Laura Beers is an associate professor of history at American University. She is the author of "Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party" and "Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist." The views expressed here are solely hers. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) Last week, I took my 7-year-old to see "Hamilton: An American Musical" in London. We both know the soundtrack nearly by heart, but watching the play live less than a mile from the Palace of Westminster threw the revolutionary success story into new relief. Several members of the audience laughingly groaned when King George III lamented that fighting with France and Spain was making him blue. But the comparison that stood out most pointedly to me was not between the politically isolated King George and the current Prime Minister, but between Theresa May and Alexander Hamilton.

Laura Beers

Hamilton's signal political achievement was his success in piloting his scheme for a national bank through a hostile Congress and then winning over opposition within George Washington's Cabinet. As Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton laments to Washington, his opponents "don't have a plan, they just hate mine!" Faced with such intransigence, Miranda depicts Hamilton's transformation from a righteous defender of his own position into a master of the art of the compromise. Determined to stay in the game and come out with a win, he holds his nose, closes his eyes, and trades his support for moving the nation's capital south to the Potomac in exchange for James Madison and Thomas Jefferson's support for the new bank.

Unlike Prince Harry, who notoriously joined the cast on stage with his wife Meghan Markle after a charity production of Hamilton last summer and briefly broke into song , May apparently has not yet been to see the phenomenal production whose sell-out run helped give the West End its highest grossing year ever. In steering clear of Hamilton mania, May shares company with American President Donald Trump, who has declined to see the play since the New York cast was (to quote Trump's tweets) " very rude " to Vice President Mike Pence when he went to see the performance in 2016. At the time, the cast asked Pence to "uphold our American values."

Yet both May and Trump could learn a lot from Hamilton's willingness to reach across the aisle and negotiate a grand settlement that transcended party divides. Since her Brexit deal was voted down by 432-202 , May has made no real effort to listen to the concerns of the 304 members of the opposition who voted against the deal. Instead, she has focused her energies on trying to finesse the backstop and persuade the 128 Tory and Democratic Unionist Party defectors to get behind her plan.

Over the past week, the EU has shown no willingness to give ground on the issue of the backstop -- the provision in the Brexit deal agreed between May's government and Brussels which stipulates that, if a settlement cannot be reached that maintains the free movement of goods and people across the Irish border, the United Kingdom will remain in an indefinite customs union with the EU. Miraculously, as we go to press, May has just succeeded in bringing enough of the hard Brexiteers together behind her Plan B -- which is essentially Plan A, minus a decision to charge Europeans currently living in Britain to remain in the country and plus a promise to try her best to renegotiate on the backstop -- to eke out a narrow victory. However, it is a triumph of Tory party unity, not a successful product of cross-party negotiation.

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