Bringing Hamilton to Hamburg

How do you translate a 20,520-word musical about an obscure piece of American history for foreigners, many of whom have never even heard of its protagonist? And once you do, how do you sell it to them?

Stage Entertainment, a European live-entertainment company, grappled with these very questions in 2018, when it decided to try producing Hamilton, the blockbuster Broadway musical, for Hamburg's musical-theater scene — entirely in German.

Hamilton has been produced on six stages across North America, as well as in Australia and the U.K., but this was the first-ever attempt to produce the musical in a foreign language. And to the surprise of many, a crack team of translators, producers, marketers and actors pulled it off. "Of course, everyone was a little skeptical," says Kevin Schroeder, one of the musical's translation duo (the other is the Berlin rapper Sera Finale). "Even we were really uncertain about how people would respond."

Success built on success

But ever since Hamilton's premiere at Hamburg's Stage Operettenhaus in October 2022, the reviews on both sides of the Atlantic have been overwhelmingly positive — and much of the buzz has to do with the translation itself. The New York Times called it "a masterpiece of translation." Der Spiegel praised it for making a Broadway show about American history, especially one that's rapped all the way through, both understandable and culturally relatable to typically conservative German theatergoers.

To be sure, there was solid ground on which to build that success. Hamilton, the biographical musical envisioned and composed by American songwriter and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, has received almost universal acclaim ever since premiering off Broadway at Manhattan's Public Theater in 2015. It set a Broadway box-office record just a year later, when it grossed $3.3 million for eight performances in one week — the first show on Broadway to break $3 million in just eight performances.

By 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Hamilton had surpassed global sales of $1 billion, turning Miranda into one of the world's highest-earning celebrities, according to Forbes. Disney acquired worldwide rights to a filmed version of the Broadway hit in February 2020 for $75 million. When it aired on Disney+ later that year, more than 22 million people watched it in the first month alone.

History on stage

For those who aren't familiar with the storyline: Hamilton follows the life of U.S. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, an orphaned immigrant from the Caribbean who became George Washington's right-hand man during the American Revolutionary War, as well as the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. It's fair to call this the minutia of American history. And Schroeder, who spent four years working on the German version of Miranda's 47-song score, along with Finale, says the history was, in a sense, an even bigger challenge than the language itself. "We had so many words, so many syllables to play with, which made this translation easier in that respect."

Schroeder has translated other musicals for the German stage, including Aladdin and Frozen. Hamilton was different, he says, because of the specific cultural history. "We definitely had discussions about some of the historical details," he says of the earliest collaboration with Sera Finale as well as the original producers from Broadway. "We talked about how we wanted to have a more universal way of telling the story. We didn't want to overcomplicate it with the details. We had conversations with the original team. They said: ‘Well, a lot of the details that are in the original won't be understood by a regular American audience either.'"

A work of translation

So, how did the translators find the right balance? "In part, it was just subconscious decisions being made. In other places, we made a conscious decision to take a universal approach," Schroeder explains. "And then, we tried to put something of our own culture into the lyrics. One example is a reference to the German hip-hop band Die Fantastischen Vier. It was a lot of fun, actually, to come up with these cultural nuances that only those in the know might catch."

Word of mouth has helped draw even those unfamiliar with the Broadway hit to come and see the show in Hamburg, says Stephan Jaekel, director communications for Stage Entertainment Germany. That has helped the marketing strategy gain further momentum. "There are a lot of Germans who have never even heard of Alexander Hamilton, who ask: ‘Why should I go see this?'," he admits. "The buzz about the translation has helped in that respect. I don't know how many times I've seen the phrase ‘I'm speechless' from theatergoers on social media after they've seen the show."

Stage Entertainment, which is a private company, doesn't release financial details, but Jaekel says Hamilton sales have exceeded expectations. On average, Hamilton attendees — at 35 years of age — are a good ten years younger than typical audience members at Stage Entertainment productions in Germany, he explains. First-time bookings are high, according to company data. "Social media communities have shared their enthusiasm to a very high degree. The translation is one of the best arguments to go see the show," Jaekel says. "They're saying: ‘Guys, go watch it because it is good in German.'"

Powered by people

The German cast is another draw. In a country still viewed from abroad as a monoculture, it's the most international cast ever in a Hamilton production — the actors come from a total of 13 countries. Indeed, the producers needed to search hard to find German-speaking performers of color. In an interview with The New York Times, Miranda said that had been his biggest concern of all. "The image of Germany in the world was not of a very heterogeneous society," he said. "That was my only hesitation, born of my own ignorance."

More of a concern, according to Jaekel, were the German theatergoers. "Audiences in Germany are quite conservative when it comes to theater and the arts, and not so ready to see that there is much more out there than a Disney show or an Andrew Lloyd Webber piece," he says. "We have the deep-rooted and imprudent German tendency to distinguish between earnest and entertaining. The attitude is: It's either Goethe and Rachmaninoff or it's Disney. This is a distinct German phenomenon that we have to overcome. With Hamilton, we can break that a little bit. People fall into two categories of those who want musical theater and those who want the fine arts. The latter are warming to it. From now on, every new musical in German will be measured against this one."

Marketing magic

To be fair, Stage Entertainment has invested time, effort and money in marketing as well. Ahead of the October premiere, the company invited dozens of German journalists to New York to see the original show — simply for comparison's sake. The marketing team worked closely with the original producers throughout the four-year development, and Stage Entertainment flew Miranda in from New York for opening night.

The company has learned from past failures. Kinky Boots - another hit Broadway musical, based on an obscure but true piece of American history, with a powerful score by Cyndi Lauper — closed in Hamburg after just one year. Jaekel says: "It was so hard in Germany to show Kinky Boots as a universal story about how much success and happiness people can have if they're open-minded. Instead, it was seen by Germans simply as a drag show. Since then, we've been very aware of stories coming across as simply too niche, too culturally distinct."