‘Hamilton’ on Disney Plus is breathtaking
Best filmed version you’ll ever see of a Broadway show
Director Thomas Kail’s filmed version of the blockbuster musical “Hamilton,” available Friday on the Disney Plus streaming service, surely is the greatest translation, democratization and preservation of any Broadway show, ever. Experiencing this event, at relatively low cost and at a time when fans of American musicals are being forced to wait until well into 2021 for their beloved art form to return, likely bruised by the experience when it does, is profoundly emotional.
I don’t think I’ve ever simultaneously admired something so much and found it so revealing of loss, both personal and within our once-shared belief in the unity and the potential for renewal of my adopted nation.
This bittersweet sensibility and context of this broadcast, moved up in time as a consequence of the pandemic, matches the show itself. ”Hamilton” is nominally a biographical musical about the first secretary of the Treasury. But creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece is, at its core, about work-life balance. It asks whether relentless ambition and the burnishing of personal legacy is worth the price your children may pay. And it explores the great paradox of how we are smart to act like we’re running out of time, for we surely are, and yet the bereaved and the dying invariably wish they had taken more time to pause and to love. We just are slow to learn that truth.
And, of course, “Hamilton” believes in a shared, inclusive, ever-reforming America, an Obama-esque extension of democracy and independence to all persons, not a ripping apart of American’s entire foundational mythology. It occupies a center lane of youthful optimism now crushed by those careening in the reconstruction zones to both left and right. History is not inevitable.
To say that Kail’s shoot is the best bit of filmed Broadway in history is not reflective of a terribly high bar. Especially for anyone familiar with those YouTube Broadway bootlegs, or the single-camera archival experiences, replete with the dangerously available zoom, from which there is no easy return, and the tops of coifs or noggins at the bottom of the frame.
He has left plenty of room for the upcoming film. This first endeavor, which runs around 2 hours and 45 minutes and was speculatively filmed before a live audience back in 2016, is as theatrical as cinematic. Its default point of view is the entire proscenium arch, as seen from the notoriously expensive premium seating. It does not leave the theater or edit the material (aside, perhaps, for a curiously self-effacing moment when Miranda enters to zero entrance applause, which did not occur on any of six or seven times I saw this show). Otherwise, though, just enough audience reaction is there to reflect the live experience, especially after the famous line “immigrants get the job done.” You don’t visit the lobby or even see the orchestra, although Alex Lacamoire, the show’s secretweapon orchestrator, pops up grinning at the end from the pit after having glowed gently yellow from his podium throughout.
Kail had cameras in the orchestra, the mezzanine (helpful when the audience is standing up) and in the wings. His directorial approach takes its cue, really, from the show turntable designed by David Korins, although that is not to imply any intrusive restlessness in the camera work; it is as much a record of what was, as an extension of what can be. The film benefits greatly from the extant continuousness of action, the boldness of Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreographic language, the absence of scene changes and the use of a unit set.
In most filmed versions of live experiences, you’re conscious of a disconnect between the scale of performances aimed at the back of the house and the needs of the camera. That is shrewdly avoided here, even in the case of Jonathan Groff ’s outre King George, thanks to the careful and generally seamless interpolation of close-ups filmed later.
For those who have seen the show live, the biggest added value here is the expanded revelation of the vulnerability displayed by the actors. This is, of course, a phenomenal collection of talent from Miranda to Daveed Diggs to Phillipa Soo to Chris Jackson to Renée Elise Goldsberry, who is confirmed here as intensely robust in her acting.
But it’s Leslie Odom Jr., who plays the antagonist Aaron Burr, who emerges as the great emotional force of the film. I also saw something similar happen with Burr on stage, depending on the casting or the night, so it’s baked into the material. But Odom here reveals the quality of his vocal instrument as well as the depth of his dive into the sheer annoyance of being a regular kind of expedient, relative-thinking guy in the face of a tsunami of personal ambition. And who has not been there?
Much debate will ensue about the best moment in the filming: I plant my flag with Odom’s “Dear Theodosia,” which had me dropping tears into the keyboard of my Macbook. But the final moment when Miranda’s Alexander pushes Soo’s Eliza forward to her destiny is a close second, not least because the close-in camera shows you a deep release from Miranda that looks like, well, a final embrace and a belated understanding of mortality.
Miranda and his character are, of course, indistinguishable, and that’s the key to understanding the success of this show, now set to reach many more people. Like those of us who followed this show from the start, Kail is an advanced student of that Miranda-Hamilton relationship, and it guides his choices here, even as he simultaneously strives to preserve the ephemerality of the live experience. It’s a difficult balance, but he pulls it off.
Live stagings of “Hamilton” will return. But there is, in this experience, the feeling of a period being dotted, of a moment in American time being preserved for the future, of the final hurrah of an incomparable theatrical renaissance that exploded before being suddenly silenced.
History, as the show and film so beautifully remind us, is never fully understood in the making.
“Hamilton” available July 3 (no end date yet announced); $6.99 subscription at Disney Plus streaming service.