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Let's just say that when the lights finally came up.... I was horrified to find that the performance I'd just seen was not the entire thing, but just the first half.

The musical Hamilton has been praised by almost anybody who has a voice. Conservatives and Liberals have both heaped praise on it.

If I had been alone, I would have left but I'd been invited so there was nothing to do but stay and pray for an electrical outage.

I am undoubtedly out of date, a curmudgeon and barbarian. I will stipulate to the facts but I am mystified whether all these worthies saw the same show.

It's convoluted and tells a justifiably obscure part of American history. The first act dithers between outlining Alexander Hamilton's wanting to escape his poverty and out-of-wedlock birth and the military conduct of the War of Independence. The second act becomes chronological and the questions of war have disappeared. So it's incoherent as a dramatic piece.

Then there was the music. Well, Mozart it ain't. Kurt Weill it ain't. It is loud. About a third is rap. The remainder is filler.

And the performances: Is it too much to ask that a rap musical have words enunciated since there is no melody? It was completely unintelligible, except for the character actor who had the pleasure of saying "I told you so" repeatedly as George III.

Also, for what little music there was it would really help if the singer's range included the notes, butI am old-fashioned about those kinds of things.

There's a chorus, but they serve no purpose dramatically or visually. As my companion and host said, "There was a lot of motion, but more like a Zumba class." You could do the show without them and it would be improved since they pull focus from the main characters.

Then there was the audience. The woman next to me spent the first half (which lasted about six hours, it seemed) texting and checking her emails. I did not kill her, although I believe it would have counted as justifiable homicide, because it did distract me from the show on stage. The people behind us seemed to think it was a hockey game and carried on conversations and came and went from their seats in the orchestra as if they had on roller skates. Given the excruciating show I guess I should have sympathized but....

You will now tell me that you have seen the musical and found it wonderful....