I Like to Watch: Hamilton
The rarest sight in America 2020 is a middle-aged white man who is really looking to be wrong.
I am that rarity (in actually quite a few areas).
When Hamilton hit the stages of New York and then Chicago, it was a phenomenon. People I knew and respected lined up and paid ridiculous amounts of cash to see this unique and extraordinary theatrical event. They gushed as if having seen it via a lottery for reasonably priced (but horribly seated) tickets was like seeing The Beatles or the Dali Llama.
I waited. I listened to some of the music and was disappointed. It sounded like Schoolhouse Rock as performed by The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I wrote the thing off as nothing more than an incredible gimmick—the casting of black and brown-skinned performers to play the very white Founders of the country and create the first rap-opera. Not a bad gimmick, as gimmicks go, but I’m just enough of a contrarian (and a bit tighter with my checkbook) to pay upwards around five hundred dollars to see something I wasn’t drooling to see.
Art that incorporates a gimmick is cool. Retrofitting Shakespeare to board rooms or contemporary political life, if done well, can refresh the meanings behind brilliant plays. West Side Story is one such gimmick production and few would leave it off a list of the best musicals ever written.
When the gimmick is the cherry on top of a solid piece of cake, it’s a real treat. The film Get Out is definitely a political parable for our times but underneath the polemic is simply a brilliantly written, performed, and scored horror film.
If the cherry is on top of a poorly made cake, the gimmick is not enough to save it. The all-female reboot of Ghostbusters had those who loved the gimmick pitted against those who hated it but few actually cared that it was, underneath the female-centered idea, a bad movie. With no straight-(wo)men characters and every comedian in the film going for maximum goofiness, it played more like bad improv where everyone is trying to out funny each other.
When it was announced that Disney+ was going to be streaming a fully filmed version of Hamilton with the original New York cast, I saw people going nuts. I wondered, Will I? I mean, the musical was a phenom and unlike anything that had come before it, yes? What if I was wrong in my dismissal? What if I fucking went bananas for it and regretted deeply my earlier reticence to drop some dime on the experience?
So, I bit. I sat down and prepared myself to be blown away and embarrassed by my snobbery at the few songs I had heard and my natural inclination to be suspicious of hype.
I wasn’t wrong.
After watching two and a half hours of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s opus my conclusions were not in keeping with so many who loved it beyond words.
Wait. What? Is that an actual SONG?
Two and a half hours of Fresh Prince style rap is like one hundred and fifty minutes of polka. Soon into it the oompah oompah becomes monotonous and everything sounds like the Beer Barrel Polka. Even the parts of the score which are sung are effectively tuneless. In fact, the only memorable tune in the entire thing comes from the only white character onstage, Jonathan Groff’s King George III.
There are far too many characters onstage to keep things from becoming bogged down. If one were to try and make all eight seasons of Game of Thrones a Renaissance opera in two and a half hours, the effect would be similar. All the music would blend into a drone and none of the characters would have enough time onstage for any of them to be terribly interesting.
Speaking of characters, the only two that get any sort of development beyond HEY! Thomas Jefferson is black! are Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. After two and half hours, I’m left with the information that Burr was a jealous political rival with no ideological allegiances and Hamilton was a know-it-all, driven by his orphan and immigrant status, who fucked around on his wealthy wife. Given I already knew the ending (duh… history) it would’ve been a good opportunity to go beyond it to fill in the blanks. Sadly, those moments in history we don’t already know are covered by songs that simply state “We don’t know what happened here” as if this lack of creative spine is to be applauded.
“I have a Hamilton on Rye!”
Speaking of A. Hamilton, while I can truly appreciate Lin-Manuel Miranda’s writing chops and drive, his “I just drank too much milk” voice and lack of charisma makes him a stand out in a poor performance for such a huge undertaking. I mean, he does his best but in the shadow of Leslie Odom Jr’s Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry‘s Angelica Schuyler, and Christopher Jackson‘s George Washington, Miranda’s Hamilton looks like someone gave the lead role to someone’s ambitious cousin—the one who works at the corner deli—who someone once told he should be on America’s Got Talent.
That may be harsh because from interviews and appearances Miranda seems like an incredibly cool and affable guy. Cool and affable and certainly talented in many ways but the dude has the charisma of that guy perpetually in the Friend Zone, and Hamilton should be played by someone with amazing star quality like Leslie Odom Jr. In fact, a Burr/Hamilton swap would make the whole thing a bit better.
None of this is to say the thing wasn’t impressive as a spectacle. The gimmick is imaginative and fun to watch in the same way that watching Sir Ian McKellen as a 1930s Richard III is cool but you can’t simply have the cherry without the cake. Once the novelty wears off—approximately twenty minutes in—it’s easy to notice how thin the rest of it is.
I know you think I’m an idiot. You loved it and I am some sort of asshole for not loving it. There are so many who think this was the end all, be all of musicals updating stories by changing racial make up. I still think that prize goes to West Side Story. I wish I was wrong because I really wanted to love this like you did and do.
That’s okay. I wasn’t wrong about RENT being a bloated, underwritten turd, either.
Impressive cherry without much cake underneath. Nice costumes, though.
