Hamilton hits Tampa’s Straz Center hard with a flawless performance

We're sure by now you're familiar with the musical Hamilton* but maybe you weren't one of the packed house that saw the show last night at the Straz. Rather than rhapsodize about the music or plot — 'cause we're assuming you already know that part — we'll tell you what it was like.

Awesome.

Seriously, that's about it. It was a perfectly executed, gorgeous spectacle of a show. Go see it. Of course, the only way to do that is if you get one of the $10 tickets from the lottery.

*Cliffs Notes version: It's a hip-hop/rap/soul version of the Founding Fathers, with special attention paid to Alexander Hamilton, the man on your $10 bill and also the least appreciated of the Founding Fathers — until now, that is. The conceit is that it's always, always cast with nonwhites. Make no mistake, our *actual* Founding Fathers were racist AF (Alexander Hamilton himself was an abolitionist in his personal life but not so much in his political one) and the notion that a black man could have been one of them is ludicrous, so yeah, in some ways it's real revisionist shit, no matter how well done every other aspect of it is. But that factoid doesn't really factor into this Tony-and-Grammy-winning show.

This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2019.