You say you want a revolution
Streamed ‘Hamilton’ feels like a peek into the bygone era of 2016
The opening scenes of the filmed version of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which started streaming on Disney Plus on Friday, pull you back in time to two distinct periods.
The people onstage, in their breeches and brass-buttoned coats, belong to the New York of 1776. That is when a 19-year-old freshly arrived from the Caribbean — the “bastard, immigrant, son of a whore” who shares his name with the show — makes his move and takes his shot, joining up with a squad of anti-British revolutionaries and eventually finding his way to George Washington’s right hand and the front of the $10 bill.
But this Hamilton, played with relentless energy and sly charm by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, also belongs to the New York of 2016. Filmed (by the show’s director, Thomas Kail, and cinematographer Declan Quinn) in front of a live audience at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June of that year, the movie, while not strictly speaking a documentary, is nonetheless a document of its moment. It evokes a swirl of ideas, debates, dreams and assumptions that can feel, in the present moment, as elusive as the intrigue and ideological sparring of the late 1700s.
“Hamilton” may be the supreme artistic expression of an Obama-era ideal of progressive, multicultural patriotism.
Casting Black and Latino actors as the Founding Fathers and their allies was much more than a gesture of inclusiveness. The show’s argument, woven through songs that brilliantly synthesized hip hop, show tunes and every flavour of pop, was that American history is an open book. Any of us should be able to write ourselves into it.
Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury and an architect of the U.S. banking system, was Miranda’s chosen embodiment of this belief: an outsider with no money and scant connections who propelled himself into the centre of the national narrative through sheer brains, talent and drive. Miranda shares some of his hero’s ambition and intelligence, and turns Hamilton into an avatar of modern American aspiration.
“Hamilton” is a brilliant feat of historical imagination, which isn’t the same as a history lesson. Miranda used Ron Chernow’s dad-lit doorstop the way Shakespeare drew on Holinshed’s Chronicles — as a treasure trove of character, anecdote and dramatic raw material. One of the marvels of the show is the way it brings longdead, legend-shrouded people to vivid and sympathetic life. The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.
The glib, dandyish Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs) is a perfect foil for Hamilton: his rival, his intellectual equal and his sometimes reluctant partner in the construction of a new political order. The duplicitous Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) may be the most Shakespearean figure in the pageant, a gifted man tormented and ultimately undone by his failure to make himself matter.
Not that public affairs are the only forces that move “Hamilton.” I haven’t forgotten the Schuyler sisters, who have some of the best numbers and who somewhat undermine the patriarchal, great-man tendencies inherent in this kind of undertaking. Angelica Schuyler (the magnificent Renée Elise Goldsberry), the oldest of the three sisters, is a freethinker and a feminist constrained by the narrowness of the options available to women of her time and class. Her sister Eliza (Phillipa Soo), who marries Alexander, is saved from being reduced to a passive, suffering figure by the emotional richness of her songs.
Still, the personal and the political don’t entirely balance. The biographical details are necessary to the structure and texture of the show, but it is fuelled by cabinet debates and pamphlet wars, by high rhetoric and backroom dealing, by the glory and complexity of selfgovernment.
“Hamilton” is motivated, above all, by a faith in the selfcorrecting potential of the
American experiment, by the old and noble idea that a usable past — and therefore a more perfect future — can be fashioned from a record that bristles with violence, injustice and contradiction. The optimism of this vision, filtered through a sensibility as generous as Miranda’s, is inspiring.
It is also heartbreaking. One lesson that the past few years should have taught — or reconfirmed — is that there aren’t any good old days. We can’t go back to1789 or 2016 or any other year to escape from the failures that plague us now. This four-yearold performance of “Hamilton,” viewed without nostalgia, feels more vital, more challenging than ever.