Normally when the culture nabobs chatter excitedly about a revolution on Broadway, your best move is to avoid the latest affront to taste or desecration of widely shared values. Nothing can be more boring than a show labeled “transgressive” by The New York Times. This fall, though, the revolution being staged at the Richard Rodgers Theatre is the American one, in Hamilton. So unabashed and heartfelt is the show’s respect for the Founding—it even styles itself on the marquee not Hamilton: A Musical but Hamilton: An American Musical—that the show is actually, in the context of the theater world, daring: Sometimes a revolution can be delightfully reactionary. When was the last time you heard a musical number about the Battle of Monmouth or the Federalist Papers? Hamilton has all the craft of Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar but replaces the hippie fatuousness with exuberant patriotism.

Alexander Hamilton was a dynamo and a visionary with feet of clay: he was a tragic figure whose adultery may have cost him the presidency and whose prideful inclinations led to two catastrophic duels—his son also lost his life on that cursed Weehawken ground. He is played by thirty-five-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also wrote the book, music, and lyrics for the show. The audacity is comparable to Orson Welles’s demanding, and receiving, from Hollywood the authority to exercise complete control over his debut film, Citizen Kane. Miranda’s gifts prove (as Welles’s did, at least temporarily) equal to his