The Redundancy of "Hurricane"

Alexander isn't a typical musical protagonist in more ways than one, but one of the most immediately noticeable ways is that he only sings one solo in the entire show. "Hurricane" comes about halfway into Act II, right as the sex scandal storyline is picking up, and features Alexander singing alone. The staging frames him in the middle of a number of chorus members, swirling and dipping around him like a hurricane, placing more of an emphasis of him, in the "eye" of the hurricane (also reflecting the repeated lyric in the song "In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet").

So with all this focus and singularity, this song has to be something groundbreaking and fresh, right? A new look into Alexander's psyche, or an exciting new tune. Right?

Wrong. The subject of the song is just a reiteration of the opening number, this time told by Hamilton instead of about him, and the backing instrumentals feature motifs from "Yorktown."

What the hell, show?

But while this song is fairly redundant, both content-wise and musically, it serves a very important purpose. Miranda and his team didn't just copy and paste elements of other songs, they crafted them together in a meaningful way.

The lyrics remind us of themes that drive the character that we haven't heard since the beginning of act one- almost two hours ago in show time- and they're also used in a different way. In "Alexander Hamilton" they're used as exposition, setting the stage for the "important" parts of the story, but here they're used to reinforce Alexander's emotions and motivations.

The music also has purpose- in reiterating themes and motifs from "Yorktown," it gives us the same emotional context that we felt during that song- battle, struggle, and ultimately triumph. This can represent both the emotional struggle in his youth that he sings about, or the struggle that he is about to face with The Reynolds Pamphlet. Either way, the choice to use the same music from a scene in which our characters fought and won a war is not coincidental.

It just goes to show, like I've said before, that this show does nothing on accident.