Monday, April 29, 2019

Chicago Tribune Applauds "Hamilton: The Exhibit" at Northerly Island


We posted about the Hamilton Exhibition coming to Northerly Island and it is finally open.  The Chicago Tribune checks-in and applauds the (temporary) museum:
As spinoffs go, “Hamilton: The Exhibition” — a U.S. history showcase derived from a play about a treasury secretary, mounted in a sprawling, spare-no-expense rendering in a sort of airplane hangar on a peninsula in Lake Michigan — stands up well against charges of crass commercialism.
Yes, you exit through the gift shop in this fresh take from the creators of “Hamilton: An American Musical,” a little show you may have heard a thing or two about.

But otherwise the exhibition, which opens to the public Saturday after two years of development, plays more like a charmingly optimistic bet that Americans were dissatisfied with the fly-by view of history they got in high school, that the Founding Fathers itch discovered by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s play demands much more scratching: more detail about the Revolutionary War, more debate over federalism, and way more exploration of early 1800s monetary policy.

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