i totally get the frustration about it being a play about slaveholders that is not about slavery. hamilton the play and the movie were given to us in two different worlds & our willingness to interrogate things in this way feels like a clear sign of change. “ late the Hamilton criticism stuff & clearly biased,” Clayton tweeted, “but… i really like that this conversation is happening. Miranda is replying to Clayton, who opened up in a Twitter thread about grappling with Hamilton in the era of Donald Trump, and if it should be consigned to the growing opinion of what to do with statues glorifying Confederate generals and Christopher Columbus. I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. The sheer tonnage of complexities and failings of these people I couldn’t get. “Appreciate you so much,” Miranda tweete d to Clayton. Replying to writer and podcaster Tracy Clayton on Twitter, Miranda acknowledged his show barely addresses the issue of slavery, both for Hamilton and its major slaveholding characters, which include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. While there was always a vocal minority of critics unimpressed by how the musical depicts Alexander Hamilton’s record on slavery, with Ishmael Reed even writing a scathing play about it titled The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in the age of many popular works going through the lens of “problematic” scrutiny on social media, criticism for Hamilton can only heighten.

Yet five years later and after receiving a relatively rapturous reception by a new audience this Fourth of July weekend-being beamed into millions of homes on Disney+ has that effect-a larger intersection of viewers, living in a different era with protestors marching for Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, has also brought renewed scrutiny. At the time, it was embraced as the definitive work of art of the Obama years, with Michelle Obama herself calling it the best art “I have ever seen in my life.” And with its color-blind and diverse casting, it also reframed the American experiment’s founding for all Americans.

When it premiered at the Public Theater and then on Broadway in 2015, Hamilton was heralded as a masterpiece that broke into the mainstream with its infinitely catchy and layered original soundtrack, which fused rap and hip hop rhythms with traditional Broadway melody, jazz, and other American influences. After being the toast of Broadway and pop culture five years ago, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tour de force musical is back in the spotlight and in a different context.

The haunting of lin manuel miranda