Hamilton on Disney Plus: Lin-Manuel Miranda reveals how Australians will connect with it
Hamilton the musical may be about American history, but Lin-Manuel Miranda believes his famous hit will connect with TV and stage audiences here when it streams on Disney Plus this week.
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There are many reasons Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda wanted to bring a filmed version of his acclaimed, award-winning musical to the wider world, not least of which to put an end to years of bragging by hipsters and rich people.
Ever since it stormed New York’s Broadway in 2015, the hip-hop musical about the colourful life of US founding father Alexander Hamilton has been the hottest ticket in town, almost impossible to get and often selling for thousands of dollars on the resale market.
Miranda played the title role from the project’s inception in 2013 until his farewell performance at the Richard Rogers Theatre in 2016 and it’s become something of a badge of honour among the theatre crowd to have seen the dazzling production with its original Broadway cast. But with performances sold out months in advance even before the Great White Way closed down early this year when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Miranda is grateful that he and his production colleagues had the foresight to film the musical just before several of the key original cast left. That production will drop on streaming service Disney+ this Friday, Miranda’s gift to a theatre world still in limbo.
“It takes away the hipster, rich-person brag of ‘I saw Hamilton with the original company’,” says the affable, energetic Miranda with a laugh, via Zoom call from his New York home. “Everyone will have seen it with the original company on July 3rd. And what really blows my mind is that more people will probably see this show between July 3rd and July 5th than have seen it in the previous five years.
“Because even if you have six productions running, you are barely touching the million mark – and Disney+ has 50 million subscribers right now. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that legacy and what that is going to do.”
With its diverse cast including African-American and Latino actors playing the very white founding fathers such as the title character, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not to mention the dazzling blend of hip-hop, pop culture references and more traditional musical elements, Hamilton became something of a cultural phenomenon on its release. Not only did it find a legion of high-profile fans (including former president Barack Obama), it also won a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, 11 Tony Awards from a record 16 nominations and spawned No. 1 album in the US. In addition to the Broadway show, there are also productions in Los Angeles, London’s West End and an Australian version due to open in Sydney next March, which will then travel to Melbourne.
Miranda has fond memories of his time spent in Australia rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tim Minchin and Eddie Perfect at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as part of the improvisational comedy rap collective Freestyle Love Supreme (you can find footage of him rapping about Vegemite on YouTube) more than a decade ago, before his breakout musical In the Heights hit it big on Broadway in 2008. He says while lockdowns and travel restrictions have forced producers to adapt to a more virtual environment for a musical that is fiendishly difficult to rehearse, he’s confident Hamilton will go ahead here. Two rounds of auditions have already been held in Australia, with a planned third round now being done online, with an eye to announcing predominantly a homegrown cast in September.
“When the pandemic hit, (auditions) turned into these virtual Hamilton bootcamps,” he says.
“We do bootcamps all the time because the physical language of the show is so specific and the musical language of the show is so specific. So, we have continued to do that work and we are confident that we will be able to get an incredible Australian company and be all systems go in March as we promised.”
And while Hamilton is about a specific time and place in US history, Miranda believes it can connect with Australian and global audiences in the same way that the Les Miserables – set in the Paris uprisings of 1832 – has for decades. He says that the political and personal battles in the show, between Hamilton and his nemesis Aaron Burr and rivals such as Jefferson and Madison, are as relevant today as they were when they played out more than 200 years ago but different moments come to the fore according to the news and the mood of the times.
“Everything has changed – and nothing has changed,” he says. “The original sin of slavery and the effects it still has on black lives in this moment are still being felt and so because that is the conversation that’s happening right now in this country, those lyrics will pop in a different way to they did in the Obama era or when Trump won the election.
“Different things pop because of what’s happening in the national conversation because everything that was present at the founding is still present – good and bad.”
Miranda felt strongly enough about the current Black Lives Matter movement surging around the world that he felt compelled to address it from the official Hamilton social media channels as well as his own, saying that he wanted the production to be “on the right side of history”. While the onstage cast is famously diverse – Miranda is of Puerto Rican descent – he admits that’s not necessarily the case backstage and in the audience and is hoping that the pause in the theatre business right now can also be a chance to reset and address the imbalance.
“The goal in this moment where everything has stopped is to address those things head on so that we can emerge in a more equitable system and continue to fight for that and continue to make sure that the black and brown company members understand that we have their back,” he says.
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Miranda professes to be a fan of Australia’s own Broadway king, Hugh Jackman, who was also due be treading the boards in New York again this year in a revival of the classic musical The Music Man. But his admiration pales into insignificance compared to that of his father, Luis, a political consultant to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, about whom Lin just made a documentary.
“I am a little envious of how my dad loves The Greatest Showman maybe more than anything I have ever written and Hugh Jackman is obviously a huge part of that,” says Miranda, laughing uproariously. “He is obviously a renaissance man and I have followed his career since Oklahoma. I remember when he was cast as Wolverine and I was like ‘holy s---, Curly is playing f---ing Wolverine’ because I had seen footage from that West End production he starred in.
What chance then of an all-star Broadway team-up?
“Obviously my dad would be thrilled,” he chuckles. “I think he has a Music Man commitment – and I did not write that one – so he has to work that out, but he’s one of your finer cultural exports. Well done to you all.”
Hamilton streams on Disney+ from Friday
Originally published as Hamilton on Disney Plus: Lin-Manuel Miranda reveals how Australians will connect with it