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Front row seats to Hamılton ...on your sofa
The film version of the smash hit musical is coming straight to your TV – and here the show’s creator tells why they had to make it
Back in August 2018, Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex attended a benefit performance at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre of Hamilton, the multiaward-winning musical about the American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton. It was in aid of Harry’s charity Sentebale, which helps young people with HIV in Lesotho and Botswana.
After the performance, Harry took to the stage himself to join the cast and Lin-manuel Miranda, who wrote the show and took the title role in the original Broadway production. Now two years later, with the film version of the musical about to hit TV screens, Lin-manuel says he still pinches himself at the memory.
‘I thought I was playing it so cool,’ he laughs when we catch up by video link from his home in Washington Heights, New York. ‘But I look at pictures from that night and you can see how stressed out I am. I have this rictus look of, “Oh my God!” It was surreal, because Harry’s sixth great-grandfather, George III, is a character in the show.
‘Harry and the duchess were fans of the show, which took away some of the surrealness. We’d arranged that he’d come up to the stage afterwards and he’d joked about singing You’ll Be Back [the song King George sings in the show to the rebelling American colonies], and I’d said, “If you’d like to do that I’ll write you some lyrics.” As it was, he just sang the first two notes, which was all it needed because there was this immediate deafening noise of cheers.’
Audiences will soon be able to hear not only the whole song, but the now-legendary production itself, which won 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Fusing hip-hop, R&B, pop and traditional showtunes, it was a sensation on Broadway when it opened in 2015 and has since been a sell-out in London.
This Friday, 3 July, Disney+ will release Hamilton the film, a live recording of the Broadway production featuring the original cast, including Lin-manuel. The idea of filming the staged version came from Linmanuel’s frustration that rocketing theatre ticket prices put it out of the reach of most people. ‘We were strapped to a rocket ship that first year in terms of the success of the show – and by success I mean that everyone who saw the show told five other people about it and it became very difficult to get a ticket. I knew something was going on when I got an email from the late, great Aretha Franklin asking me for tickets! I don’t know how she got my email address, but I was thrilled to get the tickets for her.’
Nevertheless, he remained aware that most potential audience members were not so fortunate as Aretha. ‘We struggled with accessibility – we made the two front rows $10 a ticket via lottery, and every time we put out inexpensive tickets people would buy them up and sell them for way more. We realised we had to film this moment while the principal cast were all there. And we did.
‘It’s hard to plan a movie shoot while you’re doing eight performances a week, but we were able to pull it together literally a week before I left the show. We shot the
film at the end of June 2016, and many of the original cast left the show the next weekend.’
He was inspired to write the show by Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton – the story of a poor boy born out of wedlock on a Caribbean island who came to America and rose to prominence in the newly founded American government, only to be killed in a duel with his rival and former friend, Vice President Aaron Burr.
‘It’s about a young man who came from incredibly tough origins and arrived on the American mainland just as the Revolutionary War was starting. It’s an immigrant narrative, about someone who comes here from somewhere else and writes his way out of poverty and into the formation of his country. It’s as much of this guy’s life as I can pack into two and a half hours.’
Famously, except for a cameo by King George III, the cast of the play is predominantly non-white. The reason for that, says Lin-manuel, who is mostly of Puerto Rican descent, was partly to bring the audience’s attention to the issue of slavery, and partly for the pragmatic reason of providing work for his fellow non-caucasian actors. ‘I’ve been making up my own songs since I was a child, and had a stroke of luck in high school because we had a theatre group that put on plays directed by students so I found what I loved to do very early on. But after I left school the real world hit. In high school you can play lots of different parts, but out in the world if I wanted to act in musical theatre the only parts were Bernardo in West Side Story and Paul in A Chorus Line.
‘So I started to create the kind of musicals I didn’t see when I was growing up, to provide a platform for black artists and brown artists and artists of colour to shine. It came from a desire to be in the world of musical theatre and not play Bernardo.
‘What’s interesting with Hamilton is people say it’s an “American” show because it deals with American history, but it’s also a UK show because it deals with our relationship.’
Off screen Lin-manuel has two children with his high school sweetheart Vanessa Nadal who, he says, is nothing to do with the theatre – she’s a lawyer. ‘I often tell people that the secret of Hamilton’s success is that I’m married to a person who doesn’t like musicals all that much. She gets bored. Hamilton moves like a freight train and the reason for that is that I’m trying to impress my wife!’
‘We were strapped to a rocket ship of success’