photo reference: hyperlinked to the picture
Blog Post 1
By Ye Jun Kim
As I have read and listened to thefirst act of the musical “Hamiltion”, especially listening to the scores, I noticed how the tone, word choice, and repetition of the characters affect the mood of the scene and the characteristics of those characters.
I could notice this the most with Hamilton, since he is the main character after all. In the beginning of the act, Hamilton seemed to be portrayed as a very ambitious man who cannot stay still. The lines “Just you wait” in Alexander Hamilton emphasizes and foreshadows to the fact the he does great things for this nation and he seems to proclaim that. He also appears to speak his mind in the song, “My Shot”. He is not afraid to speak to strangers about his belief of an independent nation, and even encourages them to “take a shot” with him and “rise up” and repeats those lines often throughout the song. These are only the beginning coupld of songs and even from this early on, we can see that he is a man of ambition and is proud to be himself.
Although being Hamilton’s ambitiousness contribute to the awareness of the seriousness of the nation’s independence, the people around him are often hurt, and you can tell that by the tone of the characters. In the song “That would be enough”, Eliza reveals that she is pregnant and Hamilton did not know about it until he came home. Although he doesn not directly express his fervent support for the war in this song, we can tell that Eliza was burdened enough by his amibitiousness that she was not able to promt him to come home. She says “I knew you would fight until the war was won” to show her understanding of his love for the country. Later on in the act, in the last song “Non Stop”, Eliza directly expresses that she is hurt by his blindness towards the family by saying “Helples..” and “Look around, isn’t this enough?”. In previous songs she repeats “look around” a lot, seeming to foreshadow how Hamilton fails to prioritize his importances.
The elements in the songs like the tone, word choice, and repetition, provide us clues to characteristics of the character, in most cases the main character, and either foreshadows or flashbacks to important events. Within a couple of songs, we were able to analyze Hamiltion’s aspiration for national independence, and how the people around him were affected by his belief.