‘Hamilton’ reveals new treasures
One sign that a work is a classic is that it keeps revealing itself, over and over again. We think we’ve known it and loved it and harvested it, but then we enter a new historical moment, and it sprouts still more riches for us to discover. We weren’t ready to see them before, but the seeds were there all along, waiting to ripen.
In the case of “Hamilton,” a film of the original Broadway cast performing at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, available on Disney Plus starting Friday, July 3, the first quality that might strike a confirmed fan is the way the actors own their performances. At every moment in LinManuel Miranda’s musical about the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, their work proclaims, “This role was written for me.” It’s a kind of inward swagger, an absence of showiness compensating for jitters.
You see it in the way Anthony Ramos, as John Laurence, need merely hint at a teasing smile with an upturned corner of the mouth and a jesting twinkle in the eye. You can see it in the way Daveed Diggs, as both the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, seems to channel his volatile energy into acute clarity of intention solely for his own kicks.
You see it in the way Leslie Odom Jr., as Aaron Burr, seethes his way through the show’s opening, wondering how Hamilton, “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman,” grows up “to be a hero and a scholar.” His Burr has had time to stew over just how much he hates his rival — too much time.
To see performers of color so joyously at home in their roles as founding fathers and mothers, as leaders, as American myths was always one of the show’s chief gifts. In reenvisioning our past, it gave a salutary jolt to our present and helped remap our future.
But it’s also newly energizing to revisit the show in our own era of Black Lives Matter activism. As the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others have spurred us to examine more openly how white supremacy infects every corner of life, “Hamilton” seems to say, “Yes, and here’s what a more American America could look like.”
The show’s seeming foreknowledge of current events packs continual wallops. Listen to the way Christopher Jackson’s George Washington dismisses the French Revolution as “rioting,” or how he mournfully pleads with
Americans in his farewell address, when he teaches us “how to say goodbye”: “I want to warn against partisan fighting.” Here, the musical balances its heady optimism with rueful realism, its internal awareness that generations of future audiences are doomed to heed Washington no better than we have.
At live theater your eye can seek what it will; on film, a director guides it. Here, director Thomas Kail, who also helmed the show’s stage version, faces the inherent translation challenge of never quite being able to satisfy a theatrical audience’s gluttony, how we want to be able to feast on everything, all at once, all the time, in both zoom and wideangle.
Still, he anticipates the shots your eyes crave. The changing camera angles mirror the way the set’s two concentric turntables and Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography whisk history along. One shot in particular stands out: When Jackson’s Washington sings, “History Has Its Eyes on
You,” the camera very slowly circles him — a gesture that both ennobles and threatens, casting his public and his chroniclers as both admirers and predators.
Of all the new gems the film version unearths in the text, the richest might be those that transcend current events, those that help color vibrantly envisioned human relationships. No matter how well you know the show, you’re bound to discover something new when you can see a mighty glob of spit spew from the lips of King George (Jonathan Groff) and then pool anew at the bottom of his chin.
Maybe for you, that new thing will be how Angelica Schuyler is in a way greater than Hamilton, her brotherinlaw, in that she can put someone else’s happiness before her own — a trait valiantly conveyed in Renée Elise Goldsberry’s Tony Awardwinning performance, which combines impetuosity and sagacity, mischief and tenderness into one mighty, messy ball of humanity.
Or maybe you’ll lament how Hamilton and Burr almost could have been friends, despite their opposing personalities. In their first meeting, the two ambitious, smart orphans are all warmth and grace and generosity to one another, and then Odom’s Burr decides to give Miranda’s Hamilton some advice — “Talk less; smile more” — and it’s as if some border was crossed, some spark was lit.
Their tragedies run in parallel. One man is ever “willing to wait for it.” Another is always “nonstop,” “running out of time.” One man dreams too small — all Burr wants is to “be in the room where it happens”; what he does once inside is irrelevant — and the other dreams too big. The audience to “Hamilton” occupies the chasm between them, caught between our lofty, outsize ideals and our petty human folly.