Hamilton (2020)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
The most beloved musical of a generation and winner of 11 Tony Awards, Hamilton is now available to watch anytime, anywhere via Disney+, and just in time for Independence Day/Fourth of July all across America.
Hamilton is a masterpiece of theatrical wonder and modern pop culture. Dazzling, intense, blending countless musical genres and writing styles into one cohesive, powerful, unforgettable experience.
The ensemble cast is exceptional, boasting three Tony Award acting winners, and everyone coming together to create flawless, effortless emotions and chemistry.
NO
Hamilton is a play, not a movie in your mind, and you have decided you don’t like watching plays, much less watching them at home.
I suppose pop-culture contrarians would have no interest in watching this. Pity. Their loss.
Don’t make me say it out loud.
OUR REVIEW
The conceptualizing of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton still seems almost impossible.
A hip-hop-driven musical about the “forgotten” founding father, Alexander Hamilton, told largely through rap and hip-hop music, and a blending of various musical genres and writing styles, featuring a cast of diverse performers of color playing white historical figures. And somehow, this dense, encyclopedia-style production works masterfully on nearly every level.
With Disney+ releasing a filmed performance of the show, some 16 months ahead of its original theatrical release date, more than 50 million subscribers to the platform now will experience Hamilton, giving the 11-time Tony Award winning show the widest audience it ever could have hoped for, with many experiencing it for the very first time.
From Paul Tazewell’s vibrant color-blasted costumes, to Miranda’s wall-to-wall song score, the show never pauses or rests (though Miranda and director Thomas Kail do offer viewers a one-minute intermission here). Front-loaded with exposition and historical context in the opening songs, unsuspecting or casual viewers might struggle to keep up with Miranda’s tear through history. However, he sets a rhythm and cadence and energy that never wavers from the opening song to the last.
Captured beautifully by Kail, and with Oscar-worthy editing by Jonah Moran, Hamilton might work better as a film, in the sense of how the expressions and performances match the inflection and intonation from a soundtrack many of us have heard countless times before. Nothing can replicate the feeling of seeing Hamilton in the Richard Rodgers Theatre I would imagine, but this is a different, more intimate experience than sitting in a balcony in New York City. This filmed performance, shot largely over two nights in June 2016, evolves as a richly studied look at who tells the story of one’s history and how our country has been built on the backs of immigrants, overlooked and whitewashed by centuries of history.
Quick note: It is February 2017 - I am a chaperone for a Thespian Society trip, agreeing to drive a handful of budding performers to a statewide high school acting conference. The three high schoolers who jumped into my car, politely asked if they could listen to some music on the way. Of course, I agreed. And for the nearly two-hour trip to our destination (and much of the way back home), the music of Hamilton filled the car.
Granted, I was casually aware of Hamilton. By this point, Miranda’s dazzling, ambitious, and jaw-dropping production had won all those Tonys, some Grammys, and a Pulitzer Prize. Miranda had become a major star. Hamilton had achieved something rare for a Broadway show: It had established pop culture roots the likes of which had not been seen in years. Hamilton had become the rare musical with household-name recognition.
And yet, I really had not been all that aware of how far and wide Hamilton’s impact had spread when Miranda’s breathtaking recitation of “Alexander Hamilton/My name is Alexander Hamilton” came through my speakers. The high schoolers in my car knew every line. Every inflection. They riffed with each other, rapped passages together; talked enthusiastically about their favorite songs, lyrics, and moments. While they had not seen the show on Broadway at that point, Miranda’s accessible, contemporary art transcended the stage for them.
To those new to the presentation, Hamilton presents a somewhat accurate jaunt through the adult years of the titular subject. And while it does gloss over a few significant details of Hamilton’s life (i.e. slavery), and argues Hamilton was an abolitionist, which has been much debated by historians, Miranda based the book of his musical on Ron Chernow’s 2004 best-selling biography.
Hamilton also arrives as a film in troubling and divisive times. Though it opened on Broadway in August 2015, July 2020 finds our world torn apart by a fractured political discourse. Race and racial inequity are at the forefront of our collective conversations. President Trump has approval ratings below 40%, while a recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that just 24% of Americans believe our country is on the right track.
Miranda takes us into a time of war, political persuasion, and a fight for independence with Hamilton. The founding fathers of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and others had no true idea of how America would look as they worked to form our nation’s first government institutions. We are no different today. We are at war, culturally, as a nation. Political persuasion and influence is more deep-seeded than ever before. Persons of color are fighting for an independence from 400-plus years of oppression, systemic racism, and scapegoat-driven blame that has defined the non-white experience in this country for centuries.
Hamilton is arguably more relevant now than it was just five years ago.
Driving the themes and narratives home emphatically are an ensemble imbued with flawless chemistry, who leap off the stage with enthusiasm and power. In casting members of the Black, Latinx, and Asian communities as iconic historical (i.e. white) figures, Miranda reminds us that we are all one people. And while that symbolism may feel simplistic or heavy-handed to some, the passion, and explosive emotions these actors generate speak far beyond Miranda’s composition book.
Miranda, in the title role, feels something like a point guard during the show, a fact that I admit I overlooked in listening to the cast recording. Though strong in his own way, Miranda’s far from the best on stage in terms of acting and performance. Leslie Odom Jr.’s effortless and sympathetic Tony Award-winning portrayal of Aaron Burr, as a man constantly upended by Hamilton’s ability to play politics better than he can, with seemingly no repercussions for his questionable actions and motivations, evokes seething frustration and anger.
Tony Award-winner Daveed Diggs will likely see his career breakout again, after his galvanizing Thomas Jefferson performance is seen by the masses and steals much of the show’s second half. Broadway star Jonathan Groff provides terrific comic relief as King George III (singing a British Invasion-style Beatles song and refrain throughout the show), while Anthony Ramos, who will star in Miranda’s cinematic adaption of his play In the Heights next summer, and Christopher Jackson’s presence as George Washington, both stand strong in individual moments.
The secret weapon of Hamilton, however, comes from the women, especially Phillipa Soo and Renée Elise Goldsberry, who play sisters Eliza and Angelica, respectively. As Alexander marries Eliza and embers unrequited feelings for Angelica, Hamilton sacrifices his time with family as he recklessly strives to establish a legacy for himself.
A back-to-back sequence involving a pop-style love song establishing Eliza and Alexander’s courtship and wedding (“Helpless”), and the show-stopping “rewind” of those same moments through Angelica’s song “Satisfied,” is stunning. Time and again, the female voices stand strong in contextualizing that the emotional costs of these men creating their legacies were borne on the backs of women and families left to hold the tendrils of everything they left behind.
Hamilton truly is one of those rare pop culture-tilting moments that come few to a generation. As of this writing, the cast album has spent 248 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart and is likely racing back into the Top 10 in the next couple of weeks.
With Hamilton now existing as a film, accessible to Disney+ subscribers for an indefinite time-period, Miranda’s masterpiece will only continue to speak to a wider and wider audience.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, Jonathan Groff, Sydney James Harcourt, Thayne Jesperson, Jon Rua, Ephraim Sykes.
Director: Thomas Kail
Written by: Lin-Manuel Miranda
Inspired by the book, “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow
Release Date: July 3, 2020
Walt Disney Studios/Disney+