I’ll admit: I was totally late to the “Hamilton” train.

I had heard my friends and family who were able to get tickets to the musical rave about it. I had heard songs referenced and hummed by friends at parties and gatherings. I had read articles and reviews about the musical’s monumental cultural, historic, and artistic significance. Despite all that, I didn’t know much about it until I watched the recorded 2015 original cast production released around this year’s Independence Day on the streaming service Disney Plus.

“Hamilton: An American Musical,” written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and premiered in 2015, was inspired by a 2004 biography about Alexander Hamilton written by Ron Chernow. The musical follows the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton, including his role in the American Revolution, his vision for America as a free and new republic, his personal relationship with his wife, Eliza, and her sister, Angelica, and, of course, his relationship, idealism, and conflict shared with other instrumental figures in American history, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams.

Many of the characters will be familiar to those who have taken an American history course, but “Hamilton” puts those characters into a new light, showing how the promise of America as we know it came to be. How the ideals of our country — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — were crafted, argued about, fought for, between America’s Founding Fathers and figures who had their own ideas of what America could and should be.

A promise of a perfect America crafted by imperfect individuals. Immigrants, orphans, slave owners, wealthy, poor. Watching “Hamilton” five years after its original debut on the stage, in the throes of a presidential election, worldwide pandemic, and nationwide protests against racism, the questions “Hamilton” poses continue to be relevant. Who has access to the promise of America? How has our country, systematically and individually, determined who does and who doesn’t? Who gets to be in the room where it happens?

Despite the musical being centered around the titular character, the show both begins and ends without him, his story being told by those who knew him, loved him, died for him, trusted him.

The show opens with Aaron Burr, “the fool who shot him (spoiler),” asking how someone of Alexander’s status — immigrant, orphan, not a penny to his name — rose to be a “hero and a scholar.” The show closes with his, wife, Eliza, telling her own story and her legacy after her husband died. The show closes with the questions: Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?

Whose story gets told? Who tells it, and how is it told? Those are central questions that run through “Hamilton”. What stories get told about the creation of our nation and the ideals imbued in our founding documents? What stories get told about those who, throughout history, fought to expand the promise of America, all believing, like our founding fathers, that a nation that offered life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all of its citizens could exist? What story are we telling now about the direction and future of our nation? What story do we want to tell?

“Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see;

I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me;

America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me.”

Alexander Hamilton sings that in some of his final moments on stage as the story comes to a close.

“You let me make a difference;

A place where even orphan immigrants; Can leave their fingerprints and rise up.”

“Hamilton” makes clear that America has always been a promise, an ideal, that we share, yet will always strive, and struggle, to carry out. The ideal of a perfect union, crafted by imperfect people. America, you great unfinished symphony; a symphony written by Founding Fathers and everyday citizens who believed in what America can be and throughout history, have fought to bring that beautiful dream into reality.

An unfinished symphony that calls each of us to plant our own seeds in a garden we may never see and create the America we dream it can be.

Anne Gentry graduated from Brown University with a degree in comparative literature and has studied in Italy and South Australia. She is currently executive director of the Alpena Downtown Development Authority.