With Great Performances: Hamilton's America, PBS brings Lin-Manuel Miranda and his phenomenally successful Broadway musical into the home and classroom. The 82-minute documentary both chronicles the creation and reception of Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) and teaches viewers about the historical life and times of Alexander Hamilton and his compatriots, while also making the past relatable for contemporary audiences. As one of several high-profile Hamilton paratexts, the documentary is valuable for scholars, students, and especially fans of the musical. The production is entertaining and informative, and it provides insight into the meanings of the musical and its motivating philosophy. The documentary features numerous interviews with Hamilton's cast and crew as well as celebrated figures such as Barack Obama, Stephen Sondheim, and Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow. However, the most compelling scenes are the excerpts of the show performed by the original Broadway cast and video footage of the early stages of Hamilton's genesis. Fortunately, director Alex Horwitz, a college friend of Miranda's, had the foresight to document Miranda's early work on Hamilton for posterity. The documentary is obsessed with origins: the origins of the musical and, in parallel, the origins of the nation. It frequently draws connections between the show and its historical subject, and between Miranda and Hamilton. The underlying purpose of the film, and in many ways the musical itself, is to render the American Revolutionary era alive and meaningful to our own time. This focus on similarities between then and now is a ubiquitous theme in both the interviews and the film's overall structure. For example, during a visit to the Museum of American Finance, Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. read the increasingly tense letters exchanged by Hamilton and Burr leading up to their infamous duel, after which Odom explains how much more quickly the feud could escalate today: "I might piss you off on Twitter and then you send me a text and I send you a text back, and then it's on" (1:10:19). The filmmakers also structure the documentary by interweaving historical record, the musical, and the present-day lives of the cast and crew. In one rousing scene, "The World Turned Upside Down" from Hamilton underscores Miranda's interview from the show's debut week at the Public Theater. He exclaims, "Our show opened on Tuesday and the WORLD blew up! This is crazy! I don't know what the future holds. I know that our show opened and everyone freaked out" (36:30)! Furthermore, the film features stylish graphics of both period documents and newly made illustrations in the style of early American art. It treats Miranda's early drafts of Hamilton lyrics with similar reverence, juxtaposing artifacts of the past and the present. Even the cinematography subtly recreates the same golden and sepia color scheme of the musical, creating an antiqued look.
Both Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and recent all-female productions of Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 dramatize historical events of the American Revolution with women and people of colour in the roles of white ‘founding fathers’. This article juxtaposes the casting and reception of these history musicals to theorize the ways their non-traditional casting opens up new possibilities for cultural memory of that revered era in US history. Underlying the seemingly progressive embodied performance, the written texts of both 1776 and Hamilton perpetuate founders chic and rehearse traditional versions of the nation’s founding story. Thus they expose but do not subvert the construction of whiteness and masculinity as unmarked categories that have always dominated US culture. The process of upholding the old version while blending it with the new exemplifies the incremental process of cultural memory as it shapes national identity.
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