lin-manuel miranda scares me by Allison E. '27

Ten years ago, just as I was beginning 6th grade, my cousin introduced me to Hamilton⁠01 aka the blockbuster hip-hop musical about an often-overlooked founding father that everyone and their mother couldn’t shut up about . It was the first music I’d ever chosen to listen to (i.e. not the radio), and like other middle schoolers across the country, I promptly fell deep into a Hamilton obsession. I memorized all 46 songs, watched every animatic I could find, and even (allegedly) engaged in the blasphemous act of… Google Doc roleplaying…

Anyways, I was never good enough at singing to actually do musical theater in school, but I did become a loyal fan of Broadway! So when I saw that one of the HASS classes⁠02 Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences classes–all MIT students must take at least 8 of these classes to graduate! side note: did you know that MIT is a world-class school for humanities as well as stem? like, not just in the “yeah we’re a stem school but we care about humanities too!” sense, but also in the “we’re genuinely ranked in the top-10 U.S. universities for humanities” sense. not that rankings mean much, but given that they’re often about perception, and most people don’t perceive MIT as a humanities school, i think this says a good deal. anyways, all this is just to say that we have some AWESOME hass classes offered this spring was “How We Got to Hamilton,” I registered immediately. 

We spent the semester learning about the history of the American musical, starting with the complex histories of minstrelsy and burlesque, continuing with the influences of African-American, Jewish, and Irish influences on Broadway, and following up with the modern musical developments that led to Hamilton. Our final essay for the class could’ve been about any of the content we covered, but given my middle school obsession, I felt contractually obligated to write about a song from Hamilton. This was probably the most fun I’ve had writing a class essay before, and was also super interesting to actually think analytically about a piece of media I’d been mindlessly consuming since I was 11 years old! This essay was also written by a sleep-deprived finals-week-addled Allison, so uhh if anything’s amiss⁠03 also i was told to write this in a very rigid/prescribed structure that i strongly dislike but i’m too lazy to edit it significantly now let’s just blame it on that…

I’ve been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack since the 6th grade, and aside from the song “My Shot” (which I find a bit repetitive), the only other track I regularly chose to skip was “Take a Break.” To 12-year-old me, and to 15-year-old me, and even to 20-year-old me, it seemed like an entirely unnecessary aside. Not only did the seemingly mundane domesticity feel incongruous with the broader political plot, but the elements within the song themselves also felt incongruous with each other. The music jumps between radically different styles and motifs, and the narrative shifts from one arbitrary scene to another seemingly unrelated one: first a childhood piano lesson, then an emotionally illicit correspondence, then a wife’s recurring frustrations, a birthday performance, and a sisters’ reunion. However, upon rewatching the stage production and analyzing “Take a Break” in the full context of the show, I finally realized the narrative role that this discomfort and inconsistency serves.

I always thought of “Say No to This,” the song in which Hamilton commits adultery, as the pivotal moment when Hamilton transforms from an infallible protagonist to an exceptionally flawed and complex character. But it also feels like “Say No to This” pulls its emotional punches. In this song, the story is not “Hamilton betrays his wife and family,” but rather “Hamilton is maliciously seduced in a moment of weakness.”

If it were only for “Say No to This,” we just might be able to forgive Hamilton for his singular mistake. But Lin-Manuel Miranda doesn’t let him off the hook that easily–instead, he uses the song “Take a Break” to drive home that, far from a single moment of weakness, Hamilton’s infidelity is only the next step in his pattern of consistent disregard for his family. Part of this pattern is of course shown through the literal plot and lyrics of the song, where Hamilton repeatedly ignores his wife and child. However, Lin-Manuel Miranda goes further, using musical, lyrical, and physical incongruity to make us viscerally uncomfortable with Hamilton’s neglect. We’re a human audience affected by subconscious emotions, and this emotional impact is even more difficult to brush off than the story’s actual events.

