summer in the city, lots of people in a rush and some fangirls sittin' pretty
For the last week I was in New York City, with some of my very favourite humans. I had a brilliant time and I... got to see Hamilton!
And not just any Hamilton. We booked tickets months and months and months ago, and yet somehow the date we picked ended up being the date of the once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated FULL CAST REUNION. We got every single original cast member. Including Jonathan Groff, who left a while ago. The show we saw was literally the one being filmed for posterity/the inevitable DVD. I have NO IDEA how some fangirls can get that lucky, how that can even happen. But I am here to tell you all that it CAN AND DID. To us. Whaaat.
I have way more thoughts and feelings than I can adequately describe, but as you might have guessed, I am feeling the need to express some of them anyway. I was kind of bracing myself for having massively huge expectations about to be dashed (what can I say, I am naturally a complete frickin doomsayer) but no. Of course it was a real performance, and different from the cast recording, but the actual show was just wonderful in a... a living way, a more fully realised way. It made me love it even more. I am so impressed that the cast managed this when the pressure must be incredible - some of us went to a Ham4Ham show (ie the tiny five-minute ticket lottery gigs) and there were literally three thousand people shrieking and screaming. Almost the entire audience knew the show already! There were cops on crowd control for a Broadway musical! We heard that our tickets would resell, had we decided to, for ridiculous amounts of money more than we paid. Just, wow. What. That they manage to perform at all under the weight of the sheer SCALE of the Hamilton Phenomenon is brilliant. It just gave me such love for these performers. And also made me want to see even more versions of the show in times to come.
Some more random observations:
- Hamilton himself is just even more frustrating slash amazing slash brilliant in performance. LMM isn't the strongest performer of the cast, but there is absolutely something about seeing him literally dance with frustation or huff like a petulant child at being told to sit down or just get struck with grief through, okay, basically all of Act 2. LMM played him with every raw edge on display and that really hit home. He literally cannot stop until he gets his plan through Congress, and it's fucking heartbreaking.
- Eliza. This is Eliza's musical. This is Eliza's doing. She literally made this possible. Philippa Soo is amazing. Hamilton is the energy and the mind: Eliza is the heart, and this is not a musical that undervalues that. When we cried at the end, it was Eliza's tears we were crying.
Oh and also she beatboxes and it's THE GREATEST.
- BURR. Leslie Odom took a little while to warm up I felt - his voice was a lot harsher, felt more strained initially. I wondered if maybe he was the one for whom the pressure was showing a bit: he is the lynchpin of the show, it literally all hangs on him, and that's got to be TOUGH. But he pulled it off. By the time he has to knock it out of the park in Wait For It, he was fully on. His voice is mesmerising when he's on. And Burr is so fundamentally human: he is the apparent bad guy, the damn fool who shot him, and yet this musical doesn't work if you don't care about him. If you don't sympathise, somewhere, with being a falliable person who makes mistakes that ricochet forever.
- Oh god the staging of Dear Theodosia is just too perfect and I actually can't. The links between Hamilton and Burr and even better with the staging.
- Angelicaaaaa. The rewind is just as good as I heard, and jesus, the power Renee brings. I would watch a whole show of her. I think it's clearer in the show that the reason her best raps are not literal conversations but 'in her head' monologues is just because she is not in a world where she can be publically as talented as she is. And the sisterly chemistry between the Schuylers is just beautiful... there is HUGGING. And the whole "Angelica, tell my husband"/"Angelica, tell my wife" bit is even more hilarious with that.
- Groffsauce as King George is HYSTERICAL. There were so many perfect touches: Groff was clearly having FAR too much fun stomping his feet and staring at us and making people move chairs. Though my favourite bit is still "Awesome. Wow." Which I am now incapable of saying like a real human.
- Daveed Diggggggssss. His face is even more excellent in person, and his French accent is even more hilarious/perfect in person, and then his Thomas Jefferson turns up and is just like... waving to the screeching crowds while the chorus/slaves tidy for him and it's like, why hello. Yes you are the single best performer in a cast of excellent performers. (And he REALLY DOES rap that fast WHILE LEAPING AROUND. In, like, REAL LIFE. RIGHT THERE.)
