of the hottest tickets the industry has ever seen. Lin-Manuel Miranda - who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, and created the title role - adapted the show from Ron Chernow's biography Alexander Hamilton. Although it seems an unlikely source for a Broadway musical, Miranda found a liminal space where the life that Hamilton led and the issues that he confronted came alive more than two centuries later while also commenting on contemporary life in the United States and how we view our nation's history. With a score largely based on rap and drawing on other aspects of hip-hop culture, and staged with actors of color playing the white Founding Fathers, Hamilton has much to say about race in the United States today and in our past, but at the same time it leaves important things insufficiently explained, such as the role of women and people of color in Hamilton's time. Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton is a volume that combines the work of theater scholars and practitioners, musicologists, and scholars in such fields as ethnomusicology, history, gender studies, and economics in a multi-faceted approach to the show's varied uses of liminality, looking at its creation, casting philosophy, dance and movement, costuming, staging, direction, lyrics, music, marketing, and how aspects of race, gender, and class fit into the show and its production. Demonstrating that there is much to celebrate, as well as challenging issues to confront concerning Hamilton, Dueling Grounds is an uncompromising look at one of the most important musicals of the century.

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9780190938857

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Reviews

Dueling Grounds is a multi-faceted look at the musical Hamilton, which reminds us that even though we may know every lyric by heart, we can always look deeper into this era-defining musical, thanks to an array of provocative perspectives showcased in this book. * Howard Sherman, author of Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century * This impressive volume is a rewarding and approachable read: its essays encourage engagement with Hamilton as a liminal space whose borders intersect with historiography and history, economics, identity politics, composition, staging practices, and materiality. The dialogue between the chapters promotes an additional layer of liminality that enriches exploration of the contexts from which this musical arose, and into which it speaks, and contributes to the understanding of musical theatre as multi-dimensional communication. * Millie Taylor, Professor of Musical Theatre, University of Winchester *

Author Information

Mary Jo Lodge is Associate Professor of Theater at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and a performer, director, and choreographer. Paul R. Laird is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kansas and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2002; 2nd edition, 2008, third edition 2017).

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