There are several incongruities that Miranda develops in “Take a Break,” but the primary tension is between Hamilton’s family and his work.

The explicit storyline is, of course, the most straightforward part. Act II of the show begins with two high-energy songs about politics⁠04 “What’d I Miss” and “Cabinet Battle #1” , but “Take a Break” brings us into a starkly different domestic scene. Hamilton’s son Philip is sitting at the piano, learning scales⁠05 “Un, deux, trois, quatre / Cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf (Un, deux, trois, quatre)” from his mother, Eliza. It’s a heartwarming tableau of family life, reminding us of the son that Hamilton so passionately sang about in “Dear Theodosia.” Instead of continuing the domestic theme, however, the song almost immediately jumps back to work and government. Hamilton passionately discusses recent political events⁠06 “Madison is Banquo / Jefferson is Macduff / And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunisnane” in a letter to Angelica, his sister-in-law, while Eliza and Philip remain fully on stage, reminding us of who Hamilton is ignoring. Just 30 seconds later, we jump back to Philip to watch him perform a rap for his father. In the first Philip scene (the piano lesson), Hamilton was completely absent, and in this second one, he only joins his family after Eliza cajoles him⁠07 “Your son is nine years old today / He has something he'd like to say / He's been practicing all day” . Even then, he seems only half-heartedly present, and immediately afterwards returns to his work. These two scenes with Philip could have been placed contiguously, and would probably have been easier to integrate, but Lin-Manuel Miranda’s choice to separate them makes the contrast between Hamilton’s interest in his family and his work more noticeable.

In addition to the literal events taking place, Lin-Manuel Miranda also sets up musical dissonances between Hamilton’s work scenes and his family scenes that generate an even stronger sense of discomfort. Stylistically, Hamilton’s conversation with Angelica about work is fast-paced and woven with clever rhymes and densely intellectual verses. Almost everything is in sixteenth notes, and in four lines during an analogy to the play Macbeth⁠08 “They think me Macbeth, ambition is my folly / I'm a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain / Madison is Banquo, Jefferson's Macduff / And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane” , Hamilton manages to include 11 rhymes with the “a” sound in “Macbeth” and 5 with the “a” sound in “play.” Throughout the entire show, fast rapping and rhymes are associated with intelligence and ambition, and it’s on full display here. Meanwhile, the piano lesson that previously introduced Hamilton’s family is quite literally a simple scale–slow, patient, and lyrical. Philip does attempt to present his father with a rap⁠09 “My name is Philip / I am a poet / I wrote this song just to show it” , and because rap so strongly encapsulates Hamilton’s identity, it feels like Philip’s attempt to relate to his father. By using the language of his father, we can see how much Philip looks up to Hamilton, but in the ways Philip inevitably falls short (with simpler rhyme schemes and more awkward lyrics), we still feel the impasse between father and son.

Even the shifts in the song’s underlying tone contrast Hamilton’s work and family relationships. When Hamilton is talking about work, the accompaniment is filled with fast-paced sixteenth notes, but plays a fluid and undulating scale that seems driven but calm. However, as soon as Eliza steps into the scene⁠10 “Take a break / … / There’s a little surprise before supper and it cannot wait” , the backing switches to a staccato string rhythm that feels extremely tense in comparison. This is the opposite of what you would expect–usually family is tranquil while work is tense–and it lets us feel how much more comfortable Hamilton is with work than with family. 

Hamilton’s preference for work also leads to a preference for conversing with Angelica, and we begin to see an even more upsetting incongruity in the way he interacts with Angelica more affectionately than his own wife. Hamilton listens intently when Angelica talks to him about governing⁠11 “You must get through to Jefferson / Sit down with him and compromise / Don’t stop til you agree” and encourages him to push onwards, while he immediately rejects when Eliza tries to pull him away from work to “take a break.” This contrast is made even more explicit when Angelica reads romantic intent in another of Hamilton’s letters⁠12 “I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase / It changed the meaning. Did you intend this?” , and Hamilton seems to confirm it. During this exchange, Eliza again remains fully on stage, moving slowly so that we don’t forget her presence and who Hamilton’s emotional infidelity would affect. 

