Daily Archive

I’ve been looking forward to this. “You’ll Be Back” is the first song from Hamilton that I heard, and it was so incisive and funny that I was immediately won over. I had to hear the rest. It is the “love” song of an abusive partner to the one who’s finally had the nerve to walk out. Isn’t that the perfect metaphor for the relationship between an empire and its colonials? “I love you too much to let you go,” the partner threatens. “I’ll see you dead first.” Or, if he’s the king of England,

I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love. . . .

I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.

I laughed out loud–the connection was so obvious and so new to me. What is a war against rebellious colonists if not an attempt to kill a former partner’s friends and family?

But I’m getting ahead of myself; the troops arrive in the next song. Let’s spend some time with King George. In my opinion, Lin-Manuel Miranda is needlessly apologetic about working him into the play. No, he and Hamilton never met; no, he did not show up in New York (or even New Jersey) to give his personal opinion of the revolution; but to me, his presence in the play is a “meanwhile, back in England,” and that perspective is fascinating. How did the revolution look from the outside? The king’s songs give us that chance to step back and review, which becomes particularly important when the rebels, against all odds, actually win. But that’s even further along. On to the music.

Tory politics hearken back to the past, and the music of “Farmer Refuted” underscores Seabury’s views, as a harpsichord playing Baroque fillips proclaims a nostalgia for an earlier time. It concludes with a royal fanfare, the command to the crowd–“Silence!”–and the announcement that the king has sent a message. The king’s introduction is accompanied by solo piano, but the harpsichord re-enters shortly, and hilariously, it’s got the beat of a British invasion band. Of course, this is the original British invasion. My wife, who knows music far better than I do, laughed at that point in the song and said, “Herman’s Hermits.” I don’t know a thing by Herman’s Hermits–are they the ones who did “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am”?–but I recognize the sound, especially when the violins come swooping in straight out of a late Beatles album.

On the original cast recording, King George III is sung by Jonathan Groff. You may know him from Glee; my only acquaintance with him was as the voice of Kristoff in Frozen, where he is very funny but doesn’t get to strut his singing. In Hamilton he does, and boy does he strut. I love the shift from the falsetto (hello, John Lennon) in “You say my love is draining and you can’t go on” to the lusty, angry growl on “You’ll be the one complaining when I am gone.” At judicious moments like that “when I am gone,” he drops the assumed royal accent. The rest of the time, his voice is over-the-top aristocratic: “you’ll be beck” for “back,” “when push comes to shAHve” for “shove,” and a long, lovely roll of the “r” on “arrangement.”

The song’s title may be a prediction of the future, but the song’s backwards gaze intensifies even that of the Baroque “Farmer Refuted.” Abusers want their victims to remember the good old days of romance and roses, before the true nature of the relationship was revealed. King George uses the word “remember” four times in the first dozen lines.

You say
The price of my love’s not a price that you’re willing to pay
You cry
In your tea which you hurl in the sea when you see me go by
Why so sad?
Remember we made an arrangement when you went away
Now you’re making me mad
Remember, despite our estrangement, I’m your man
You’ll be back, soon you’ll see
You’ll remember you belong to me
You’ll be back, time will tell
You’ll remember that I served you well

Oh, I love that tea joke, and another historical reference he tosses off, “When you’re gone, I’ll go mad.” But I have to say that the madness jokes get a little wearisome; they appear in all three of the king’s songs, which is wildly clever but also mean, because King George III really did descend into mental illness later in his very long reign, and once you get past the glee at a dictator’s comeuppance, that’s not actually funny. My father reassures me that he recovered. (Now I am hearing Monty Python: “I got better.”)

Viva la British Invasion.