Arts Commentary: “Hamilton” — Streaming on Disney Plus, Feeling Like You’re in the Room Where it Happened.
By Glenn Rifkin
The opportunity to see the culture-changing Broadway phenomenon Hamilton on Disney Plus sucked up all the arts oxygen over the Fourth of July weekend.
A scene from Disney Plus’s Hamilton.
In the midst of the pandemic-induced streaming frenzy of the past five months, the main topic of conversation on most Zoom calls seems to focus on what is worth watching to save us from losing our minds. Just when we’re getting down to the dregs (Space Force anyone?), along comes a transcendent viewing experience that rumbles the landscape. The opportunity to see the culture-changing Broadway phenomenon Hamilton on Disney Plus sucked up all the arts oxygen over the Fourth of July weekend. And this was one of the rare occasions where the hype — and there’s never been a show more hyped than Hamilton — was met and surpassed.
This show, about the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, is a work of genius by Lin-Manual Miranda that took Broadway by storm when it opened in February, 2015. I need not offer another review of this hip-hop history lesson that single-handedly thrilled theater goers, took home a truckload of Tony Awards (11), a Pulitzer Prize, and recalibrated ticket pricing on Broadway forever. By early this year, it had grossed $500 million, had three touring companies, and productions in London and Chicago. The cast album has been on the Billboard 200 chart for 246 weeks.
For those who shelled out four-figures per ticket to see this brilliant musical, there was nary a whimper of upset that they’d overspent. Yes, it was distressing that the show priced itself out of the orbit of most theater lovers, or forced us to pony up a year’s worth of arts tickets for a single event. My wife and I saw it in Boston, with the touring company, sitting up in the thin air of the mezzanine, and were thrilled.
But for all that, the majority of theater lovers never got close to seeing the show. Tickets were like hen’s teeth and they felt out of reach. All of which makes this offering from Disney Plus perhaps the greatest bargain in modern theater history. For a subscription fee of $6.99 per month (which can be canceled at any time), viewers get Hamilton, a beautifully directed version of an actual live performance from 2016 with the original cast.
Miranda, not just a creative genius but a savvy businessman, had the film made just weeks before the original cast was heading for the exit. It was finished and then locked away in a vault with the idea that it would be shown in theaters five or six years later. In 2019, Disney paid a record $75 million for the rights to the film, and planned to release it in theaters in October 2021. When the pandemic set in, Robert Iger, Disney’s chairman who had pushed hard for the film rights, suggested to Miranda that they bring it out now via Disney Plus. At first Miranda and the show’s producers refused, but as they realized that Broadway was not going to reopen this year, they changed their minds. Miranda told the New York Times, “I’m getting messages every day from folks who had tickets to Hamilton and can’t go because of the pandemic, so moving up the release so everyone could experience it this summer felt like the right move.”
Undoubtedly, he’s rich as Croesus from the show already, so no weeping is necessary for his bank account. The Disney payday might be equal to (let’s say) a year’s worth of royalties or more for him. But still, this is an act of selfless patriotism for a stressed-out, angry nation, coping with multiple problems without obvious solutions: an insidious virus, a deranged buffoon of a president, the Black Lives Matter protests, and other debilitating realities intensifying our national anguish. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.
Sure, you lose the immediacy of a live theater-going experience, which is unique and intimate. But this is as close to the real thing as you can get. You really feel like you’re in the room where it happened. The film was shot over two performances in June, 2016 with nine cameras strategically placed around the theater. Close-ups were shot on stage between the two performances. It was directed brilliantly by Thomas Kail, who was also at the helm of the stage production. “I wanted to create a document that could feel like what it was to be in the theater at that time,” Kail told the New York Times.
It is seamlessly edited to provide the feeling of the choreography sweeping across the stage, interspersed with close-ups of each actor’s emotional performance. Even front-row orchestra seats won’t give you this intimate a view. Having seen it in the theater, this film was the perfect bookend to the experience. I honestly can’t name a single performer from the touring company, but this cast, with the superb Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Miranda as Hamilton, Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, Daveed Diggs as Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, Okieriete Onaodowan as Hercules Mulligan and James Madison, and Jonathan Groff as King George III, put their indelible stamp on this show.
Given the political climate, the sight of actors of color portraying the Founding Fathers, a signature part of the show’s genius, was moving and powerful. Something profound was happening as this nation struggled to its birth in the late 18th century, and it is captured poignantly in this provocative performance. Something profound is happening still, and the touch of Hamilton in this challenging summer is an elixir that feels right and restorative.
Glenn Rifkin is a veteran journalist and author who has covered business for many publications including the New York Times for nearly 30 years. He has written about music, film, theater, food and books for the Arts Fuse. His new book Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire was recently published by McGraw-Hill.
Tagged: Disney Plus, Glenn Rifkin, Hamilton
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Hmmmm. Let’s just say that now I’ve finally seen Hamilton, I had a more complex reaction. The good news is that the Disney stream is an exuberant, seemingly accurate, rendering of the original stage musical, with its terrific first-run cast (and we have very few such theatrical records). The (somewhat) bad news is that . . . well . . . Hamilton is always dazzling but somehow not always compelling . . . it doesn’t quite grip you despite its many brilliant facets. I found myself skipping ahead, or taking breaks and literally forgetting about it for a while. Perhaps this was because its subject and constant focus, founding father Alexander Hamilton, remained an over-achieving cipher to the finish (much like his modern-day avatar, Barack Obama, to whom the show is a neoliberal valentine). As for composer/star Lin-Manuel Miranda – although he’s a lyrical genius whose rhymes glitter and pop throughout, he’s not that skilled at dramaturgy, and to be honest, as a performer he’s completely out of his league in this powerhouse cast.
