"Hamilton" is Worth the Wait

Spoilers ahead.

After putting it off and putting it off for ages, I finally watched the Disney+ live taping of the Broadway musical "Hamilton" with the original cast. Of course, I've been hearing about the show for ages, and I'm familiar with a good chunk of the song and much of the talent involved. Lin Manuel-Miranda and Daveed Diggs are everywhere lately. However, I always held back from learning too much in case I ever had the chance to actually see the show myself. I suspected I might have to wait until a film adaptation - I guess I was half right.

So, for those of you who've been under a rock for the past five years, "Hamilton" is a stage musical about America's forgotten founding father, Alexander Hamilton (Lin Manuel-Miranda), an American Revolutionary and the country's first Treasury Secretary. He's the man who wrote most of the Federalist Papers and set up the U.S. banking system, but is best remembered for having been shot and killed in a duel by his rival Aaron Burr. (Leslie Odom Jr.) Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and composed the show, intending to use modern styles of music - including hip-hop R&B, rap, and soul - to bring the story of America's founding into a more contemporary context. To that end, the cast is comprised of almost all non-white actors, the major exception being Jonathan Groff as a campy King Geroge III. Miranda plays Hamilton, Phillipa Soo and Renée Elise Goldsberry play his love interests, and Christopher Jackson, Daveed Diggs, Anthony Ramos, and Okieriete Onaodowan juggle multiple roles as various founding fathers. Diggs, for instance, appears as the Marquis de Lafayette in the first half of the show, and Thomas Jefferson in the back half.

Filming a traditional stage performance is always a tricky business, because all the choreography and performances and stagecraft are meant to play to a live audience, not a screen. "Hamilton" has some of the usual issues with having to choose between close-up shots to capture a particular performance, or wide shots to take in everything else that's happening on the stage. Fortunately, "Hamilton" is structured around the individual performances rather than the larger scale spectacle, and there aren't that many sequences where I felt like I was missing too much of the experience. It really is a beautifully executed musical, and the camera was able to catch a lot of the little moments of humor and theatricality that you could never get by just listening to the soundtrack - the costume and scene changes, the little winks at the dual roles, and the bits of pantomime. Jonathan Groff literally spits his lyrics as King George III. Phillippa Soo's Eliza clearly doesn't want her husband going anywhere when she sends him off to war. Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom Jr. are just plain amazing to watch.

Speaking of which, that's what I've been doing a lot in the past few days - listening to parts of the "Hamilton" soundtrack and rewatching certain parts of the filmed version over and over again. The more famous songs have been circulating in the wider culture for a while now, so I've fixated on "Hurricane" leading into "The Reynolds Pamphlet," parts of the second act that I hadn't heard yet. There's also "Helpless" and "Satisfied," the first time I've seen a flashback handled in a stage show quite like this. The duels, of course, are completely different without accompanying visuals. And then there's the whole ending, starting with "The Election of 1800" through "Obedient Servant" and "The World Was Wide Enough" to "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story."

It's also been a lot of fun to go back to all the old reviews and the spoofs and the interviews from back in 2016 when the "Hamilton" phenomenon was really taking off. I might be coming late to the party, but it's nice being able to share in the giddy feeling of discovery and enthusiasm for a really significant piece of media, just a bit. As much as I enjoyed the filmed version, it also emphasized for me that there's no substitute for the live version. I'll still be looking for my chance to see "Hamilton" in a proper theatrical setting as soon as I can.

And hopefully the success of "Hamilton" on Disney+ will lead to other musicals becoming available in a similar way. I hear HBO has "American Utopia" in the works.


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