Something to watch tonight: Thursday 28 November

Hamilton (Kail, 2020)

Later this afternoon I’ll be heading out to watch Moana 2, a sequel that doesn’t contain any songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and earlier on today iTunes shuffle played me a song of his from Hamilton, so it’s almost like the universe is trying to tell me something.

It feels remarkable that a show that was so successful in its early incarnations that you had to win a lottery to get a ticket, is now available so easily on streaming. In fact, the version of Hamilton that you can see on Disney+ is that original cast – the one that tore up all the Broadway rules in the mid-2010s.

There would have been a time that a filmed version of a hit like that might take years to arrive – possibly never – once all the regional touring productions and cut-down schools versions have milked every dollar out of audiences everywhere. That’s the Wicked model, basically.

Now, you can have a hankering to watch that fantastic first cast – Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, and of course Miranda himself – and just scratch that itch whenever you feel like it.

I know some viewers of my acquaintance have chosen to watch it with subtitles so they can keep up with the rapid-fire wit of Miranda’s wordplay. The editor-in-chief and I were talking coming out of Wicked the other day about how old fashioned its musical-ness seemed. There’s a before-Hamilton and an after-Hamilton in the world of musicals now.

(We also talked about how poorly it held up cinematically and choreographically compared with an even older-fashioned musical, Spielberg’s sublime version of West Side Story but that’s a discussion for another day.)

I covered Hamilton in one of my RNZ Nights slots in November 2022 – despite the presence of Emile’s mugshot on this web page, back then it was hosted by Karyn Hay:

This is about Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States. He was never actually president of the United States, but he helped get George Washington elected. He helped win the Revolutionary War.

He was a secretary of the Treasury. He essentially created the modern American financial state. He created the Coast Guard. But he also was an orphan who was born in the Caribbean island of Nevis and made himself – he was a genuinely self-made person.

He taught himself how to write, and he was a pamphleteer. He was a propagandist. And he was this extraordinary character, but he was surrounded by all of these other ones. Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington.

And so Lin-Manuel Miranda has created this show and then populated the cast with, I guess, a snapshot of modern America. It's more than just colourblind casting. It's a conscious effort to tell the American story through the lens of American now.

I go deeper into the origins of Hamilton in that segment and also talk about David Farrier’s troubling documentary, Mister Organ.

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Where to watch Hamilton

Worldwide: Streaming on Disney+