‘Hamilton’ to hit the big screen in ’21
“Hamilton” will soon be available for all to see, for all time. The Walt Disney Co. movie version of the hit musical is coming to the big screen on Oct. 15, 2021.
It’s no surprise that creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, with director Thomas Kail and producer Jeffrey Seller, would partner with Disney on bringing the original Broadway cast to the big screen. Miranda did voice work on Disney’s animated film “Moana” and appeared in Rob Marshall’s “Mary Poppins Returns” in 2018.
The Founding Fathers hiphop musical that won 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Miranda will be released in the U.S. and Canada.
Just because it is due in movie theaters doesn’t mean that “Hamilton” will leave the stage. The touring musical, which made its Pittsburgh debut in January 2019, is returning to the Benedum Center for the 2020-21 Broadway Series season.
“The film of the original Broadway cast performing ‘Hamilton’ is a leap forward in the art of ‘live capture,’” according to a Disney press release sent Monday. “Combining the best elements of live theater and film, the result is a cinematic stage performance that is a wholly new way to experience ‘Hamilton.’”
The cast includes Miranda as Alexander Hamilton; Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, Jonathan Groff as King George, Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton and two Carnegie Mellon University alums, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Leslie Odom Jr.
“We are thrilled for fans of the show, and new audiences across the world, to experience what it was like on stage — and in the audience — when we shot this at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway in June of 2016,” said Kail, whose mother, Wendy Green Kail, is from Squirrel Hill.
“We wanted to give everyone the same seat, which is what this film can provide.”