... beginning Friday, July 3rd (a week from today) on your television set. Or, presumably, on your cell phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. If you are willing to subscribe to Disney Plus for $6.99/month.
But that price is a bargain, compared with what you would have paid for Broadway tickets to see Hamilton. Or, as my wife and I paid last year, tickets to see a national touring company production. I don't remember exactly how much it set us back, but probably it was over $200/ticket (before all the surcharges), and we were in the 3rd balcony or somewhere similarly distant from the stage. But ticket prices for live performances are moot because the theaters are closed for the foreseeable future.
But now, Disney has stepped up to solve those problems. This Chicago Tribune FAQ describes what the Disney production will feature:
- This is not an original Disney film production; it is a video recording which Disney has obtained of a performance by the original Broadway cast. It will have the stage production look and feel
- It features the original cast of Hamilton, which you wouldn't be able to see anymore in New York, even if performances still were running and you were willing to mortgage your home to buy tickets; the original cast left long ago. To be sure, their replacements are reported to have been brilliant, too, before COVID-19 shut them all down. But this televised production will be the same cast that knocked Broadway audiences for a loop the first time
- The cast includes Lin-Manuel Miranda, who not only starred as the protagonist, Alexander Hamilton, but also wrote the music and lyrics for the show.
In case you are not one who follows Broadway musicals: Hamilton is the biggest smash hit to come along in many years. It is difficult to overstate the impact it has made, far beyond the usual theater audiences.
Miranda is widely considered the reigning genius of Broadway musicals. Ok, maybe that's going a bit far, what with Stephen Sondheim still among the living, but Miranda is the one currently experiencing commercial success with fresh and original works which are pushing the boundaries of live theater. In both Hamilton and his prior Broadway hit, In The Heights, he has melded an urban and contemporary musical sound with brilliant lyrics. By all accounts, he is quite good on stage (I have never seen him perform live), but his music and lyrics are The Thing. Probably there weren't many Americans who would have thought that familiar historical characters like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could be cast multiracially and given hip-hop and urban contemporary music and lyrics to sing and dance to. But that was before Miranda not only showed us that it is possible but can be done brilliantly. This is not 1776.
If it's not feasible for you to see Hamilton live in a theater, I would recommend that you spend the $6.99 to order Disney Plus from your cable or video service provider for a month, just to watch it. The Chicago Tribune article notes you can cancel it anytime. I consider Hamilton to be that important a cultural marker.
Some of you will have to tell me what you think of it. We already have too many add-on channels as it is!
ReplyDeleteThough for $6.99 I might consider doing it and bailing out when the month was up.
DeleteLehman Engel -- who wrote and conducted music on Broadway for a couple of decades from the '40s into the'60s and then ran a famous workshop for composers -- said even a professional wouldn't know what he thought of a score on first hearing. I believe he confessed to not knowing what he thought of "Fiddler on the Roof" the first time he heard it. I, no Engel, wrote there was no breakout song in "A Chorus Line," completely not registering the 10 o"clock number, "What I Did for Love."
ReplyDeleteI mention this because we are no longer in Engel's era (or my later one) when an audience would know some of the "Hamilton" songs from radio. And the show is basically sung-through. When I saw it I found following it hard work because it was mostly unfamiliar. My daughter-in-law, seeing it for the third time from the balcony (while I was kvelling in the 14th row) said it was the first time she was really aware all through he show of the bullet (a dancer) that would kill Hamilton.
What I am getting at is that if don't have to like it because you paid $800 (which is like the pig's commitment in the parable of the hen and the pig), you might find it a struggle on the small screen at $6.99.
I was alive and reviewing when a producer had the audacity to charge $25 for a slight show with Liza Minelli and was thoroughly pilloried. Baseball priced the caddies and burger flippers out of the park, and now it wonders why the kids don't care. Broadway is busily pricing the blue-haired ladies from Connecticut out of the matinees, and that will be curtains for it.
Tom - Fiddler on the Roof is in my pantheon (I've probably mentioned that before).
DeleteI was in high school when A Chorus Line was running on Broadway. It was Uuuge among the theater kids. "One! singular sensation, every little step she takes ..." I saw a national touring version in Chicago, have to admit I didn't love it.
I discovered, while waiting in the Hot Tix line (or whatever it's called in New York) to buy same-day tickets at an alleged discount, that there are 14 lines to buy tickets for musicals, and one to buy tickets for non-musical plays, some of which are amazing - well, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that. Musicals, with their large casts and orchestras, must cost a large multiple more to produce than, say, something by Albee or Tennessee Williams or Pinter. But musicals are what the people want to see.
I have my own criteria. I don't want to see a staged Disney derivative of an animated film I've already seen. I want to see original work. And I don't want to pay Broadway prices to see South Pacific or Guys and Dolls or some other well-worn warhorse - I want something that people have built and are making work for the first time. And the jukebox musicals like Jersey Boys don't interest me at all. Lin-Manuel Miranda is right down the middle for me: a guy in his prime creative years doing original works and betting the house on getting it right.
Jim, I didn't mean to imply Fiddler wasn't in Engel/s pantheon, too. What he meant was that he, a professional, had to hear it a couple of times before he was sure.
DeleteThe first time a person hears anything is almost always "too many notes," as Emperor Josef II is alleged to have told Mozart. ("On Top of Old Smokey" and tunes of that genre may be the exceptions. And maybe Jerry Herman's assorted anthems, which he would reprise, reprise again and then reprise the reprises so it was an ear worm the first time.)
Fiddler on the roof, my brother was Tevya when they did it for a high school musical. He was the drunken Santa Claus for The Miracle on 34th Street. My sister was the mother superior in The Sound of Music. We teased her a little about that. I always enjoyed seeing my siblings in high school musicals much more than being in them myself; less stressful. Though I don't know what should be stressful about a one-liner bit part!
DeleteAbout Disney derivatives, I really don't like the computer-animated updates of classics. Or really any of the computer animated stuff. The characters look like they were made of sponge rubber. The granddaughters don't care though. They would just as soon see a you-tube of a kid in Australia doing toy demos. "Daddy, pleeez can't we do our own you-tube?" My son: "Nope. Too many creepers out there."
DeleteTom - right, I understood your point about Fiddler. I was just seizing the opportunity to say that I like it :-).
DeleteWith Engel's background and expertise, I'm sure he heard things that a consumer like me wouldn't hear when he listened to a score. I daresay that a Russian Jewish musical must have seemed risky. Bock and Harnick struck a certain balance between Eastern European musical themes, melodies and modes; and more conventional musical-theater idioms. That's my view, anyway, fwiw.
Did you know the original cast members actually had to learn to balance those milk bottles on their heads?
Delete(No hidden assistance.) Not only Tradition!, but Authentic!
Not to do with this thread, but to the previous one on David Haas. Which I think just went to "older posts".
ReplyDeleteAn "Oh, rats!" moment. Just realized our parish's beloved funeral song, Saints of God was a David Haas one. It has been sung it for every single funeral, while the priest was incensing the coffin, for at least 25 years. Know the alto harmony in my sleep.
Hamilton is only lower than the Book of Mormon in my list.
ReplyDeleteTotally forgettable "music" and, in the case of the latter, very sophomoric humor. "I have maggots in my scrotum."
I meant to say that the only thing lower than Hamilton in my list is BOM.
ReplyDeleteAh, even if you forget the music, never forget: "Talk less -- smile more." Good advice for Biden.
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