A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton.
Quick summary: it's good. Just like the soundtrack album.
And that's not just damning with faint praise. It is a great musical experience. But the staging of the show was overwhelmed by the songs. It's not a grand spectacle. The dancing is skillful but with a fairly small stage the performers mostly have to strike poses on a rotating floor section because there isn't room to move.
To me it would be as great an experience if the performers were just standing on stage in evening dress in front of the orchestra, with the chorus on risers in the back. And I find myself wondering, why not? A purely static musical performance can be profoundly moving.
I have heard that a film version is in the works, and I hope the director isn't content to plant a camera in front of the stage. The music would work just as well against a realistic period background. The dancers could really cut loose. Freed from the theater stage, the spectacle of the show could finally match the music.
I was very impressed by the cleverness of the lyrics and the structure of the piece. At some point Mr. Miranda must have sat down with a notepad and jotted down all the words and phrases he could think of connected with a pistol duel, and then tried to build songs around them. I suspect his hard drive contains discarded drafts of a number about "fire," perhaps one about "paces," or "triggers," or "the ground."
I was also impressed by a bit of casting: all the performers who play Hamilton's friends in the first act are his adversaries in the second, which heightens the depiction of a man becoming more and more isolated as his ambition cuts him off from everyone around him. The exception is the man who plays John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton; in both acts he's the Guy Who Dies. I do wonder if in some earlier draft Laurens had a spotlight number in the first half to match Phillip's in the second.
(No doubt there will be a book or three written about this show which might confirm or explode my speculations. Until then, I'm free to guess.)
Jim says check it out.
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