The musical differences between Angelica and Eliza only make it more evident that Hamilton connects better with Angelica than his own wife. Angelica matches Hamilton’s wit in trading quick and rhythmically complex verses, while Eliza tends to communicate in slower, more lyrical phrases that clash with Hamilton’s driving forcefulness. We also hear Angelica backed by the same sixteenth-note runs as in “Satisfied,” a song explicitly about how much she loves Hamilton, and subtextually about how different she is from Eliza. Even more noticeably, Hamilton and Angelica frequently sing together in harmony (about missing each other, no less)⁠13 “And there you are an ocean away / Do you have to live an ocean away” , which is a strong sign of emotional closeness. Meanwhile, Hamilton and Eliza never sing together. In fact, he frequently interrupts the ends of her sentences⁠14 “There's a lake I know (I know) / In a nearby park (I'd love to go)” , and throughout the song they are always arguing.

“Take a Break” ends with all of these discordant segments colliding, and while the styles converge slightly, the subtext creates an uncomfortable juxtaposition of each character’s priorities that leaves the audience incredibly troubled with Hamilton. Immediately after Angelica seems to (successfully) make a romantic pass at Hamilton, she brings up visiting her sister, who she is evidently betraying. As Eliza steps forward to remind us of her presence, it’s an abrupt reminder that the two are related yet at odds. When the two sisters meet in person, they react with pure joy⁠15 “Angelica! / Eliza!” *hugs* , despite what Angelica has been doing behind Eliza’s back, and the immediacy makes it feel even more dishonest on Angelica’s part. Just to make sure that we don’t forget it, Hamilton then immediately jumps back into the picture and greets Angelica a little bit too affectionately. The audience is left with an incredibly uncomfortable mix of feelings: horror at Hamilton and Angelica’s betrayal of Eliza, and incredulity at their massively inconsistent pretense of loyalty.

This mix of feelings is reinforced as Angelica and Eliza seem to come together in their attempts at convincing Hamilton to “take a break,” but for entirely opposing reasons: Eliza wants him to spend time with family, while Angelica wants him to spend time with her, to the detriment of his relationship with his family. The two begin their argument in unison⁠16 “Take a break / Run away with us for the summer / Let’s go upstate” , but although they are both pursuing the same result, they soon split into trading lines in an overlapping way that again feels meant to clash⁠17 Eliza: “There’s a lake I know” Angelica: “I know I’ll miss your face” . The background music mirrors this conflict, beginning with the more placid chords that backed Eliza earlier in the song, but it soon has to compete with Angelica’s sixteenth-note “Satisfied” background runs. The two sisters come together as a united front at the very end, singing “when the night gets dark / take a break” in harmony, but this final line just serves to emphasize that Hamilton is turning his back on truly everything in his life when he insists that he has to get back to work.

When viewed as a mechanism for painting Hamilton as an absent father and emotionally unfaithful husband, “Take a Break” feels less like a hodgepodge of discordant family scenes and more like an introduction to Hamilton’s fall in the eyes of the audience. Up until now, he has been almost invincible–a rousing speaker, a romantic heartthrob, a powerful battlefield leader, a successful lawyer, and, at the end of Act I, a loving and devoted father. This song must singlehandedly turn the ship around so that the audience doesn’t experience whiplash in the very next scene, where Hamilton cheats on Eliza with Maria Reynolds. This is the primary conflict of Act II, and it’s important that we see Hamilton turning his back not only on Eliza, but also on Philip and even Angelica. It’s important that we see that his lack of care has been an ongoing problem, not a lapse in judgement driven solely by sexual desires. Most of all, though, it’s important that we feel Hamilton’s betrayal, and the dissonant incongruities of “Take a Break” drive home that feeling of discomfort in a subconscious way that only music can.