‘HAMILTON’ GRANDLY LEAPS TO TELEVISION
One sign that a work is a classic is that it keeps revealing itself to us, 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 out 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 on stage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre now available to stream on Disney Plus starting July 3, the first quality that might strike an already confirmed fan is the way the actors own their performances. At every moment in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, their work proclaims, “This role was written for me.”
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, 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.
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.”
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 wide angle.
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.
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.
Maybe for you, that new thing will be how Angelica Schuyler is in a way greater than Hamilton, her brother-in-law, in that she can put someone else’s happiness before her own — a trait valiantly conveyed in Renée Elise Goldsberry’s Tony Award-winning 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.
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.