Inside the 10th anniversary performance of 'Hamilton' on Broadway
On August 6, 2025, the multi-award-winning hip-hop history musical celebrated a decade at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, with Lin-Manuel Miranda in attendance.
"No one else was in the room where it happened..." except the lucky audience members inside the Richard Rodgers Theatre for the Hamilton matinee on August 6, 2025, the day the musical celebrated its 10th anniversary on Broadway. Nearly all 1,319 seats were filled by fans who won a special, expanded version of the show's famous $10 ticket lottery, allowing them access to perhaps the most coveted performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony, Grammy, Emmy, and Pulitzer-winning hip-hop musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton that's already been one of Broadway's hottest tickets for a decade.
Forty-five minutes before the show was due to start, the line to enter had already wrapped around the corner and into the breezeway of the adjacent Marriott Marquis hotel, repeatedly snaking back on itself before spilling out onto the next block. The end only got harder and harder to find as more theatregoers of all generations, genders, and races descended on 46th Street. For some, it was their first Broadway experience ever — I spoke to one woman (who declined to give her name) who traveled three hours by train from Pennsylvania to bring her daughter to this, her first Broadway show. But many were returning Hamilton fans, their branded merch a signal of a past visit or three.
"This is our fourth time, all on Broadway," William, an NYC resident, told New York Theatre Guide from the line alongside his daughter, Madison. "It's the 10th anniversary, so we wanted to be in the place where it happened!"
Susan, another Pennsylvania resident who had only seen Hamilton in Philadelphia, arrived at the Rodgers wearing near-matching Schuyler Sisters shirts with her young daughter, Lizzie. She'd taken Lizzie to her first Broadway show a year ago, but neither had seen Hamilton here.
"I can't wait to introduce her to it," Susan said of her daughter. "She knows all the music, so she's been waiting for this moment."
Even as people began to flood into the Rodgers auditorium, only a sudden surge of whooping from the mezzanine — suggesting a former Hamilton star had arrived — interrupted the buzz of excited pre-show chatter as audience members snapped photos with special-edition Playbills and admired the complimentary tote bags, bearing the tagline "History has its eyes on you" and the hashtag #HamilTen, placed on each seat. When it finally came time for Jared Dixon, as Aaron Burr, to sing the show's opening line, his first few words were rendered inaudible beneath a thunderous swell of entrance applause. A minute later, Trey Curtis had to pause after singing only two words, "Alexander Hamilton," as we cheered his arrival in the title role.
I was honestly surprised such interruptions didn't happen more often. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty more rapturous cheering — Burr's popular numbers "Wait For It" and "The Room Where It Happens" were unsurprisingly crowd-pleasers, and I even saw someone bopping along in their seat to the former. Tamar Greene's soul-stirring performance of George Washington's poignant farewell song "One Last Time" brought the house down. And from the moment he dropped it low during "My Shot," Ebrin R. Stanley earned laughs with every move as perhaps the sassiest Hercules Mulligan/James Madison to ever grace the stage.
But the audience was reverent. We held our applause until after each song's final note. No phones went off. No one broke a silent moment with a cough or shout or sneeze. We did, though, happily oblige when King George III (a perfectly petulant Jarrod Spector, another crowd favorite) invited everybody to join in at the end of "You'll Be Back." My seat neighbor sang along with select other lyrics throughout the show, and while that's generally discouraged in the theatre, I could hardly blame her in that celebratory atmosphere. It was particularly amusing to hear her quietly exclaim "NO!" during "Say No To This," as though she were experiencing the show (and Alexander Hamilton's many bad decisions) for the first time.
In a way, it's as though we all were. We knew we were witnessing something historic. If anything was to be heard from the audience mid-number, it was sniffling. The late-show ballad "It's Quiet Uptown" caused much of that, but two colleagues seated near me, both of whom had first seen Hamilton in their teens, confessed to "bawling [their] eyes out the whole time."
I was also in my teens when Hamilton came out, but truth be told, I began a skeptic: In 2015, I'd shrugged upon hearing a friend describe the premise; she was attending Hamilton's very first Broadway performance the next day. Mere months later, my high school A.P. U.S. History teacher played the opening number for the class, and I rushed home after school to devour the rest of the album. But I'd only attended Hamilton live once before, from the very last row of the orchestra in 2023. The experience and energy of the fan matinee was all what I imagined the musical's earliest performances must have been like, had I paid attention. Annabelle, a Connecticut resident who first saw the Off-Broadway world premiere at The Public Theater, was able to vouch.
"I won the lottery in April of 2015 [...] I was in the front row. And at the Public, you could literally lean over and touch the stage," she recalled. "After the first number, you could hear the audience [say], 'What did we just see?' It was amazing. Everybody in that audience knew there was something special."
Including the anniversary matinee, she's now seen Hamilton four times and has tickets for a fifth when original cast member Leslie Odom Jr. reprises his Tony-winning performance as Aaron Burr this fall.
"There's a group of us that have been friends with him since Leap of Faith," a short-lived Broadway musical Odom did in 2012, Annabelle said. "We would always see him in that show, and he became friendly with us." When Hamilton came to Broadway, he'd chat with Annabelle and her friends, she said, at in-person lottery drawings held throughout that first year at the Rodgers.
From small-scale experiences like Annabelle's to the large-scale anniversary celebrations, it's clear that Hamilton has built a community — one that began as "young, scrappy, and hungry" and ended up a global phenomenon whose audience and resonance remain strong precisely because they are ever-changing. As was highly anticipated, Lin-Manuel Miranda (the real one, not the life-size wax figure that proved a popular photo op in the lobby) took the stage after the final bows to acknowledge as such, even sharing that over 15 people who were with the musical at the Public are still involved today.
"We are the 16th-longest-running show in Broadway history, and none of that happens without all of you," Miranda said in his speech. "Thank you so much for 10 years. Here's to the next 10."
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Top, bottom photo credit: Hamilton on Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)
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