Elanna Bellofatto made it on stage right in time. She threw on a blue colonial overcoat, cinched her ruffled collar and tied her light brown hair back into a ponytail as she rushed onto the elevated platform, ready to play Alexander Hamilton. “The show has begun,” she announced to the crowd of more than 50 people in a D.C. studio. It was her second of three performances on this Saturday in September, but Bellofatto isn’t a singer or an actor. The 26-year-old Maryland native is a SoulCycle instructor — and mastermind behind a series of popular spin classes built around the musical juggernaut “Hamilton.”
I initially noticed Bellofatto’s social media posts advertising these classes about six months ago. She’s not the first person to merge “Hamilton” and spin, but her videos have drawn massive attention: The one that caught my eye has 6.5 million views and well over a million likes. The first class I attended, on a Friday afternoon in March, was oversubscribed, as it often is, but I managed to snag a bike off the waitlist thanks to a last-minute cancellation. Which is how I found myself in the second row of a Georgetown spin studio, pedaling and drenched in sweat as Bellofatto — faux facial hair, tan trousers, knee-high boots and all — exhorted the class to join her in belting out the lyrics to the song “My Shot.” “I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry,” the crowd sang, hooting with excitement and pushing the pace.
Bellofatto led her first “Hamilton” ride years ago while living in Orlando. She moved to D.C. in 2023 and, late last year, began offering “Hamilton” classes again. Soon, she was leading them several times a month and including variations to keep things interesting for regular riders. For instance, a recent class had Bellofatto alternating between songs from “Hamilton” and musicals like “The Greatest Showman” and “Mamma Mia!”
Some riders can’t get enough. “I wish there were more ‘Hamilton’ rides on the schedule,” 41-year-old Sarah Groninger, who is a regular at Bellofatto’s classes, told me. “I’ve been to other musical theme rides, but this particular class I think is something that’s a little special.”
Special in the world of exercise, certainly — but maybe not an outlier in the broader culture. “I feel like everyone’s gravitating towards it now,” Bellofatto says of the decade-old musical. If true, this would represent a major pendulum swing in the fortunes of “Hamilton” — from cool to cringe and back to relevance again.
When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical opened in 2015, its fusion of hip-hop and patriotism, plus its reimagining of the Founding Fathers as a racially diverse group, proved enormously popular — and highly in sync with the political-cultural zeitgeist. The play, Matthew Yglesias observed in Vox at the time, “perfectly matches the sensibilities of mainstream Obama-era Democrats.”
And then, it all unraveled. The problem was Donald Trump. Gerry Canavan, a Marquette University professor who taught a course on “Hamilton,” said the feeling of “exuberance” the musical had inspired in many of his students was shattered by Trump’s first victory. The musical “is very earnest about America, and the good and the bad of it,” Canavan said. Trump, he explained, “seems to conjure a version of America that’s so different than that sincerity.”
By the early 2020s, says Amy Budd, a theater professor at Goshen College who has taught classes about “Hamilton,” feelings about the musical among her students had reached the “eye-roll phase.” “It was really fashionable to be super into ‘Hamilton,’” she told me, “and then it got really unfashionable.”
But now, there’s evidence of a comeback. A social media trend dubbed #hamiltonrushtok has sorority girls dressing up as Founding Fathers and performing dances to “Hamilton” during rush week. A September episode of “The Eli Manning Show” featured Manning and current Giants quarterback Jameis Winston learning “Hamilton” songs from cast members. At a recent trivia night at Whitlow’s on U Street in D.C., I witnessed a bartender plead with the audience not to sing before asking a question about the Revolutionary War. (The answer was the Battle of Yorktown, which inspired a “Hamilton” song.) Budd told me that, far from thinking the musical uncool or cringe, many of her current students seem eager to engage with its themes.
Bellofatto’s riders are part of this trend. Zoe Woodruff, 23, told me she was a big “Hamilton” fan in middle school and feels that “it’s definitely more relevant now than it was six years ago.” Gemma Westrick, who has taken six of Bellofatto’s “Hamilton” classes, pointed to the 10th-anniversary celebrations as one reason for the musical’s renewed appeal. “It’s having a moment in the past year or so,” she said. Elanna’s sister Elyssa, who took her class for the first time in September, told me she has recently been revisiting the musical for new reasons. “Our political climate is not kind to people of color and immigrants,” she said. “When it came out, I don’t think the political climate in this country was as bad, or maybe it didn’t feel as bad, but now it’s just so much worse” — and “maybe the music is a little more inspiring.”
These explanations fit with the theories I heard beyond Bellofatto’s class. Canavan told me he has particularly noticed the musical growing in popularity among people who may not “see the connection to 2008, to 2016 very clearly, but do see the fundamental question of: What kind of place is America, and what kind of place should it be?”
VanJessica Gladney, who taught a class about “Hamilton” as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she disliked the musical when it first came out because she saw it as a one-dimensional “victory lap about America.” Now, she feels there are more salient takeaways. The song “Non-Stop” — a reference to Hamilton’s vigorous work habits — is “about the driving need to keep moving forward, and how we don’t have time to look back,” she said. “It’s less nostalgia and more resistance.”
Miranda himself has acknowledged that the meaning of his musical has changed. “Hamilton” has been through different iterations, he told biographer Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: “‘Oh, it’s the Obama show!’ ‘Oh, it’s actually the resistance-to-Trump show!’ It’s a musical. If it’s well written … different things are going to hit you depending on where we are as a country.”
Meanwhile, riders — maybe responding to a shifting zeitgeist, maybe just drawn in by the spectacle — keep signing up in droves for Bellofatto’s sessions. She told me about a friend group who recently booked the front row, then showed up dressed in matching King George outfits. “This is the best job in the world,” Bellofatto told her riders after finishing a day of back-to-back-to-back “Hamilton” classes. “I get to put on a costume and scream and love my favorite things.”
Anusha Mathur is an assistant editor for Washington Sun Perspectives.
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