Wait for it no more
The TV debut of Hamilton, which has taken on new significance in the time of BLM protests, is drawing near
On July 3, timed for the U.S. Independence Day holiday weekend, the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s critically acclaimed Broadway musical gets its official release.
Hamilton, a blockbuster hit with perhaps deeper meaning for American culture than any musical in our lifetimes, will see its impact magnified as Disney Co. streams the production for the first time, to subscribers on its digital platform, Disney+.
Originally planned for distribution in the fall of 2021, the film starring Hamilton’s original Broadway cast — including Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr., Jonathan Groff and Renee Elise Goldsberry — is being released now to fill the entertainment void created by the pandemic. As a result, July 3 is certain to be a watershed in theatre history — the day a current musical that heretofore cost a small fortune to see will be accessible to all for a measly monthly fee.
The last time a smash Broadway musical at the height of its influence and popularity was made available in this way was ... never? Even its celebrated composerlyricist, Miranda, gasps as he contemplates the wider exposure Hamilton will receive. “On Broadway, we’re a restaurant. We only serve 1,300 people at a time,” he said in a Zoom interview from his home in Upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights. “More people will see the show between July 3 and 5 than have seen it anywhere onstage.”
Hamilton, honoured with 11 Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize for drama, will be available on the worldwide platform for an extended period. Even with the fate of live performance in limbo because of the coronavirus, the gambit carries some risks: Will lowering the barriers lessen its cachet? Will its online presence diminish its longevity as a stage phenomenon? Miranda is betting that a screen experience is an enhancement, not a replacement. “The conventional wisdom is don’t put out a movie while your show is still in theatres,” he said, adding: “The conventional wisdom is wrong.”
Hamilton, which debuted at off-Broadway’s Public Theater in February 2015 and moved to Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre months later, has at almost every turn been a mold-breaker. Featuring actors of colour as the major characters of the American Revolution — and similarly prescribing those roles in subsequent productions in other cities and touring incarnations — has helped to further entrench the practice of non-traditional casting.
The film has some gamechanging mojo, too. It’s not an attempt to “open up” the stage production, as so many musicals-to-movies tend to do; you’re not going to get Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton facing off against Odom’s Aaron Burr, for instance, on a Weehawken, N.J., bluff.
The film — overseen by the show’s stage director, Thomas Kail — instead places a kind of visual exclamation point on what a theatre audience sees. “We wanted to create a language that honoured what it meant to be in the theatre and honours what it means to be ‘cinema,’ ” Kail said in a phone interview. “It’s not to say: ‘This is the definitive presentation of Hamilton.’ This is about what it felt like to be in the theatre, on that stage, with that audience.”
But it is a historical document, one derived from the recording of two regular performances in the Rodgers — a Sunday matinee on June 26, 2016, and the Tuesday evening show on the 28th. Miranda and several other original cast members were to leave the production two weeks later. Jeffrey Seller, the show’s lead producer, wanted to preserve that cast on film — an opportunity he and the other producers of an earlier hit, Rent, let slip by.
Employing six cameras and the services of a multimedia company, RadicalMedia, and film editor Jonah Moran, Kail sought to create a movie of both scope and intimacy. “A show like ours has struggled to make itself accessible, because of the price of the tickets,” Miranda said. Now, he added, “I had the opportunity to put everybody in the same seat.”
“I’ve actually told her she’s not allowed to see this one. There’s occasionally movies that come along that I do that I don’t like her
to see. And I think this one’s under that heading.” — Russell Crowe tells Extra he has banned his mother from watching his new movie, Unhinged. The 56-year-old Oscar winner stars as The Man in the psychological thriller, which tells the tale of a case of road rage.