Every day it’s different.
Sometimes it’s just “Alex-ander-Ham-il-ton.”
Others it’s the harp progression from “Satisfied”, but most days its “Da da da dat da dat da da da da ya da, Da da dat dat da ya da!”
It’s been a week since I had my first experience of anything Hamilton related, when I watched the live stage recording of the Broadway show on Disney+, and the songs keep springing to mind, unbidden, but in a good way!
This was to be… somewhat expected.
Avoiding everything to do with Hamilton was never intentional. I haven’t been living under a rock! I’d heard enough to recognize a parody poster in a video game, but I hadn’t heard any of the songs.
A hit Broadway musical, only accessible, for some, on stage and via a cast recording, isn’t quite in my cultural wheelhouse. A wheelhouse, nay a whole boat, that is already bursting with content I have yet to catch up on. I figured Hamilton would be transmogrified into some format I could easily consume (and maybe wring an article out of) eventually, and it has. Going in, I wasn’t too sold on the idea of this “live” stage recording though.
Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night?
Stage and screen are very different animals and I generally prefer my movie musicals either animated; featuring an aging music star’s back catalogue, nicely arranged to fit a biographical narrative, or starring Hugh Jackman.
Would this version only be for the fans?
Well obviously not. I’d have to be a complete contrarian not to enjoy one of the most popular, critically acclaimed musicals of all time. As evidenced by my thoughts above, I can’t stop singing along with the songs and might even, given time, start narrowing Bahir’s considerable lead in total soundtrack listens.
As a musical, Hamilton is amazing. As a movie or streaming experience, I’m not so sure.
Capturing the original cast and staging of Hamilton for posterity is a great idea as a one off, but I can’t see it working for many other shows. Some of the energy is lost when experiencing it in your own home, without the electric atmosphere of a packed theater audience. Despite the clever staging, (the floor revolves!) and fluid camera-work, cutting to close ups to reinforce the emotion of certain moments, it does feel a bit too long as a movie set in a single (visible) location.
Alexander Hamil-Who?
For someone with only a passing familiarity with American history and zero knowledge of Alexander Hamilton, I found that I lost a lot of the detail of Hamilton’s early life amongst the rapping and dance of the opening half. Too late did I realise that I should have turned on subtitles for this musical.
I hadn’t expected it to be quite so long either. At 2 hours 40 minutes it’s the same length as Avengers: Infinity War, a film I’ve only seen twice, and I loved that one.
I actually ended up watching Hamilton in two sittings after realizing there was over an another hour and a half to go as the intermission neared. I returned to it a second day and have been popping in and out of the cast recording (finally) ever since.
I had fallen in love with Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Lin-Manuel Miranda and their work, elsewhere (Snowpiercer, Altered Carbon and… um… Moana respectively) so it came as no surprise that they, and the rest of the cast, are just as amazing as I’d been led to believe.
“Spit” and Polish
I hadn’t been expecting Jonathan Groff’s spitting King George though, so well done everyone on not spoiling that for me. As a movie, I doubt I’ll returning to this version of Hamilton again. I won’t be popping it on again in the background, as I generally don’t do that (podcasts are more my thing). I don’t see myself returning to it as some kid of annual tradition either. It’s just too long for that.
I’ll now listen to the cast recording and wait for the inevitable (?) lavish historical, period drama, or animated version to reach our screens in a decade or so, with those thirty-two thousand troops in New York Harbour visualised on screen rather than in lyrics only.
Although, perhaps the words of Groff’s King George will come to haunt me in time: “You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me…”
“Da da da dat da dat da da da da ya da, da da dat dat da ya da!”
Hamilton
160 mins
Disney+
Director: Thomas Kail
Writer: Lin-Manuel Miranda, inspired by the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
Cast: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Jonathan Groff.
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