ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

The more pertinent question may be how a musical that celebrates America, in the words of a dying Hamilton, as "a place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints" will resonate in post-Brexit Britain more broadly. As in the U.S. productions, the U.K. cast features black and Asian actors in the leading roles, except for that of King George, who is played by the white actor Michael Jibson. The role of Hamilton went to Jamael Westman, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art whose mother was born in Ireland and whose father came from Jamaica. (A recent piece in a right-wing tabloid felt the need to clarify that the historic Hamilton, however, was "in fact white.") When his political rivals catch Hamilton in a scandal, they mock his origins with a faux-Caribbean patois that recalls the xenophobia of the Brexit campaign: "An immigrant embezzling our government funds . . . ya best g'wan run back where ya come from." And Miranda's hybrid score, bridging the Beatles with Beyoncé and Biggie Smalls, may play, right now, as the sonic analogue to Meghan Markle's engagement to Prince Harry, which has been treated in the tabloids as a progressive fantasy and a reactionary nightmare. "Harry's girl is (almost) straight outta Compton" ran an absurd headlinein the Daily Mail.

In some ways, though, "Hamilton" is surprisingly British in its sensibilities. Miranda grew up on the spate of U.K. imports that ruled Broadway in the nineteen-eighties--"Cats," "Phantom of the Opera," "Les Misérables." (The producer who brought those shows to New York, Cameron Mackintosh, is also the one taking "Hamilton" to the Victoria Palace Theatre, not far from other long-running Broadway transfers like "The Lion King," "Wicked," and "The Book of Mormon.") Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" helped give Miranda the idea for a sung-through historical pop opera narrated by the hero's nemesis. (The original casting description for King George called him "Rufus Wainwright meets King Herod.") Miranda's George Washington gives a shout-out to Gilbert and Sullivan, dubbing himself "the model of a modern major general, / The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up, to put me up on a pedestal."

And it's entirely possible that "Hamilton" will end up like "Les Mis"--playing endlessly, embraced around the world for its stirring romance, battles, and ballads, with little sense of the specific history it stages. (Off the top of your head: Which French revolution do Marius and his comrades join?) After Miranda's first musical, "In the Heights," opened in London and became a moderate success, he said that the story of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants in gentrifying Manhattan could transfer to the West End because "the specific problems of this community feel universal"--although the musical's book writer, Quiara Alegría Hudes, told me that the absence of a Puerto Rican diaspora community in London made that production feel like a story more about class than race. It could seem like a diminishment of "Hamilton" if its specific ideas--its redefinition of patriotism as pluralism, its elevation of hip-hop to the status of national chronicle, its championing of urban Hamiltonian federalism over louche Jeffersonian agrarianism--faded into generic universality. But, then, one could argue that that's what happens with Shakespeare, too: questions of leadership, nationalism, and military morality in "Henry V" still resonate in heightened, punchy verse, even if we can no longer tell the Earl of Westmoreland from the Duke of Exeter.

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