Parody ‘Spamilton’ takes aim at Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’
If you missed your shot to experience “Hamilton” at The Smith Center last summer, you can head there during the next three weeks to see Lin-Manuel Miranda portray the 10-dollar founding father.
Kind of.
Adrian Lopez plays Miranda playing Alexander Hamilton in “Spamilton: An American Parody,” Tuesday through Feb. 10, in the arts center’s Troesh Studio Theater.
“When a show is that loaded with entertainment value and significance and story, it makes it easier to spoof it,” says “Spamilton” writer-director Gerard Alessandrini. Following productions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London, the show is making its first national tour, with Las Vegas as its second stop.
Alessandrini has made a career out of satirizing musicals. As the Tony-winning creator of “Forbidden Broadway,” he figures he’s churned out “about 25 full-blown different versions” of the revue since 1982. “Spamilton,” though, is his first full-length parody.
“It was only daunting in the fact that there’s a lot of rap in it, and I’m not used to writing rap lyrics,” Alessandrini says.
The pace with which Miranda’s lyrics zoom past was a slight adjustment for the satirist, who’s composed parodies of other notable speedsters, including Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim and Alan Jay Lerner, along with the rapid-fire works of Gilbert and Sullivan.
“The speed of the lyric adds to the comedy,” he explains. “So I had attempted some of those, I think successfully, before. Of course, Lin-Manuel is doing it at even a faster pace, but I welcome that. The more words there are, the more verbiage, the easier it is to make people laugh, I find.”
Rather than attempting a full-blown parody of “Hamilton,” which probably would have proven repetitive, Alessandrini studied the cast album, the vocal score and relied heavily on the book “Hamilton: The Revolution,” an inside look at the making of the phenomenon.
“Of course, I twisted it,” he says of the show’s backstory, “so that this is a fantasy about what was going through Lin-Manuel’s mind.”
Songs that will sound familiar to “Hamilton” fans feature Miranda and original co-star Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, portrayed by Datus Puryear, singing about the making of the musical as well as what will happen in the inevitable movie version.
As Daveed Diggs, the large-maned Tony nominee for his roles as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, Dominic Pecikonis channels Will Smith by rapping about “how I became the prince of big hair.”
“Spamilton” ventures further from the source material with a series of drop-ins and a Poppins. Actors portraying everyone from Stephen Sondheim to Jennifer Lopez — “J. Lo, what are you doing in the American Revolution?” — stop by, as does that magical nanny in a nod to Miranda’s role in “Mary Poppins Returns.”
Miranda himself dropped by one night during “Spamilton’s” off-Broadway run. “He seemed to enjoy it thoroughly,” Alessandrini says of his special guest. “From the back, I just kept seeing his head bob up and down. And he stayed and spoke with the cast for about an hour afterward.”
Alessandrini insists you don’t have to know “Hamilton” as well as Miranda to appreciate the show, which also references the likes of “Chicago,” “Gypsy,” “Camelot,” “The King and I” and “Sweeney Todd.”
You should be fine without ever having seen it.
“I’ve made it very self-explanatory,” Alessandrini says. “Everybody comes out and says who they are, what they’re doing, what they mean, what you need to know about them.
“So you don’t really need to have seen ‘Hamilton.’ At the most, I would say you need to know it exists.”
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence @reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.
