Okay, maybe Hamilton is peak I-would-have-voted-for-Obama-a-third-term-if-I-could, but you can’t deny the music is incredible and the depth of interconnected character conflict surpasses the majority of what gets popular nowadays. I saw this on Broadway with the same cast as this recording (except for Jonathan Groff)—due to my age and complete lack of interest in the musical scene, I was probably one of the few going into it blind. It floored me at the time, but I still had one reservation, one I expressed in the car ride out of New York, much to my supposedly more theater-experienced extended family’s dismay: Lin-Manuel Miranda. No, not his writing (of which I find little fault besides the occasional Marvel-y/normie wisecracks that don’t land), but his casting. He just isn’t on par with the rest of the cast. Unlike everyone else, his weak, pulled-back voice and ungraceful movement doesn’t capture the inner-life of his character. Hamilton (as depicted in the text) is an assertive, brash man whose downfall is not his timidity but his unquestioning foolhardy determination.
I’m totally fine with writers/directors/etc putting themselves in their own work, but they have to be the absolute best pick for the role if that’s what they choose to do. There was no other man alive capable of playing the pathetic, drunk (yet somehow still charismatic) Robert Harmon in Love Streams than Cassavetes himself, for example. This was not the case with Hamilton. No other moment demonstrates this more than during “It’s Quiet Uptown,” which is supposed to be the emotional linchpin of the show: the camera starts on Miranda who is reaching really hard for tears or some sort of genuine reaction to the event that had just occurred (no spoilers), but it’s just not coming. While Miranda is throwing out his back attempting to act, the camera then pans to Eliza (Soo) whose tears are flowing. I nearly laughed but kept it in to not ruin the moment for my mother who was seeing it for the first time—in my head though, I played back the moment in Lady Bird when they’re all practicing for the musical and the instructor says that they’re going to play a game to see who can cry first. Everyone starts contorting their faces, and then we cut to the instructor whose essentially having an emotional breakdown. Miranda isn’t in the same league.
Every other performance besides Miranda’s is the best I could possibly imagine. Leslie Odom Jr. is the perfect Burr. You can see the boiling resentment deep within him, the way he moves on the stage, slouching, moving in the shadows, always below the more popular characters like Washington and Jefferson. Somehow Odom manages to convey that to the back row of a theater while simultaneously not looking ridiculous in close-up (a stark contrast to Miranda who I thought was hamming it up when I saw Hamilton from from 15 rows away). I almost wish this were Burr. Maybe based on Gore Vidal’s book. It probably would have ended up more like Amadeus, but I think it would have been a good trade-off of a bit of originality in return for centralizing the more nuanced character (and performance).
Anyways, I sound pretty negative, but I still love Hamilton. I just prefer all of the songs that are about all the characters around Hamilton rather than about the man himself. Luckily, the musical is massive—it’s much much more than just Miranda’s performance. It’s getting a four this time (partially because of the mix which I’ll explain in a note below), but my original experience in 2015/2016 will always be a five in the history books.
Note: the mix is definitely not as good as the album recording. For example, Angelica (Goldsberry) gets lost in the cacophony on “Satisfied” during the last chorus in this 5.1 mix while she has a finite presence on the stereo mix. There just seems to be better balance overall on the album recording. Now, I will say my listening setup does give a little bit of an advantage toward the stereo mix since I just have a simple 2.0 speaker setup (although a very nice one at that). My receiver mixes the center and surround channels into stereo. I may be getting a center speaker in the near future, so maybe that’ll be an excuse to revisit this and see if my opinion on the mix changes. Also, I can definitely hear the bit of mushiness that’s characteristic of a lossy recording—hopefully we’ll get a blu-ray of this in the future, but I doubt it (for reference, I’m listening to the 24bit flac of the album recording on Qobuz).