I watched the Hamilton musical on Disney+ this weekend, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
My surprise wasn’t indicative of the musical itself; in fact, I had rather high expectations for it. Rather, it’s rare that a musical can keep my attention for more than one or two dance numbers.
But on nearly every level, I find Hamilton to be rather incredible. The music was awesome–I was familiar with the first song, but one after another the great songs kept coming. In fact, nearly every second of the 2.5+ hours is a song, as there’s hardly any talking.
Large dance numbers don’t really do it for me in musicals, but there was something about the choreography in Hamilton that felt like every motion had a point to it. It seemed very natural–in my mind, they were just people hanging out and walking around on stage.
I really loved the diversity of the cast. It was instantly noticeable, but then I stopped thinking about–and I think that’s at least part of the point.
I also enjoyed the sheer amount of history and facts packed into the musical. Sure, it’s about Hamilton himself (the good, the bad, and the sad), but it covers a wide variety of other people and events as well.
The biggest surprise for me, though, was how much of the musical focuses not on Hamilton, but on Burr. American history has kind of cast off Burr as a villain with a gun, but now I know he was so much more than that. And the actor who played him can really sing.
If I have any criticism, it’s that it was maybe a touch too long. I like songs that advance the plot of a musical, and there were a few songs that made their point within the first minute and could have moved on. But overall it was fine.
If you haven’t watched Hamilton, I’d highly recommend giving it a chance. We watched it all in one sitting, but I think you could probably break it into two parts (there’s an intermission a little over halfway through.
If you’ve seen it–on Broadway, live elsewhere, or on TV–what did you think of it?
Never before have I so empathised with the townsfolk from Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. I’ve recomposed and deleted this repeatedly because “I don’t want to appear a fool”. However, unlike that situation, the analogy all falls down because this emperor clearly *does* have clothes: It’s clearly a quality production — great set, costumes, cast — LMM is clearly very talented. (don’t even get me started on how often I’ve had his songs from Moana on loop in my head — even with the rap bit from “You’re Welcome!”)
As someone who generally likes musicals (I still occasionally belt out a rendition of “C’est Moi” from Camelot! in the shower), I wanted to like it, but I think I’ve passed some age threshold where I’ve become the old codger shouting from his verandah about how “they don’t make songs like they used to!” — I never developed an ear for hiphop or rap (or grunge or virtually anything new after 1988), and the songs here sort of droned into one another for me.
Perhaps part of it is that I was doing other things on the computer at the same time and I needed to be paying careful attention to the lyrics to follow the plot.
I guess I need a musical driven entirely by early 80s new wave and synthpop music.
As the father of a Performing Arts professional, Hamilton, like so many other musicals captured my attention. Now, I’ll say more so with Hamilton as I was a History major and I had read Chernow’s book years before Lin-Manuel Miranda had a clue about Alexander and Aaron. I couldn’t in good faith spend thousands of dollars to see the original cast, so I was thrilled to be able to share the afternoon with Hamilton and my daughter (who’s home from Savannah for a month-and-a-half) to watch this epic story.
We road tripped from St. Paul to Chicago a couple of summers ago to see the production there and it was truly fantastic, but it was really exciting to watch it on Disney+(as the original cast is simply amazing)!
As an aside, if you haven’t seen some version of this story circulating around already it’s pretty neat:
https://screenrant.com/hamilton-secret-character-bullet-death-foreshadowing/