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Who is your favorite character and why?
Oh boy is this a hard one to answer. I love all the characters so much (except for James Reynolds, George Eacker, and Charles Lee) so picking one as my favorite is tough, I could list a bunch of reasons for why I like them all so much. I think, if I had to choose, it’s tied between John Laurens and James Madison.
I loved all the energy he had when introduced in Aaron Burr, Sir and then finding out how he was anti-slavery made me like him even more. Then throughout Act 1 (I was absolutely heart broken when I first heard Laurens Interlude) he was shown as an occasionally funny character who was all about fighting for what he thought was right even if not everyone else agreed with him and that just cemented him as one of my absolute favorites. (and then I looked more into the actual history of the character and found out he was like that and also probably had a thing with Hamilton and I always love learning about LGBTQ+ people in history so that was another plus, lol). Basically I loved the fact that he had strong moral beliefs and was willing to fight for them.
To be honest, I think James Madison is severely underappreciated in the Hamilton fandom (of course, the musical does focus on Hamilton’s life so it would make sense that other people, especially his enemies, wouldn’t get much focus). This dude was probably one of the few people that could keep up with Hamilton work-wise, for example with The Federalist Papers according to the musical originally the plan was to write 25 papers, but in the end Madison wrote 29 while Hamilton wrote 51. They both wrote more than the original proposed amount and that was with the idea of splitting the work with another person as well, and those numbers probably don’t take into account that they probably worked together on some of those papers. Later on we find out he wrote The Bill of Rights so between those two things (plus the fact that Hamilton went to him for this little writing project) it’s pretty impressive. Later throughout the musical we can see how intelligent he is, like how in Washington By Your Side he proposes they follow Hamilton’s financials, later on tells Jefferson he needs to get Hamilton’s endorsement because he sees how even though he doesn’t have a government position Hamilton is still influential, and figures out In the Room Where It Happens that he and Jefferson can trade a few votes for the location of the nation’s capital, to name a few instances. There’s also little moments throughout the musical that I love, like when he mutters France in Cabinet Battle #2 for example, and I also loved his interactions with Jefferson. (Also to be honest I really liked his voice, like I’m very particular about sound and his voice is really nice.) So yeah, he was this very underappreciated intelligent guy in the musical and his actual history is also cool (this already is like halfway to an essay so I won’t list anything, lol) so those are some of the reasons he’s one of my favorites.