TV critic Alan Sepinwall on why we need 'Hamilton,' arriving tomorrow on Disney+, now more than ever
The version arriving on Disney+ on Friday is stupendous in many ways. It offers the original cast at the peak of their powers, with Daveed Diggs spitting out Lafayette’s rhymes of “Guns and Ships” at lightning speed, and Phillipa Soo taking Eliza Hamilton’s righteous indignation in “Burn” to an even more vocally powerful place than she does on the show’s cast album.
Even before this pandemic rolled along to utterly rewrite the world as we thought we knew it, the optimism of the Obama administration had begun to feel like it happened centuries ago. Social progress isn’t as linear as we might wish, and the last few years have featured white supremacists marching in the streets — and working in the White House — immigrant children in cages, and video after video of brazen, horrific police brutality against people of color.
It’s a four-year-old performance, but every scene, every song, every stylistic device feels acutely current. The idea of having black and brown actors play the founding fathers plays even more potently in this moment when George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath have forced us all to reckon with the racism that has been baked into the American experiment from its beginning.
Even more than in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign, the show’s depiction of Burr as an empty suit who stands for nothing but his own advancement — whose greatest pleasure comes from campaigning for its own sake, to bask in his supporters’ adoration rather than to argue for anything that might assist them — points a glaring neon arrow towards the current holder of the job Burr tried and failed to win in the election of 1800.
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