HAMILTON is back onstage presented by Broadway in Boston at Citizens Opera House— and long may it wave. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterwork whose book, music, and lyrics rapped us through the Revolutionary War with its multiracial, multi-ethnic cast, is the hip hop musical heard round the world. This stunning production is more potent, more relevant, and more crucial now than ever.

When I saw HAMILTON years ago, I was overwhelmed by its expressivity, its vision, its brilliant, ridiculously catchy, non-stop sung-through score and propulsive choreography.  HAMILTON centers the remarkable personal story of its titular hero–Alexander Hamilton–a poor orphan, born out of wedlock in the Caribbean who immigrated penniless to the colonies, and rose through the force of his own genius to become a Founding Father of a new country and our first Secretary of the Treasury. The show also captures the swath and swagger of a seismic cultural moment which exploded in the extraordinary democratic experiment that is the American democracy.

A decade after this iconic musical’s birth on Broadway, I find myself not just overwhelmed by the show’s inventiveness and production values, but moved by its foundational concept in ways I could not have predicted. The production currently onstage is not only flawlessly well-directed and cast to a person, with fierce performances by an air-tight ensemble–including Nathan Haydel as the titular lead the night I saw it– but it also feels invigorated by the fresh threat posed by OUR cultural moment. I find myself recalling Benjamin Franklin’s famous response at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when asked, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Those words are not in HAMILTON, but, as evidenced by the Constitution which they penned, the Founding Fathers no doubt understood what they were up against: the perpetual threat of forces who would divide and attempt to conquer. SEE HAMILTON for the first time –or AGAIN–to be supremely entertained, and exhilarated anew by who we are, what got us here– and how we can keep it.

Presented by BROADWAY IN BOSTON at Citizens Opera House THROUGH NOVEMBER 2