PBS mixes American, Broadway history in ‘Hamilton’s America’
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Documentary filmmaker Alex Horwitz had some pretty amazing good luck when he began documenting playwright LinManuel Miranda back in 2009. Or maybe his luck started earlier when the two were college roommates.
Either way, Mr. Horwitz’s good fortune covering what would become the pop culture Broadway phenomenon of our time comes to fruition in PBS’s “Great Performances” presentation of “Hamilton’s America” (9 and 10:30 tonight, WQED-TV), a documentary that serves as both a historical primer on Alexander Hamilton and a look at the creation of Broadway’s “Hamilton,” complete with excerpts of multiple musical numbers.
The first hour of “Hamilton’s America” is the most engrossing aspect of the documentary. Once the show’s a hit and everyone’s jumping on board to laud its innovative use of rap and hip-hop to tell an 18th-century story, “Hamilton’s America” becomes more predictable and less interesting. But the first hour is revelatory.
In one scene, viewers see Mr. Miranda coming up with the lyrics for one song. He’s able to sing most of them but acknowledges one patch that’s incomplete. Then the program cuts to the completed section as it’s performed on the Broadway stage.
“I didn’t know what Lin was making any more than he did,” Mr. Horwitz said at an August PBS press conference. “Lin had this sort of half-baked idea. It might be a concept album, it might be a show. It was the time where he started using the term ‘show’ or ‘musical’ more often that I said, ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re going to make, but let me follow you, doing it.’”
In the film, Mr. Miranda says he somewhat randomly grabbed a Hamilton biography to read on vacation. It was that book by author Ron Chernow that inspired Mr. Miranda to start writing songs about Hamilton and his experience. Mr. Miranda, who was coming off the success of the Broadway musical “In the Heights,” performed the “Hamilton” opening number at the White House before he’d written much else for “Hamilton.”
Representatives of the White House called him as the star of “In the Heights” to join in what was the Obamas’ first evening of arts at the White House. They wanted him to do something from “In the Heights,” and then asked, “Do you have anything about the American experience?”
“To watch that video of Lin introducing this song about a guy, as he puts it, who embodied hip-hop, Alexander Hamilton, to watch that crowd’s reaction in that room, the Obamas included, is to watch a microcosm of the world’s reaction to ‘Hamilton,’” Mr. Horwitz said. “And by the end, they’re standing and applauding. And that is the story of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton,’ that video. We’ve just made the bigger version of that.”