Mondays with Mike: Calling all Hamilton and history geeks      

I was one of the last kids in school to actually see Hamilton the Musical here in Chicago. Before I saw it, I was regaled again and again with frenetic excitement from those who’d just seen it. So much so that I expected that Hamilton could not possibly live up to the hype when I finally went a couple months ago.

It did. That’s all I’ll say out of respect for any of you who hasn’t seen it and/or doesn’t care.

Whether or not you care about the musical, Hamilton: The Exhibition is a worthwhile afternoon but you better go soon.

I liked it enough that, when our friends offered to treat us to an afternoon at Hamilton: The Exhibition, Beth and I accepted.

The Exhibition is well off the beaten path in an obscure location on Northerly Island. Without signage, you wouldn’t find it. But there, on what were once Meigs field airport runways, stands a temporary giant black box that looks more like a heavy equipment storage shed than a historical exhibition.

In short, it’s a 34,000 sq. ft. popup museum. You travel through 18 rooms, each themed with a time period/event or both. Visitors wear a geeky little audio device that…actually works! As you move through the rooms and time periods, the voices of creator Lyn Manuel Miranda, other cast members, and a heavy-duty history academic automatically narrate major passages of history. Throughout there were little portals labeled “More Information.” If you want extras, you just point the little audio pendant to hear the rest of the story. Technology is used constructively, not slavishly. There are just endless exhibits of replicated documents, sculptures, paintings, contextual history placards, models, maps and little framed explanations that come clean about where Miranda took liberties in service of art.

But there weren’t that many of those and I needn’t have worried that it would be kind of an extended shill for the play. Now, you will likely want to see the show again, just because the earworm music is playing in the background all the time. And yes, you leave the exhibition only to pass through a gift shop.

But man, I learned a ton. It’s just dense with history. Hamilton’s arc of life is just a vehicle to tell the fuller history of that period in the United States. That history is sometimes inspiring and sometimes dark—punches are not pulled regarding where slavery fit into our history. There was a lot of information about African Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War—including those who fought for the British in exchange for the promise of emancipation.

It was full of reminders that there were plenty of people opposed to breaking up with the Brits and that New York City was a bastion of British Loyalists. And, to the curators’ great credit, the exhibit doesn’t lionize Hamilton. The warts are there, and at the end of the journey, there are quotes from major figures about Hamilton that run the gamut from veneration to vilification.

Should you go? It’s funny; I think I enjoyed it more than Beth but not because of my sight privilege. Beth listened to Ron Chernow’s fantastic and enormous bookthat the musical drew from. So lots of stuff that was news to me was not to her.

I’d say if you haven’t read the book, go, and you like history, go whether or not you care about the play.

Count on spending a couple hours, and act soon: It’s closing ahead of schedule, after August 25, according to this Chris Jones column. Jones also reports that plans for the exhibit to travel have been canceled—partly because it’s just too damn big. It was hard to imagine packing all that up and unpacking it again.