Currently out on Disney+. The film is performed my the original cast and was recorded in 2016. Has anyone here watched it? Thoughts?
I think that this is going to open a door for Broadway to make itself more accessible to the masses. How they took a stage production, put it to film, and still having the end product feel like a stage performance was outstanding to me.
As for the musical itself... I thought LaFayette/Jefferson stole the show. The dude was phenomenal in both roles and I hope he gets more opportunities in he future. The guy, who as my wife pointed out is apparently from Glee, was AMAZING as King George.
I found that Miranda's rapping and singing was the least memorable of the main cast. His story telling abilities, though, outweigh his deficiencies as a performer and I found his use of rap, among several others styles, to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton to be inspired.
I watched an interview he did where he speaks to how Hamilton's writing prowess has lead there to be more documents written by him than any other founding father. Rap has more words per measure than any other genre of music and he chose it so he would be able to fit in so much more information to tell a more complete story.
It was excellent and not at all preachy as you might expect from a main cast that is 87% POC on the subject of the slave owning forefathers. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud:
One of my friends at Disney said the initial production company recorded as many as a dozen different shows, then edited them together.
The production company spent $10 million to produce and while they had to rent five cameras, a steady-cam and 100 microphones, that seems a bit expensive to record only two shows.
I finally watched it, and I thought it lived up to the hype. Very impressive performances all around. It seems that a lot of people in here don't appreciate how much skill it takes to write and perform a production with this much rapping in it. [Reply]
Originally Posted by rabblerouser:
Someone grabbing their junk while spewing obscenities over a sampled beat hardly qualifies as "music", friend.
I didn't realize you were the gatekeeper for what is and isn't music based on a, apparently, extremely small sample size (if that is what you really think rap music is about).
Tell me, friend, can you tell me a little about your experience with rap? Like, what songs or what groups have influenced your opinion on this music. [Reply]
Originally Posted by rabblerouser:
Someone grabbing their junk while spewing obscenities over a sampled beat hardly qualifies as "music", friend.
Well damn. This guy has just solved why a genre has been around for 30+ years.
While I'll admit there is plenty of bad rap i can say that for any genre of music. True rappers are wordsmiths and there are a ton of different techniques and intricacies. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud:
One of my friends at Disney said the initial production company recorded as many as a dozen different shows, then edited them together.
The production company spent $10 million to produce and while they had to rent five cameras, a steady-cam and 100 microphones, that seems a bit expensive to record only two shows.
Before Covid they would have made $30-$40 million on opening weekend. Then the DVD money. Then to Disney+.
Was your people in the know surprised they went ahead and released to Disney+ instead of riding out Covid? [Reply]
Originally Posted by BigRedChief:
Before Covid they would have made $30-$40 million on opening weekend. Then the DVD money. Then to Disney+.
Was your people in the know surprised they went ahead and released to Disney+ instead of riding out Covid?
I had rumors about it for a while but from my understanding, the Disney+ deal didn't happen until after Bob Iger returned to his CEO post (after "retiring" for about a month).
I gotta hand it to Iger, man. He rarely makes mistakes and even when he makes mistakes (e.g., KK and Star Wars), Disney still earns a boatload. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud:
I had rumors about it for a while but from my understanding, the Disney+ deal didn't happen until after Bob Iger returned to his CEO post (after "retiring" for about a month).
I gotta hand it to Iger, man. He rarely makes mistakes and even when he makes mistakes (e.g., KK and Star Wars), Disney still earns a boatload.
The parks shutting down because of COVID has to be killing them. Their losses must be astronomical? [Reply]
Originally Posted by MagicHef:
I enjoyed it very much, but was shocked by how much Miranda was overshadowed by every other person in the production.
I saw the pre-Broadway run of Spamalot in Chicago. Tim Curry played King Arthur, and I went in thinking there couldn't be a better choice to stand in for the late great Graham Chapman. But his performance was flat as a board; pretty much everybody else blew him off the stage. Especially David Hyde Pierce, who played Robin. [Reply]
