The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel

which also makes him a natural target in the emerging world of American politics. Hamilton’s I Want rap (it’s not a conventional song) is called “My Shot,” and it’s a distant but recognizable descendant of “Something’s Coming.” Hamilton is trying to join a gang, not escape from one, but it’s a gang of aspirants, revolutionaries with a new idea about a new country. They’re going to fight a war to get it, and Hamilton is eager to fight a war. But unlike the rest of them, he lacks breeding, finesse, a common background. He’s an outsider, and he’s the one worth watching. Of course, each time he declares
    Hey, yo, I’m just like my country
    I’m young, scrappy and hungry
    And I’m not throwing away my shot …
    we wince a bit, because in the end, what Hamilton does is throw away his shot, first figuratively, then literally, while Aaron Burr takes deadly aim and wipes out one of the great characters and intellects of early American history. “My Shot” happens in a context that we barely recognize as American musical theater—the actors are dressed in costumes that might have been preserved from a production of 1776 , but from the neck up they look like a motley gang of street-corner revolutionaries in the Bronx in 2015. And they sound like that too. Yet Hamilton presents an opening number that sets the style, the tone (unique as it is), and the point of view of the show perfectly (complete with the information that the hero will be dead at the final blackout) and then proceeds to “My Shot,” secure that its insurgent style will only be helped by adhering to the classic niceties of getting a show off the ground.
    *   *   *
    If Tony is a descendant of Carousel ’s Billy Bigelow—an earlier man with poetry locked away inside him and violence in his future—and Hamilton is his offspring many generations down the line, Seymour Krelborn, the meta-schlep at the center of Little Shop of Horrors , stands between them as the nephew or uncle they would probably both want to forget. West Side , Little Shop , and Hamilton all deal with a dangerous underbelly of the American landscape, in three wildly divergent tones. In Little Shop , Seymour lives in a cartoon version of West Side Story ’s mean streets. Like the denizens of West Side Story , the characters in Little Shop occupy the slums—skid row, to be specific. And for the most part, they’re acclimated to it. Racial disharmony and general dissatisfaction make up the daily diet, just as they do in Hamilton . In the show’s weirdly cheerful-sounding opening number (irony and camp are hallmarks of the whole event), they describe their surroundings—the grime, the bums, the minimum-wage jobs, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness—until a spotlight picks up young Seymour, a clerk in an all but bankrupt flower shop. He sings of his orphanhood, his dependence on the misanthropic, intolerant owner of the shop, and his existential nightmare:
    Poor!
    All my life I’ve always been poor.
    I keep asking God what I’m for
    And he tells me, “Gee, I’m not sure,
    Sweep that floor, kid!”
    The tone is as far from “Something’s Coming” as one could get, but the problem is the same. Seymour doesn’t have Tony’s gift of poetry—in fact, he seems short on gifts altogether. But he’s lovably direct, as a cartoon character should be. After making sure that we understand his circumstances, he turns directly to us, stops whining, and starts venting his passionate desire:
    Someone show me a way to get outta here
    ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here
    Please won’t somebody say I’ll get outta here?
    Someone gimme my shot, or I’ll rot here!
    The tone is knowingly dopey, but the passion and the desire could not be clearer—or more real. It’s the rock-and-roll version of “Something’s Coming” minus the big dreams, and Seymour is begging, not promising. Little does he know what’s about to come cannonballing down through the