Canada and the U.S. are joined at the hip-hop

Lin-Manuel Miranda is Alexander Hamilton and Anthony Ramos is John Laurens in Hamilton, the filmed version of the original Broadway production. (Credit: Handout)

A couple weeks ago I saw the road company version of the Broadway musical, “Hamilton,” playing in Montreal’s Place des Arts.

I know: “Hamilton,” a rap musical with a multi-racial cast based on the life of U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton is old cultural news. It opened in 2015, during the Obama administration, which seems about 100 years ago now. It won 11 Tony awards, including best musical, a Pulitzer Prize for best drama and a bunch more prizes after that. There have been at least 10 different productions, with long runs in London and Chicago. It’s been translated into German — hard as that is to imagine. It has toured several times.

And now, more than 10 years after opening in New York and more than 20 since the publication of Ron Chernow’s best-selling biography of Hamilton, which got producer-director-composer-lyricist-and-Broadway-lead Lin-Manuel Miranda interested in the story, it has finally made its way to Montreal. We do, in this self-regarding country, participate in cultural trends, albeit at a lag.

I had seen the Disney+ filmed version of the original Broadway show — which has the advantage of optional subtitles, adjustable sound, close-ups and a much lower price — and listened to the wonderfully clever score, courtesy of one of those miraculous modern “all the music ever recorded” streaming services. But musicals are always more fun live and in person.

The show we saw, which followed an afternoon matinee, seemed sold out, with not an empty seat in view. Given the official capacity of Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, that meant 2,982 Canadians — mainly Canadians, judging by overheard conversations — had come out to express their affection and admiration for Miranda’s handiwork. Which they did, loud and long, with lots of hooting and hollering at key points in the story.

Think about that. Here we are at one of the worst passages ever in Canada-U.S. relations, as bad as the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs went into effect, or even the post-Civil War 1860s, when the victorious Republicans punished their South-sympathizing British neighbours by abrogating the free-trading Reciprocity Treaty.

Canadians are angry with the Trump administration, angry with a spineless Congress that acquiesces in everything the administration does (except maybe denying vaccine science — we’ll see), angry with the 49.8 per cent of Americans who voted the administration in and angry with the 50.2 per cent who couldn’t find a presidential candidate who could have kept it out.

And yet almost 3,000 of us Canadians turned out, enthusiastically, for a rap musical written and scored by an American, produced and performed by Americans, about an American founding father, the American political controversies of the 1790s and 1800s and, above all, the American idea. In terms of popular culture, at least, our two countries seem joined at the hip-hop.

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And the harmonizing goes both ways. Though on a much smaller scale, Americans have enjoyed the Canadian musical “Come from Away,” the story of airline passengers diverted to Gander, N.L., on 9/11, while the music of dozens of Canadian folk, rock and pop stars populates Americans’ playlists. Many of these northern stars have moved to the U.S. to pursue their careers in a bigger, richer market that has warmer winters and lower taxes.

Mutual musical appreciation even in times of political stress is not unknown. Even in 1940, with the Luftwaffe doing a Putin over London, the BBC aired Wagnerian opera. (One critic wrote that “by their unstinted applause, the audience gave the lie to the fantastic myth that the music of Wagner cannot or should not be appreciated by civilized people at war with Germany.”) And of course the musical accompaniment to Churchill’s two-finger “V for Victory” sign was by Germany’s own Ludwig van Beethoven: the first four notes of the “Fifth Symphony,” short-short-short-long.

It does seem unlikely that Nazi radio programmers showed similar liberality regarding British composers. But, the war over, Liverpool’s Beatles mastered their craft in Hamburg, while Britons and Germans found other ways to live in peace and even, for a time, have free trade and relatively open borders with one another (though even when it was in the European Union, the United Kingdom never joined the invisible-border Schengen Area). Many Brexiteers still favour free trade. They mainly don’t want uncontrolled immigration and overbearing regulation.

As far as I can tell, Canada is mentioned just once in “Hamilton.” Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s longtime friend, rival and, ultimately, murderer (in the famous duel), tells George Washington how he served with Gen. Richard Montgomery “until he caught a bullet in the neck in Quebec.” That was during the Americans’ ill-fated 1775-76 invasion of Canada, with Gen. Benedict Arnold in overall command and Benjamin Franklin a political emissary. The Continental Congress hoped to defeat Britain’s forces in Canada, if that could be done and was not “disagreeable to the Canadians.” The Congress even invited us to become the 14th state.

We declined, and continue to decline. Commercial policies come and go, but it does seem strange that two peoples so often in tune should be building walls against each other.

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