Other issues surface as the show develops: the plot’s hard to track through the many object history lessons, and the songs, though catchy, are often in the same key, with many of the same chords, and tend to force actors to describe what they are feeling rather than actually convey that emotion. Strangest of all – Hamilton feels dated, and maybe even a little dishonest. The sarcastic optimism of its take on the American Revolution, and the initial resonance of its triumphant multi-ethnic cast, all feel further away from us now than the opening strains of Showboat. The meritocracy Miranda naively extols has been shown up as a fraud, Barack Obama has left the stage without an heir, and all the positive energy of a zillion earnest shows about conquering prejudice have, it seems, converted precisely zero racists.
Then there’s the tricky problem of just how Miranda has manipulated his material to dodge the slavery question – which was absolutely critical to the founding of this country. Somehow he has time to spare for the foundation of the Bank of New York or the relocation of the nation’s capital, but forgets to mention that Hamilton’s wife Eliza was from a notorious slave-owning family (in fact her father’s statue was just pulled down), and that Hamilton himself, though an “immigrant,” was a product of privilege who had his private education paid for by a corporate scholarship, mixed and worked with slave-owners constantly, and seems to have been perfectly okay with the notorious “three-fifths compromise” that enshrined slavery in the Constitution. (Ironically, corny old 1776 does much, much better on the slavery question than Hamilton.) And it’s easy to see a subtle cast to the show that its millennial fans might have missed – I mean isn’t it a bit odd that our new favorite Founding Father should be a financier and knowledge worker . . ? Hmmmm. No wonder the Obama crowd clutched it to its collective breast!
To be fair, Hamilton is still miles (MILES) better than Dear Evan Hansen or Book of Mormon, or that godawful Natasha and the Great Comet or whatever it was. (And frankly it’s better than the likes of Wicked or Rent, too.) At least it’s intermittently ABOUT something, and Thomas Kail’s direction is always ingenious, Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography is dynamic, and the cast (with the exception of Miranda) is stellar.
It’s easy, given Broadway’s low standards, to see why people fell in love with it (particularly given the live theatrical electricity I’m sure this cast generated). But of course the price of its tickets meant that most of us couldn’t SEE it till now – so there’s been very little real discussion or critique of this supposedly egalitarian triumph. Now that that has changed, I think a little air may be about to leak out of its artistic reputation – although it still counts as a major achievement in showmanship and Broadway dazzle. In the end it may not be quite “great” in the way that Sweeney Todd and South Pacific and West Side Story are great, but I’d say it’s still about as great as any millennial musical is ever likely to be.
I’m of a mind with Thomas Garvey. Yes, the rapping is clever and fresh but after a while overall the music of this musical is a study in monotony. For all the snappy glitz the show felt like a half-digested history book chapter, and theatrically dated (pre-Sondheim and others, not far from Oklahoma.) Didn’t hold me to the end. I enjoyed Terri Gross’s interview with LMM much more. Nice points on ducking slavery, but Garvey’s swipes at ‘the Obama crowd’ (why? and who, exactly?) seem odd here.
I mentioned the Obamas because they identified with, and WERE identified with, Hamilton almost as much as the Kennedys were once linked to Camelot. Indeed, after seeing it Off-Broadway, the First Lady invited the Hamilton cast to the White House, and described the show as “the best piece of art in any form I have ever seen in my life.” Okay, maybe it’s a little mean-spirited to take “swipes” at such naïveté (although I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cringed at the cultural opinions of members of the 1%, be they members of the financial 1% or the academic 1%). The point is that if Hamilton no longer resonates – and opinions now being widely voiced that this is indeed the case – then it’s time to begin considering it as a reflection of its cultural moment, rather than, as Mr. Rifkin would have it, “a transcendent viewing experience that rumbles the landscape,” whose hype was “met and surpassed,” and that now feels “right and restorative.”
As I wrote, to many today Hamilton calls to mind a kind of artistic time capsule, reflecting attitudes and strategies that for a time dodged or co-opted the deep conflicts in American culture, but never actually grappled with, much less resolved, them. Obama’s misguided faith in the likes of Robert Rubin and Timothy Geithner is reflected in Miranda’s awe before Hamilton’s financial expertise, and his strategy of simply avoiding any discussion of slavery subtly mirrors the Obamas’ strategy of rarely, if ever, engaging directly with the racist harassment and stonewalling that emanated from Mitch McConnell’s Senate (and elsewhere). In short, the show’s very DNA is braided with the political DNA of the Obama era – even though the reaction to the calm hubris of the prevailing Democratic wisdom was simmering even as the show took its bows; remember, it was being cheered on Broadway even as Trump slouched toward electoral victory (in fact Mike Pence caught a performance). So as we applaud the dazzling stagecraft of Hamilton today, four years further down an increasingly rough road, it behooves us to ponder the failure of the attitudes that underpin it.