- Jasmine Cephas-Jones gets more to do than I thought! Her "...and PEGGY!" is brilliant and a lot more dynamic, active than you get from the recording. And her Maria Reynolds gets a lot more depth when you can see her.
- That said, 'Say No To This' is EVEN MORE AWKWARD than I expected. You have literally the entire chorus going "NO THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA" and the deliberate sexiness is exactly balanced on the line of skeevy weirdness. It feels inappropriate. I found it really hard to watch.
- Can we talk about John Laurens and Philip Hamilton? Cause they were both done so well, and I DID NOT think a grown man could actually pull of being a soldier, a teenager, and a child in the same show. But well, Anthony Ramos sold it. Completely. And at least one person in the audience did not know what happened to Philip, and GASPED. It was amazing.
- Christopher Jackson basically IS George Washington. I will hold no debate on this subject because I have never seen a human being with that much natural gravitas and authority. Ever. I want him to be the rap battle judge on my LIFE. And the bit in One Last Time where the staging switches the song gradually between Hamilton and Washington is just gut-wrenching in a whole new way.
- Hercules Mulligan and James Madison are both even funnier than they are in the cast recording. And SUCH different performances - so many kudos to Oak Onadawan. Both Mulligan and Madison are roles where they could easily get overwhelmed, but they do not.
- The battles are just... mindblowing. The use of the set and costuming and ridculously talented chorus dancers to show the bloodshed and carnage is another thing I couldn't have guessed would be as great in real life as it is. It's so powerful. And without a single drop of fake blood.
- The minor characters were amazing: Samuel Seabury is hilarious (as is the other characters literally pushing and pulling Hamilton around before he jumps up on the table and gets into it!) in a way that's hard to get from the recording alone. It's much easier to follow! And Charles Lee going "whee!"
- I want to see so many more productions. The writing is so great, and I want to see what else can be brought from it with different staging, acting choices.
- But I am SO, SO GLAD I got to see these original performances.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/159120.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
And not just any Hamilton. We booked tickets months and months and months ago, and yet somehow the date we picked ended up being the date of the once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated FULL CAST REUNION. We got every single original cast member. Including Jonathan Groff, who left a while ago. The show we saw was literally the one being filmed for posterity/the inevitable DVD. I have NO IDEA how some fangirls can get that lucky, how that can even happen. But I am here to tell you all that it CAN AND DID. To us. Whaaat.
I have way more thoughts and feelings than I can adequately describe, but as you might have guessed, I am feeling the need to express some of them anyway. I was kind of bracing myself for having massively huge expectations about to be dashed (what can I say, I am naturally a complete frickin doomsayer) but no. Of course it was a real performance, and different from the cast recording, but the actual show was just wonderful in a... a living way, a more fully realised way. It made me love it even more. I am so impressed that the cast managed this when the pressure must be incredible - some of us went to a Ham4Ham show (ie the tiny five-minute ticket lottery gigs) and there were literally three thousand people shrieking and screaming. Almost the entire audience knew the show already! There were cops on crowd control for a Broadway musical! We heard that our tickets would resell, had we decided to, for ridiculous amounts of money more than we paid. Just, wow. What. That they manage to perform at all under the weight of the sheer SCALE of the Hamilton Phenomenon is brilliant. It just gave me such love for these performers. And also made me want to see even more versions of the show in times to come.
Some more random observations:
- Hamilton himself is just even more frustrating slash amazing slash brilliant in performance. LMM isn't the strongest performer of the cast, but there is absolutely something about seeing him literally dance with frustation or huff like a petulant child at being told to sit down or just get struck with grief through, okay, basically all of Act 2. LMM played him with every raw edge on display and that really hit home. He literally cannot stop until he gets his plan through Congress, and it's fucking heartbreaking.
- Eliza. This is Eliza's musical. This is Eliza's doing. She literally made this possible. Philippa Soo is amazing. Hamilton is the energy and the mind: Eliza is the heart, and this is not a musical that undervalues that. When we cried at the end, it was Eliza's tears we were crying.
