by Beth Keating
News/Analysis
DisneyBizJournal.com
July 2, 2020
We are New Yorkers at DisneyBizJournal. That means that we are, I think, required by state laws to show up in New York City once a year during the holidays to visit the tree at Rockefeller Center and go to see a Broadway show. Really, you can look it up somewhere. It’s tantamount to people who live in Orlando being magnetically drawn into the theme parks. We’re microchipped or something.
Over the years, we’ve seen dramas including Shakespearian productions such as Christopher Plummer in Macbeth, big budget musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Into the Woods, monologue spotlights like Jake Gyllenhaal’s Sea Wall/A Life, and holiday celebrations including Patrick Stewart’s one man version of A Christmas Carol. Twice.
What we haven’t seen is Hamilton. Hamilton is one of those shows that everyone wants to see, but no one can get tickets. Scalpers command thousands for desirable seats, though the face value of the ticket usually ranges from $149-$449 (it varies widely by day and time and seat location).
If you, like our family, didn’t have the good fortune to snag tickets to the show with its original Broadway cast, Disney is getting ready to hand you an Independence Day gift. In a spectacular display of foresight, the Hamilton production was filmed over three days in July 2016 with most of the original Broadway cast. Now the three days have been woven into a single film, with input from the creators themselves. Originally set for release in October in theaters, Disney bumped up the “go” date to July 3 and is offering it for streaming on Disney+. Viewers will see the Broadway production in its entirety, as if they are watching it from the best seats in the house.
Inspired by the 2004 Alexander Hamilton biography by historian Ron Chernow, the Broadway show is the brainchild of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 2008 Tony award winning creator of another Broadway standout, In the Heights. (You also know him from Moana and Mary Poppins Returns, and he’s currently working on the new live action Little Mermaid film.) Miranda fell in love with Alexander Hamilton’s story as he read Chernow’s biography while vacationing on the beach, and managed to condense 818 pages into a slightly-less-than-3-hour musical. Hamilton is a high-energy, two-act look at the life of one of America’s youngest Founding Fathers, with the story portrayed almost entirely in song, with a blend of hip-hop, jazz, R&B and traditional Broadway styling.
An unusual choice, to be sure. “This is the story of America then, told by America now. It looks like America now,” said Miranda of the decision to use modern musical genres and cast the role of the white Founding Fathers with men and women of varied ethnic backgrounds.
In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in 2015, Miranda said of Hamilton’s story, “There’s great drama, there’s a great love story, there’s incredible political intrigue.” And Miranda has helped bring that story to life, not only as the writer and lyricist behind Hamilton, but as the original lead, giving birth to the very first Alexander Hamilton in the show. Miranda imbues Hamilton’s story with musical deliberations on such weighty topics as the proper role of the Federal government, debated through the give and take of Rap battles.
For those unfamiliar with Alexander Hamilton, he was George Washington’s righthand man during the Revolutionary War, wrote many of “The Federalist Papers” supporting passage of the Constitution, and served as America’s first, and perhaps greatest, Secretary of the Treasury. In his book, Chernow observed, “In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.” And since no one is perfect, Hamilton also exhibited terrible political instincts, and supplied the nation with its first major political sex scandal.
In the 2015 CBS interview, Lin-Manuel Miranda also said of Hamilton, “This is a guy who on the strength of his writing pulled himself from poverty, into the Revolution that helped create our nation.”
Hamilton was the winner of eleven 2016 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and also won the 2016 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a special 2018 citation from the Kennedy Center Honors. The show began as a break out hit off-Broadway at The Public Theater, before moving to Broadway in 2015. When the Broadway theaters bring up the curtains again post-COVID-19, the show will resume at its home at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
Among the original Broadway cast members appearing in the film are Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, and fellow Hamilton Tony winners Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr; and Tony nominees Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, Christopher Jackson as George Washington and Jonathan Groff as King George.
Lest you think the tale of Alexander Hamilton is just a story for erudite, ivy-leagued, elbow-patched old men who spend their time debating the minutia of history of the days of yore (Hamilton’s hip-hop accompaniment notwithstanding), there is an unusual subplot to this musical. The creators of Hamilton have teamed up with The Rockefeller Foundation and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to produce the Hamilton Education Program (EduHam), which has served more than 160,000 students across the country since 2016. Through EduHam, “students study primary source documents from the Founding Era, learn how Lin-Manuel Miranda used primary source documents to create the musical Hamilton, and finally create their own original performance pieces based on the same material.”
In the spring, as the ramifications of COVID-19 began closing down schools across the country, sending kids into home schooling scenarios, the EduHam team, already working on a family-based component to their programming, stepped into high gear and launched EduHam at Home, a free family version of EduHam that will continue to be available through August 2020.
One of the central objectives of EduHam is to not only get students excited about history, but to familiarize them with using primary source material. The website includes an instructional video by Miranda, 45 people from the Revolutionary period (some of whom appear in Hamilton), and 14 historical events for students to explore through the use of more than two dozen original documents from the period. Interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alexander Hamilton biography author Ron Chernow are available to students on the site as well. Check it all out here. As part of the program, the students have the opportunity to work their way through exercises that help them pen their own original works of art based on the historical material.
When school is in session, and students from across the area descend on the Richard Rodgers Theatre to experience performances of Hamilton for themselves, each school picks a student ambassador to perform original material they have created as part of their Hamilton curriculum. The ambassadors climb up on the stage in front of members of the Hamilton cast and their fellow students to share what they’ve crafted. What an amazing opportunity, and a generous component for the students, from the theatre community, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute.
As a short warning to families (this is Disney+ after all), Hamilton is rated PG-13 for moments of adult language. Hamilton aficionados are aware of the “F-Bomb” that finds its way into the Broadway version of the show several times. If left intact, that would have garnered the film version an R rating, under the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rules. Miranda has addressed this issue on his Twitter feed, acknowledging that, rather than cutting the lines entirely, a few of the profanities are muted or have a record scratch overarching the word in order to maintain a PG-13 rating so the kids can watch the show too. He suggests that viewers should feel free to sing along to their hearts content over the missing words.
"You can sing whatEVER you like at home (even sync up the album)! Love you. Enjoy," Lin-Manuel offered on Twitter to his fans. (Admit it, those of you who love the show will, in fact, be singing away at the top of your lungs anyway.)
In a New York Times interview, Miranda acknowledged, "If we have to mute a word here or there to reach the largest audience possible, I'm OK with that, because your kids already have the original language memorized. I don't think we're depriving anyone of anything if we mute an F-bomb here or there to make our rating." Considering the Richard Rodgers Theatre holds about 1300 guests per show, and the audience for Disney+ is seemingly limitless, his compromise is undoubtedly a valid one. Besides, Miranda wrote the show himself, so if anyone is allowed to make edits, he certainly has that prerogative. It’s his show. (Fair warning: There is still one F-bomb intact in the songs.)
If you would like more information about the Hamilton musical, visit the website here.
Don’t throw away your shot… Take Disney up on the opportunity to see this Broadway phenomenon with its original cast. It’s a chance that too few were able to see in person.
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Beth Keating is a regular contributor to DisneyBizJournal.
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