Country music | 9 November 2017

Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song and dance of it. In early December, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s $1 billion-grossing, hip-hop and show-tune extravaganza about one of the country’s founding fathers will finally open to sold-out crowds in London. It joins the Menier Chocolate Factory’s sold-out revival of Sondheim’s Assassins, the Tony Award-winning musical about the cranks and misfits who have, to paraphrase its opening number, exercised their right to follow their dreams by attempting to assassinate US presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan (but not, yet, Trump).

Both shows fit neatly into the American tradition of making successful musicals out of American history, especially during periods of national introspection and cultural turmoil. In 1969, the year of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam marches, the Broadway smash hit was 1776. It was conceived by a high-school history teacher and its co-writer described it as ‘maybe the worst idea that had ever been proposed for a musical’. Regardless, its depiction of Benjamin Franklin singing about the Declaration of Independence won three Tony Awards.

More recently garlanded shows from the Great American History Book include: The Civil War (nominated for a Tony, despite being dismissed by the New York Times as being without plot or character); Miss Saigon (Madama Butterfly, in Vietnam, with prostitutes, by the writers of Les Misérables); and The Scottsboro Boys, a moving depiction of racism and injustice in 1930s Alabama by Kander and Ebb, the writers of Chicago and Cabaret.

Consider, on the other hand, Britain’s most successful writing duo. The Likes of Us, Lloyd Webber and Rice’s little-known first musical, written in 1965, was based on Dr Barnardo’s concern for destitute children in Victorian London. After failing to secure funding, the future knight and future-former peer wisely decided to plunder Argentina’s history instead.