Oh and also she beatboxes and it's THE GREATEST.
- BURR. Leslie Odom took a little while to warm up I felt - his voice was a lot harsher, felt more strained initially. I wondered if maybe he was the one for whom the pressure was showing a bit: he is the lynchpin of the show, it literally all hangs on him, and that's got to be TOUGH. But he pulled it off. By the time he has to knock it out of the park in Wait For It, he was fully on. His voice is mesmerising when he's on. And Burr is so fundamentally human: he is the apparent bad guy, the damn fool who shot him, and yet this musical doesn't work if you don't care about him. If you don't sympathise, somewhere, with being a falliable person who makes mistakes that ricochet forever.
- Oh god the staging of Dear Theodosia is just too perfect and I actually can't. The links between Hamilton and Burr and even better with the staging.
- Angelicaaaaa. The rewind is just as good as I heard, and jesus, the power Renee brings. I would watch a whole show of her. I think it's clearer in the show that the reason her best raps are not literal conversations but 'in her head' monologues is just because she is not in a world where she can be publically as talented as she is. And the sisterly chemistry between the Schuylers is just beautiful... there is HUGGING. And the whole "Angelica, tell my husband"/"Angelica, tell my wife" bit is even more hilarious with that.
- Groffsauce as King George is HYSTERICAL. There were so many perfect touches: Groff was clearly having FAR too much fun stomping his feet and staring at us and making people move chairs. Though my favourite bit is still "Awesome. Wow." Which I am now incapable of saying like a real human.
- Daveed Diggggggssss. His face is even more excellent in person, and his French accent is even more hilarious/perfect in person, and then his Thomas Jefferson turns up and is just like... waving to the screeching crowds while the chorus/slaves tidy for him and it's like, why hello. Yes you are the single best performer in a cast of excellent performers. (And he REALLY DOES rap that fast WHILE LEAPING AROUND. In, like, REAL LIFE. RIGHT THERE.)
- Jasmine Cephas-Jones gets more to do than I thought! Her "...and PEGGY!" is brilliant and a lot more dynamic, active than you get from the recording. And her Maria Reynolds gets a lot more depth when you can see her.
- That said, 'Say No To This' is EVEN MORE AWKWARD than I expected. You have literally the entire chorus going "NO THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA" and the deliberate sexiness is exactly balanced on the line of skeevy weirdness. It feels inappropriate. I found it really hard to watch.
- Can we talk about John Laurens and Philip Hamilton? Cause they were both done so well, and I DID NOT think a grown man could actually pull of being a soldier, a teenager, and a child in the same show. But well, Anthony Ramos sold it. Completely. And at least one person in the audience did not know what happened to Philip, and GASPED. It was amazing.
- Christopher Jackson basically IS George Washington. I will hold no debate on this subject because I have never seen a human being with that much natural gravitas and authority. Ever. I want him to be the rap battle judge on my LIFE. And the bit in One Last Time where the staging switches the song gradually between Hamilton and Washington is just gut-wrenching in a whole new way.
- Hercules Mulligan and James Madison are both even funnier than they are in the cast recording. And SUCH different performances - so many kudos to Oak Onadawan. Both Mulligan and Madison are roles where they could easily get overwhelmed, but they do not.
- The battles are just... mindblowing. The use of the set and costuming and ridculously talented chorus dancers to show the bloodshed and carnage is another thing I couldn't have guessed would be as great in real life as it is. It's so powerful. And without a single drop of fake blood.
- The minor characters were amazing: Samuel Seabury is hilarious (as is the other characters literally pushing and pulling Hamilton around before he jumps up on the table and gets into it!) in a way that's hard to get from the recording alone. It's much easier to follow! And Charles Lee going "whee!"
- I want to see so many more productions. The writing is so great, and I want to see what else can be brought from it with different staging, acting choices.
- But I am SO, SO GLAD I got to see these original performances.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/159120.html. Please comment there using OpenID.