Wednesday night, an energetic crowd packed the seats of the Citizens Bank Opera House for the opening night of Hamilton’s Boston tour run. Gilded ceiling ornaments and lavish chandeliers mark the path through the lobby of the Opera House into the theater, where a stripped-back, bare-brick stage reveals exposed wooden columns and draping rope reaching high into the rafters.
A scintillating drum and harpsichord melody eased the restless audience back to the 18th century, welcoming patrons to the show about America’s founding fathers.
Hamilton first premiered on Broadway ten years ago and has been touring since 2017. A winner of 11 Tony Awards, Hamilton was and continues to be celebrated as a revolutionary piece of musical theater, which continues to take the world by storm.
For ten years, audience members have yearned to be in “The Room Where it Happens,” but for a select few, every night begins and ends in that room. Kai Thomani Tshikosi ‘15 is one of those people. Playing the roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison, this is Tshikosi’s first touring production, and he’s enjoyed working with the ensemble on the road.
“It’s been an exciting ride…getting to be in the company of such talented movers and vocalists and technicians,” Tshikosi said, “[Hamilton] attracts some really, really elite talents who are hungry to bring their lens to these characters. The show may be ten years old, but this tour is as new and hungry as ever, and audiences who come into it get to share in the energy.”
Tshikosi also enjoys the opportunities presented by touring.
“It’s been really interesting to tour around North America in this show that is so much about the American project and to be able to see parts of the nation that I hadn’t visited.”
Tshikosi has been touring with Hamilton for over a year and is now returning to Boston, his home for many years, until Nov. 2. Having graduated just as Hamilton first came on the scene, he recalls being introduced to the show through his college peers.
“I remember watching the phenomenon that was the cast album kind of sweep over the Emerson community,” he recalled.
Graduating with a BA in Acting from Emerson and later earning an MFA in Acting from Brown University, Tshikosi has built a resume consisting primarily of dramatic roles, including several Shakespeare performances at Boston theaters such as the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Actors’ Shakespeare Project. This background gave him a foundation for Hamilton’s unique historical portrayals.
“To fall in love with Shakespeare as a young Black child in the arts involves navigating around these ahistoric representations of historical or fictional characters, traditionally imagined as white, and making meaning for yourself,” said Tshikosi. “It’s about unlocking the virtuosic while finding a way to be defining your relationship to who the figures represented are.”
As Hamilton celebrates its tenth anniversary during a vastly different political situation than when it first premiered, Tshikosi has reflected on the show’s evolving meaning.
“It’s both a text of its time and then also rapidly becoming history,” said Tshikosi. “It is a document of its era and contains a lot of interesting threads about the time in which it was made—the end of the Obama era into the Trump era.”
Most notably to Tshikosi, the musical has propelled the story of the immigrant founding father into the cultural zeitgeist, allowing for the opportunity to initiate more complex conversations about its subject matter.
“It has entered the commons, it is in the common vernacular [and] is a jumping off point for us to be able to talk about and engage with the historical moment of the American Revolution…but also, the continued relevance of revolutionary struggle.”
The discussion of revolution is one that Tshikosi feels is perhaps the most relevant aspect of the show.
“I think we feel differently about revolution based on who is calling for it… So it’s a really potentially powerful moment for people to expand their empathetic lens for calls for freedom and self-determination and towards scrappy groups of people fighting against impossible military odds for their families and their lives and their ideals. I think it is something that continues to be, if anything, more relevant now than ever.”
Through challenging the text, Tshikosi believes an audience can learn more than by passively accepting it as it is presented.
“I hope we can celebrate its success as a piece of art and not take its conclusions for granted and use it as the start of a conversation rather than the conclusion,” he said.
A lot of that intellectual curiosity and pursuit of truth and justice within the mainstream stems from Tshikosi experience at Emerson.
“Emerson was a place where I turned the kind of values and political beliefs that had been gestating in my childhood into the beginnings of action. It was a place where I learned about organizing and activism,” he recalls. “Before my time here, I felt like my artist self and activist self were encouraged by others to be two different people, and coming out of my time here, I really have been on a journey to integrate the two.”
Reflecting on Emerson’s continued emboldening of collective action, Tshikosi found the ten-year parallel to be most symbolic of his return to Boston.
“I think that’s the most interesting linkage—returning to Boston in a show next door to the Paramount Theater, where I trained for four years. It’s literally above our heads. It’s almost a perfect ten-year window, and a lot of the same questions, challenges, and tensions on campus [between] students and administration, students and the city, students and the world, are still [happening], which is both heartbreaking and inspiring,” said Tshikosi.
“There is a common linkage of struggle, I think, which can get lost in the short institutional memory of student turnover every four years. But there is this common thread of people with good hearts, trying to find the best way they can use those hearts to make the change they want to see in the world, and that’s the hallmark of the community that I’m proud to be a part of.”
