Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo
Photo: 2020 Lin-Manuel Miranda and Nevis Productions|, LLC.The room where it happens is now in your house, as long as you’re a subscriber to Disney+, where a filmed version of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning “Hamilton” drops on Friday. When it opened at the Public Theater in New York in 2015, Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout called the smash-hit-to-be “the most exciting and significant musical of the past decade.” Has that changed? No. Is the Disney+ “Hamilton” the same as the theatrical experience? No. But the streamed version does offer something that no walking, talking ticketholder could see, even if the entire theater world weren’t pandemically shuttered: the original Broadway cast, including writer/composer Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, in a performance recorded in 2016 and time-capsuled into our theater-free present.
Hamilton
Friday, Disney+
How does it play? With the same verbal and musical fireworks as the stage version, and with the same emotional kick, which is rooted in the casting. As Mr. Miranda puts it during the informal, offstage introduction that he and director Thomas Kail provide the Disney presentation, “The story of America takes on a different meaning when you see black and brown performers telling the story of our country.” He might be selling his own product, but he’s also right. It does. The casting changes the dynamic between Americans and their revolutionary heroes, who through the pasteurizers of textbooks, massaged history and marble monuments have become something beyond bone and flesh, regardless of the color. “Hamilton” makes them people, turns immortals into mortals. To pilfer from Mr. Teachout one more time, “If you’re wondering whether a multiracial musical about one of the founding fathers could possibly amount to anything more than a knee-jerk piece of progressive sermonizing, get ready for the biggest surprise of all, which is that this show is at bottom as optimistic about America as ‘1776.’ American exceptionalism meets hip-hop: That’s ‘Hamilton.’”
Amen. The purpose of this critique isn’t to re-review the show, which has already become part of the canon and will inevitably—and probably unwisely—become a feature film. Whenever Broadway reopens, the show will also likely go back to commanding outrageous ticket prices. The question is how effectively Mr. Kail—who won a Tony for his direction of the show and helped midwife it at the Public—has maneuvered it onto our screens. A major difference between watching a staged “Hamilton” and a filmed “Hamilton,” of course, is that the latter puts your eye at the mercy of the director. Unlike screen actors, stage performers never stop acting when the main focus isn’t on them. When Mr. Kail reverts to a close-up of, say, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, you might be missing the eye-rolls of Daveed Diggs (as both Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson) or a muted response from Mr. Miranda’s Hamilton, or George Washington (Christopher Jackson) looking down imperiously on what he and his army and his revolution are wreaking elsewhere on the stage.
The thrust of “Hamilton,” inspired by the Ron Chernow biography, is how the “bastard, orphan, son of a whore” became great (“By bein’ a lot smarter / By bein’ a self-starter”). “Hamilton” the show does justice to the energy of Hamilton the man through Mr. Miranda’s sometimes furious volley of words and rhymes and some very memorable musical numbers, which unlike songs without hooks are often hooks without songs (“The Room Where It Happens,” “My Shot,” “Washington on Your Side”). One thing viewers will have to resign themselves to is not understanding it all on first try. Headphones will help. But “Hamilton” is a bit like a pointillist painting. You don’t count the dots; the characters, objects, objectives and even ideas take shape, emerging out of a mix of hip-hop, history and Mr. Miranda’s clever way of letting all his elements straddle eras. This includes the actors.
Usually, Mr. Kail takes the viewer where he or she would naturally go, to his stars, some of whom benefit enormously from the transition to screen. The camera loves Mr. Odom, for instance, who seems even more of a presence than he did on stage. (He won a Tony, so it’s not as if he were overlooked before.) Likewise, Mr. Diggs, whose Jefferson is both sarcastic and elastic and is always making funny lines funnier. The gifted Mr. Miranda, on the other hand, is not as naturally charismatic a physical presence as his co-stars—notably the principal women in his cast, Phillipa Soo as Eliza Schuyler, whom Hamilton marries, and Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, whom he loves. Each of the principals gets his or her show-stopper moment, including Jonathan Groff as King George, whose big number, “You’ll Be Back,” is a nod to Broadway’s past—and America’s—and proof that Mr. Miranda can in fact write conventional melodies.
When the visual focus is narrowed, intent can also shift: When Burr and Hamilton confer in an early scene and they are all we see, what’s lost is the rest of the cast swirling around–and with it the sense that the two then-unknowns are simply two strivers adrift in the human traffic of New York. It’s a subtle shift, but the kind Mr. Kail had to worry about constantly. Most of the time, we don’t have to: The show moves as fluidly as the turntable on stage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on which the American revolutionaries constantly revolve. There are perhaps unforeseen extras included in the filmed “Hamilton”—one of the things I learned through the close-ups is how much saliva Mr. Groff expels during his brilliant, wild-eyed turn as that crazy Hanover, George III (“When you’re gone / I’ll go mad / So don’t throw away this thing we had”). But this “Hamilton” adds up to the bargain of the year for those who’ve never seen it. And a second revelation for those who have.
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