Hamilton to stream on Disney plus at America’s moment of reckoning
The blockbuster musical Hamilton has a cast of actors of colour. It opens to mass audiences worldwide in the wake of the killing by police officers of a black man.
It feels strange to be talking about Hamilton right now, says Daveed Diggs, one of the original cast members and a Tony Award winner for his performance in the hip-hop blockbuster musical. On the one hand, he’s pleased — if a little apprehensive — about a film of the stage show coming to Disney’s streaming service next week, making one of the hottest tickets in the world accessible to audiences who, at this rate, might never get a chance to see it live.
But, he says, it’s also strange to think that this is “a fixed version, frozen in time”, something that can be returned to and re-examined and “that will have to be in conversation with every era”.
Hamilton presents a version of America “that is idealised in some ways”, he says.
Set in the 18th century, Hamilton combines rap, R&B and show tunes to tell the story of “founding father” Alexander Hamilton, the Revolutionary War, political and military battles, duels, death, love, ambition and identity. All the characters except for one, that of George III, are played by actors of colour.
For Diggs, 38, it’s a vision of the country’s independence “presented essentially as it was, a very active revolutionary act. We just placed that same story on the bodies of an America that looks more like the America we know about today.” Furthermore, he adds, “if you buy into that and that inspires you, then you have to buy into the idea of change or fundamental change for the country. And that’s the lens that I view it through.”
This film version was shot in June 2016, over the course of three performances, just after the show had won 11 Tony Awards, including best featured actor in a musical for Diggs. It’s intended to give a sense of what it’s like to be present in the theatre audience, complete with intermission and curtain calls. A couple of adjustments have been made, including the trimming of two of the three f..ks to secure the film’s PG rating.
Scheduled to arrive in cinemas next year, the release has been brought forward. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music and lyrics and played the title role, backed the straight-to-streaming decision.
“Now in this moment where there is no theatre we have the gift of this show and the snapshot of this moment and I’m really grateful for that,” he said during a press conference last week.
Diggs, alongside Christopher Jackson, who plays George Washington, was involved from the beginning, when Miranda was trying out an early iteration of the production in workshops.
In the first act, Diggs plays the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who became one of Hamilton’s revolutionary allies. In the second act he’s Thomas Jefferson, who — after spending the war as ambassador in Paris — returns with a flourish to become Hamilton’s principal antagonist. Like many of the founding fathers, Jefferson was a slave owner, a historical detail referenced but not explored in detail in the musical. “It’s not actually missing, it’s just never really talked about,” Diggs says.
But, he says, “make no mistake, Thomas Jefferson is wheeled in at the beginning of act two by all of his slaves: those ensemble members who were wheeling me around on stage in that moment are playing slaves. The reason that Thomas gets to behave the way he does is because of his privilege directly related to slavery. And he and Hamilton fight about it at the cabinet battle,” a key scene of conflict in which the abolition of slavery is debated.
Diggs describes Hamilton as “a great gateway drug … If you don’t like rap music, it’s a gateway drug for rap, if you don’t like musicals, it’s a gateway drug for musicals. There are so many different points of entry into it.
“I think part of the hope is that it will inspire you to look for more information about those things that you didn’t know you liked … It was my gateway musical. I had had no interaction with Broadway … It’s become a world that I have grown to love and participate in and care about.” And, he adds, “if you’re not an American history buff, it’s the gateway drug for American history”.
Hamilton has established initiatives to develop a more complex awareness of American history, something Diggs appreciates and would like to extend. “A lot of the cast members talk about it: how to figure out ways to point to other voices from the same time period that we should be reading and learning about.”
It’s a musical that invites people to consider the past, and it can challenge them to think about the present and future.
The film version opens to mass audiences worldwide in the wake of the killing by police officers of a black man, George Floyd — a time when America is involved in a reckoning.
“There is a debate going on in America that questions what we are willing to change in order to actually protect the lives of all of our citizens,” Diggs says. “(A debate) about how much we are willing as a society to give up, to acknowledge that some of the ways that a lot of us figured out to be successful are based on a system that’s fundamentally racist, and fundamentally sexist and fundamentally queerphobic, and that discriminates and refuses to allow full participation — even the right to live — to so many of its citizens.”
He’s not sure how he feels about where this reckoning might lead. “I think I’m generally an optimistic person, but I am the most pessimistic version of optimistic that has ever been. It probably just comes with age, but I think I am exhausted in a lot of ways by the moment. I am also inspired by young people — the kids always inspire me.”
But he adds. “I am exhausted by — if I’m going to be just frank about it — I’m exhausted by the positioning of a lot of white people in my life who seem to feel like this moment is new.”
After all, he says, it was years earlier that he started writing his 2018 feature, Blindspotting, about a cold-blooded police killing. “That was the same moment. And I have felt equally out of place in my skin, in this country, for the entirety of my life.”
Blindspotting, which he also produced and starred in, was meant to go into production several years earlier. But the Broadway run of Hamilton came up, and Diggs and his friend, co-writer and co-star Rafael Casal put it on hold for what he thought would be no more than six months. “It turned into three years,” he says.
He has done theatre, TV and film since Hamilton, and released music with his experimental rap group, Clipping. He’s currently in the Netflix series Snowpiercer, and next up is The Good Lord Bird, coming to Stan in October. He plays Frederick Douglass, the pioneering social reformer, writer and orator born into slavery in 1817.
The series is based on a book of the same name by James McBride. “If you haven’t read that novel, you should. It’s one of the most fascinating pieces of writing I’ve ever read,” Diggs says.
The Good Lord Bird is the story of abolitionist John Brown (played by Ethan Hawke) and his celebrated attempt to raid Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and begin a slave revolt. “It’s told from the perspective of a pre-teen, cross-dressing former slave boy, Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson) whom John Brown liberates by killing his father. It’s so good.
“I get to play a version of Frederick Douglass told through this lens — so Frederick Douglass is the first black person of wealth that Onion ever meets. He is, at that moment, the most famous person in the world, the most photographed human being in the world, and he lives in relative opulence in the North with two wives. All of this stuff that Onion can’t even wrap his young brain around. What it manages to do, for Frederick Douglass, and I think for everybody in the show, is something we tried to do with Thomas Jefferson too — humanise our heroes a little bit and understand that they are actually more impressive because they are flawed.
“And because Onion doesn’t have to hold him in any sort of esteem, not actually knowing who this guy is, you’ll be able to point out some fascinating flaws in Frederick Douglass and make him a bit of a fool who was also the most brilliant speaker you have ever heard in your life.”
The most famous example of Douglass’s gift is the July 4 speech from 1852, in which he spoke of the Declaration of Independence and the continuing existence of slavery and said: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Parts of it can be heard in The Good Lord Bird. “It was one of the great joys of my life,” Diggs says, “just getting to learn and say those words”.
Hamilton streams on Disney+ from July 3. The Good Lord Bird is on Stan from August 9. The Australian production of Hamilton opens next year at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, with presales from August 24
