The ‘Hamilton’ Hook

Lin-Manuel Miranda wastes no time hooking the audience in his musical Hamilton. Not only do the first few beats of the opening song  “Alexander Hamilton” grab your attention, but there is no wasting time jumping into the story:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by providence impoverished
In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The ten-dollar founding father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter
By being a self-starter

There is no set-up, just boom. It’s like sprinter Usain Bolt coming out of the blocks at the start of a race. We don’t know who is singing or who he’s singing about. (But since the show is called Hamilton we have a clue who they might be talking about.)

Within the first four lines we get an exposition dump and a major dramatic question. It’s was an extremely creative way to jump into what could be an extremely boring history lesson. The one that starts “In 1879, Alexander Hamilton became the first United States Secretary of Treasury….”

Often times history doesn’t grab our imagination because it’s presented in dry facts. Miranda’s opening line of a“bastard, orphan, son of a whore” is lets us know from the start that this isn’t your father’s history lesson about the Founding Father’s of the United States.

My post The Major or Dramatic Question has remained one of the most read ones over the years. Having a major dramatic question helps the audience avoid asking the question, “Wait, what’s this story about?” Essentially the major dramatic question in Hamilton is Who is Alexander Hamilton?  (And what did he do that was so special that he ended up on a ten dollar bill?)

One of the limitations of the stage is it is much harder to “show, don’t tell” than is done in movies. The filmed stage version of Hamilton simply starts out with Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) walking on stage and singing. No sweeping aerial cinematic shots of the Caribbean island in the West Indies where Hamilton was born like a feature film on Hamilton might start.

Instead Miranda embraces his limitations and  uses words to stir your imagination.

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by providence impoverished
In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

We have an underdog to root for from the get-go. Over the years I’ve written several posts about exposition and I’ll put the links to some of them at the end of the post. Two movies that came to mind regarding Hamilton’s opening were Jerry Maguire and Citizen Kane.

Jerry Maguire opens with Jerry basically saying the earth is a big place, and millions of people live here, I’m one of them and I’m a sports agent. Here’s what I do?” A pure expo dump. But with the writing of Cameron Crowe, the talent of Tom Cruise, and some fine cinematography it doesn’t come across heavy handed or spoon feed.

In Citizen Kane, Charlie Kane dies and a reporter basically asks “Who was Charlie Kane?” Simple. The audiences expectations are set. I guess we’re going to find out who this Charlie Kane dude was, and what was the meaning of his final word “Rosebud”? (Here’s the 2 1/2 minute opening with a single spoken world—Orson Welles as uttering “Rosebud.” That’s a hook for the movie that AFI listed as the #1 greatest American movie ever made.)

Miranda hooks the audience at the start, and continues to build empathy for this guy who:

Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain

Hamilton makes it to New York as a young man and is destined to make a name for himself in the new America. He does—but we learn in the opening song that he also ends up shot to death.

We won’t know why until the end of the story,  but Hamilton’s open is one fine example of hooking your audience early and setting expectations. And the ending is implied in the beginning.

Related posts:

Screenwriting & Exposition (an oldie from 2008 post)
“Exposition is BORING unless…”
10 Solid Exposition Examples
‘A Quiet Place’ Meets ‘Screenwriting from Iowa’
Mysterious Minimal Exposition from ‘A Quiet Place’

Scott W. Smith 

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Before ‘Hamilton’ (The Successes and Failures That Paved the Way)

I am not throwin’ away my shot!
I am not throwin’ away my shot!
Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young scrappy and hungry
Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)

Singer/songwriter Paul Simon preceded Hamilton—the play, not the person. And I sure hope he knows it. I just learned over the weekend how Simon’s biggest musical failure planted the seeds for the off the chart success of Hamilton: An American Musical.  

Simon & Garfunkel had their first number one hit back in 1966, with a song Simon wrote when he was just 21-years-old (The Sound of Silence).  Their greatest hits include the classics Mrs. Robinson, Homeward Bound, and Bridge Over Troubled Water. That alone represents a solid music career.

In the 1970s, Simon’s solo career included the hits Kodachrome, Loves Me Like a Rock, and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.  At the 1976 Grammy Awards his album Still Crazy After All These Years was named album of the year, and he was also named Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male. Simon could have called it a day and rode off into the sunset knowing he’d reached the height of success that few get to experience.

But Simon reached into the well in the 1980s and released his most successful solo album, Graceland. The album scored more hit songs and more Grammys. But it was in the late ’80s that he began working on a passion project, the musical The Capeman. Written with Derek Walcott, Simon said it was “a New York Puerto Rican story based on events that happened in 1959—events that I remembered.” The controversial musical ruffled many feathers on Broadway and closed after just 68 performance and personally cost Simon millions.

But one of the people who saw the play was a high school senior named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who would later write Hamilton. Miranda knew the play didn’t totally work, but he thought it had a “gorgeous score” and it planted seeds on how he could carve his own path. Being of Puerto Rican descent he wasn’t sure if there was a place in the spotlight for him in theater. Plus in school he knew there were better singers, dancers, and musicians than him. Two years after seeing the The Capeman he began working on In the Heights. 

To make a long story short, he stumbled on the 2004 book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow while on vacation and the rest is history (ba dam tss).  The twist was he told  the story “America then, as told by America now.” That meant using hip hop, rap and other music not usually associated with the American Revolution. And he cast people of color as founding fathers of the United States, and a nice lead role for himself as Alexander Hamilton. That’s how you turn the world upside down.

The show eventually found its way to Broadway in 2015 and the following year won a Best Musical Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But . . . before all of that, way back in 2009, Miranda had the opportunity to sing the opening song of his work in progress at a White House event. (I think the laughter is because the audience thinks he’s joking about working on a musical about the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.  Which is a reminder that there’s a good chance that people will laugh at your crazy ideas before the applause and awards come.)

Hamilton has toured around the world since then and a month ago a filmed version of the Broadway play was released on Disney+ for a whole new audience to discover.

P.S. Three other successful musicals that influenced Miranda before his Hamilton; West Side Story, 1776, and Amadeus.  More on that in a future post, but I have a friend whose mother calls herself a Nuyorican (born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City). She couldn’t tell you how many times she’s watched the film version of West Side Story. Miranda can look forward to day when writers start approaching him with how seeing Hamilton as a youth inspired them to create their own stories.

P.P.S. I have a vision that late one night 78-year-old Paul Simon is home surrounded by his 12 Grammy Awards (including one for Life Achievement) and he watches Hamilton and smiles knowing that his expensive Broadway failure sparked a phenomenon.

Here are a couple of songs from The Capeman and a insightful video of Simon walking Dick Cavett through his process of wrtiting Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Scott W. Smith 

 

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