Hamilton again

[liv]

I assume everybody has heard that the film of the original Broadway show has been released. I was extremely fortunate that I got to see it in the West End [CN: old post misgenders one of the people mentioned, who uses different pronouns now from the ones I knew about 2 years ago. Sorry about that.] But I was definitely excited to see the Broadway version too, so I subscribed to Disney+ just for that, and watched it for my date night with jack. We even set our big TV (which had been gathering dust for a year) back up for the occasion.

It was really amazing to get to see Miranda himself and Diggs and Odom Jr and Groff's magnificent George III. And the rest of the cast are amazing too. The pace felt much more frenetic than the West End, but perhaps that's an artefact of watching the film rather than seeing it live. But for me it was just several hours of intense emotion with basically no break, no slack numbers, no wasted space. I can see why lots of people reported feeling exhausted by watching it!

I love the lyrics more every time I hear them, and the West End acting and singing were glorious but the original cast are just sublime. I am familiar enough with it now that I started picking out more of the returning musical and verbal motifs, and the whole thing felt really tightly woven together as a whole.

Things I didn't like: the choice to focus all the camera work close on people's faces. I could basically barely see the ensemble and it was a shame to miss the outstanding choreography. Some people have pointed out that the the close-ups made it easier to lipread, and certainly getting to watch the actors' emotions in a way that would be impossible even from the best seats in a real theatre is a special experience. But the trade-off was that almost seemed like a succession of solos and duets (with backing choruses) rather than a stage show.

I also found the Mrs Reynolds storyline far more objectionable in this than in the West End show. It goes way too heavy on literal Madonna / whore imagery, with virtuous Eliza dressed in blue, modest, demure, motherly, lit as if haloed, contrasted with Maria in scarlet simulating sex on stage. I think it's partly that I'm less and less sympathetic about the adultery plot the more times I engage with the musical. But also the deliberately race-blind casting has somehow accidentally landed on a virtuous woman played by a mixed white and Asian actor with light skin and straight hair, and the evil seductress played by a much darker woman with strong African-American features, and that made the sexism even more distasteful. Goldsberry's Angelica is pretty awesome, though.

lannamichaels' review agrees with my impressions but with more detail provided, and I somewhat agree that there was no good reason to wait this long to release the recording and then claim it as a great act of generosity in pandemic times. There's some great discussion at rachelmanija's, too; the show is really significant to her personally.

I am starting to get a little uncomfortable with the ways that Hamilton is deliberately apolitical (even though it's a show specifically about politics). This op-ed from 2016: You Should Be Terrified That People Who Like Hamilton Run Our Country is rather unnecessarily catty (and that headline really hasn't aged well now the country is run by people who hate Hamilton), but it's core point that Changing the races allows these men to appear far more sympathetic than they would otherwise be is worth considering. I love it a lot, and one of the things I love about it is that it uses ethnically diverse actors singing music drawn from a wide range of cultures to portray on a major Broadway stage people who were in real history a bunch of Great White Men. But I can see the criticism that, by not really being about slavery, which is the key existential question about what sort of country newly independent America should be, it almost winks at slavery.

Anyway, despite those caveats, I'm super excited that I can watch the recording of the show, and I've set up a date to watch it again remotely with another partner at the weekend, and I'm really enjoying everybody's squee posts and reactions and analysis.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I feel like Hamilton engages very shallowly with the politics of its day, while engaging more with the politics of our own day, such as the emphasis on repeatedly referring to Hamilton (and Lafayette) as immigrants. The show also does the thing a lot more than I'd like of having someone raise a point in contradiction to Hamilton, and instead of him refuting the point, he insults them, which is another way it sidesteps politics and brings it back to a personal conflict alone. Act 1 brings up slavery because of Laurens, but then he dies and it seems to disappear from the show; it really should have had more of a role. But I find there's also a side comment in the ending of "you have no control... who tells your story" in that the story of these folks is being told by Lin-Manuel Miranda and put on by this cast, which I feel the founders would not have liked. So it's kind of an eff-you to them, but I don't know if Miranda intended that line to be as such. (Maybe? There's a bunch of layers to the lyrics.)

I can't even with the adultery, but it struck me as interesting that Aaron "Wait For It" Burr acknowledges that he's doing what he wants to do, while Hamilton's excuse is "the woman tempted me" and that he never wanted to do it at all.

That said, I've already rewatched a bunch of it and I only finished my first watch yesterday. XD

[doseybat]

Seeing Hamilton live helped me understand why I avoid theatres and ballet invitations nowadays. Karen got us better tickets near the front than I would normally expect, I spent time beforehand getting to know the music, and liked the tunes. But so many people doing different distracting and colourful things all at the same time, deliberately distracting from one another - I got visually and emotionally overwhelmed in the first 15 mins and then suffered through the rest of he show.

[cosmolinguist]

I had a similar reaction as a partially sighted person: I appreciate liv's point about missing out on the ensemble by having lots of close-ups, but it's one thing I loved about the filmed version because I couldn't follow the stage version nearly as well, it was all too much.

[nameandnature]

Lin on Drunk History doing the Reynolds story is fun (and probably less problematic as everyone's white and Hamilton is a woman).

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yay, we watched it and I enjoyed it more than I expected. (I was watching it primarily because it's an important contemporary cultural reference point that I didn't want to miss out on, and we already have Disney+ so it was free. I went in not knowing the plot and only having heard a couple of the songs before.)

I was impressed by what they did with the turntable stage and the way the actors interacted with it, getting effects I'd normally expect to be restricted to film: the "rewind" bit with Angelica, Philip getting shot and reeling back in Matrix-style bullet time, and bits where most of the cast pause or go into slow motion while someone has a monologue in the foreground, like during Hamilton's duel.

I loved King George's song(s) (I'm not sure whether to count it as three songs or one song with two reprises). I really liked the musical style of it, and it really reminded me of something else and I can't put my finger on what.

(I suspect the show was deliberately associating the more traditional show-tune-y classic-rock-ballad-y musical style with the unsympathetic oppressive white man of the old regime and contrasting it with the contemporary rap musical style associated with the cool and diverse young revolutionaries, and so implicitly criticising me for preferring the former, but I enjoyed it enough that I don't mind.)

It was a bit weird having the founding fathers mostly played by black people while still accusing each other of exploiting slaves and so on. I don't know how many not-very-historically-aware schoolchildren (and perhaps even adults) are going to be confused into thinking the founding fathers actually were black, and thus underestimate the racism and injustice of the past, which is probably contrary to the aim of the casting decision.

I didn't actually think Lin-Manuel Miranda was that great in it. I think he's a fantastic writer and lyricist, but not so good an actor. He came across a bit permanently-dazed and vague. I think a better actor would portray Hamilton as thrustingly energetic. (On the Moana soundtrack, which Miranda also wrote, there's a bonus track which is his own cover version of You're Welcome. I think that suffers from the same problem: it sounds a bit dazed, vague, or lacking in expression, cpmpared with Dwayne Johnson's excellent version from the actual film.)