A: Chad DiMera, you're my hero. You are my soul mate. You're my best friend. And you're my true love. I am so honored to spend the rest of my life with you as my husband and me as your wife.
C: Now, I could never say it as well as your father did. But I will spend my life honoring that and honoring you and loving you with everything I have in me.
A: You are the love of my life, Chad. There's nothing that I want more than to spend the rest of my days with you.
C: I'm yours, and I'll never doubt you again because a love like ours really does only come once in a lifetime.
I love how Hamilton at least gestures at so many major arguments of the time. How it shows the difficulty of building a country - not just in the successful rebellion (that really only worked because France helped us, which we also see!), but also in putting together a new country that wouldn't fall apart. "Winning is easy, governing's harder" may be something of a cliche (… at least in stories I love), but this play shows us the truth of that - Hamilton succeeds in winning the war, but ultimately fails in governing. Of course thing about governing (or living!) is that you can't win it once and be done.
Another thing. For a musical that's very much about a revolution, it presents the ambivalence many of the revolutionaries had about too much revolution, too much democracy, very well. "The people are rioting, frankly it's a little disquieting you would let your ideals blind you to reality."
The way that it overlays modern language and referents - e.g. "a little place in Harlem" - over very specific historical details and events to create kind of a doubled world - to collapse the gap between our world and theirs - is nothing short of stunning in all the coincidences it locates, all the mappings that really do fit. Some of that's people being people, or (American) politics being (American) politics; a good bit of it uses the geography of New York for effect, the fact that - we usually don't think about this - but 'history is happening in Manhattan' and seeing a play on Broadway and going upstate for the summer have been things for even longer than this country has.
I feel like almost every other line has something clever in it. A reference (whether I get it or not), a double meaning or a hook for dramatic irony, or just some of the most complex set of internal and polysyllabic rhymes I've ever seen.
The density of character work is almost novelistic. (I read once: every word should advance two of these three things - plot, theme, and character.) Almost every line in Hamilton elaborates one (or more) of its many themes, as well as developing either the plot or the character who's saying it (and frequently both). As well as being a pure auditory delight….
The portrait of ambition. You can never do enough. Oh my god, that speaks to me….
The portrait of intelligence, of ambition, when it's frustrated. Oh my God, Angelica. *weeps.* "to match wits with someone at your level… it's the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light, it's Ben Franklin with a key and a kite."
"Looking for a mind at work," though, isn't just frustrated, it's - what we (what I) care about. It's not having the right opinions or knowing the right facts, it's… I say 'doing the work,' maybe, because 'work' is the wrong word. It covers every sort of labor, of effort, usually what you do for a paycheck or without a real choice. 'The work' in this usage is different; it's something that matters, something you choose to do.
