I saw a performance of Hamilton: An American Musical yesterday.

Unfortunately, it was pretty difficult for me to understand what people were saying as they sung. The performance hall had closed captioning but I needed to constantly check it. This meant that I sometimes missed what was happening on stage, a problem exacerbated by the fact that sometimes the captions were delayed by several lines (and when they would finally appear, they would print out very quickly to catch up). I also had trouble telling who is who for most of the play and I couldn’t really tell who the characters were most of the time.

Something I noticed about how the play is structured is that during certain moments, parts of previous songs that have been sung already will be echoed again to show what the character is currently thinking of or how they feel. It’s nice because it recontextualizes what the words in the song means and it can change the meaning of what has been said.

For example, the words from the music numbers My Shot, That Would Be Enough, History Has Its Eyes on You, and Satisfied are all echoed at the end of act one to show the various forces acting on Hamilton’s choice to keep doing more.

Another particularly poignant example of this is in the second part of the play, when Hamilton’s son Philip dies.

In the play, we are shown Eliza teaching Philip as a child piano while also teaching him the French and English words for the numbers one through nine in the musical number called Take a Break. Elsewhere in the play, there is a song where the audience is told ten things they must know about duels in the musical number called Ten Duel Commandments, which also features counting.

These two musical numbers are juxtaposed at this moment in the film when Philip dies; Philip had just counted as part of the duel song and as he dies he sings the piano counting song with Eliza.