Hamilton
Disney+Hamilton, unofficially subtitled Theatre Kids' Second Coming of Christ, is a musical widely revered as being one of the best of the millennium – or even all time. So, let's quickly rush through the highlights.
The unprecedented and long overdue representation it gave performers of colour on Broadway. Jonathan Groff. Renée Elise Goldsberry. The tsunami of spittle endlessly escaping from human sprinkler Jonathan Groff's mouth any time he speaks. The occasionally toe-tapping songs. The stage manager who had to clean up Jonathan Groff's plentiful fountain of mouth water, presumably to repackage and subsequently sell it as Dasani or to put inside one of those Mickey Mouse misting fans you get at Disneyland.
That seems about it. Right, onto the crap. Firstly, the elephant in the room. And no, not the shiny trail of slobber Jonathan Groff leaves in his wake like a snail. The genuine, serious problem of Hamilton's Founding Father propaganda.
Hamilton is a story mostly about slave traders, slave owners and people who were okay with both. The focal protagonist, Alexander Hamilton, happens to come under both the first and third in that list. Making a story about how great Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to think he was sounded like a bad idea from the start, exacerbated by the incredible lack of attention, and seemingly even credence, writer and main star Miranda treats the context of the story with.
Instead, he whitewashes the story – ironic, considering the intentional casting of the Founding Fathers as people of colour, something which could have worked conjunctionally with a more realistic depiction of those Founding Fathers but the effect of which is dampened by the dishonest script. This dishonesty is exemplified perfectly by its inclusions and omissions: the British are rightfully depicted as a setback to American progression but the racism of Hamilton is not – although whether down to Miranda's laziness, agenda or otherwise is unclear. The revolutionary, rags-to-riches portrayal of Hamilton is laid bare, if improperly developed; his passive acceptance of slavery is not. This glorified, romanticised, pick-and-mix version of events betrays Miranda's intentions of appealing to the same faux-progressive types of white liberalism that Get Out rightfully lambasted, and this is a problem so inextricably tied to the foundations of the musical it is impossible to overlook.
Elsewhere, Lin-Manuel Miranda's singing/rapping/speed-talking voice – delete as appropriate for every song or keep a running tally on which style and velocity of speech he uses most in each musical number for entertainment whilst watching – exists in a previously untapped realm of shrill terribleness. It all but violates the Geneva convention, presumably having the same maddening effect on humans as fireworks do on dogs. Mice can hear it clearly, but it's rumoured they pretend not to. Miranda might make a mint from royalties; they could use it in army training camps as a form of aural torture to weed out fallible recruits, as a sound to drive away loiterers outside shops and train stations or, if all else fails, as a sonic weapon come World War 3. The running theme here isn't exactly positive, but money talks! If anyone takes me up on one of the above I demand ten percent of the profits on intellectual property grounds.
Additionally, there are 46 songs in the soundtrack. 46! The word 'excessive' seems not to be in Miranda's vocabulary, the result being that so many of the songs bleed indistinguishably into each other, any songs you did – at some point during the time-consuming void of Hamilton – recall liking fall into a pit of obscurity, reprises and barely variant pieces, oddly similar to how the Netflix algorithm works. A massacre of music, a crime scene of cacophony where the DNA of each individual song pools with all the others, losing any individualism; think what happens when you accidentally wash light and dark clothes together – although that would still result in a more artful outcome than Hamilton.
What's more, for three-quarters of these songs one will be treated, at least in some capacity, to Miranda's trauma-inducing warbling. Oh well, at least Guantanamo Bay has some new auditory material to use for their interrogations.