Monday: Hamilton: The Movie

This film of the original Broadway play became available  for television viewing  Friday, just in time for the Fourth of July.   It had been scheduled for theatrical release in October 2021, but nobody knew if movie theaters would re-open by then or if audiences would be willing even to go to theaters.

So the film opened on Disney+, the entertainment giant's new streaming effort.  No, you cannot watch it on one of those free trials that Hulu and other services offer.  But look at it this way: A month or three of streaming is much, much cheaper than a ticket to the play ever was.

I saw the Hamilton in New York in late 2015 with the same cast and loved it.

But I was wary of this filmed version.  I wondered whether it could convey the enthusiasm that Hamilton generated in Broadway audiences.  In fact, it can't.  But what makes up for that is a three-camera production that shares all the full-stage scenes and also close shots of actors' faces in key moments.  And the actors in this are great.

We all know the story.  If you want detail, you can read my discussion or, better, Ron Chernow's  absorbing biography, Alexander Hamilton.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Puerto Rican immigrant, read that book and made the material his own by writing this play, scoring it with hip-hop songs and nods to operatic recitative dialogue, and then casting African American, Hispanic and Asian actors in the key roles.  The effect is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine Hamilton with a white cast. 

Think of it as a huge 21st-century expansion of the idea of Woody Guthrie's song, "This Land Is Your Land."  Most Americans can trace their ancestry to immigrants or Native Americans who were treated badly or worse, but the message we have for each other now is this:  This land belongs to you and me -- to all of us.

It's a generous theme, and I hope we will keep it in mind as a pandemic foments emotional  frustration and rage, and, worse, anarchy by people aiming to burn down the whole foundation without offering a better alternative.  This too shall pass.

Meanwhile, watch Hamilton.  It's just right for this moment.


Notes

If you are under the age of 30, you probably know the Hamilton score by heart.  If not, this highlights video will bring you up to  date.

-----

Hamilton creator Miranda was one of those high school theater kids (musical theater in his case), and he has said that he knew from an early age that if he wanted to make a career of his passion, he needed to come up with new productions that told stories about people like him.  His first play, In the Heights, set in the neighborhood where he was raised, was very popular in New York theaters and has been made into a film that is waiting to be released.

-----

7/11/2004 -- Today is the 196th anniversary of the Hamilton-Burr duel. Last week, David Crow at Den of Geek examined the antagonism between the two men and what was at stake and asks whether Hamilton really did "throw away my shot." 

Broadway and The Fantasticks

The annual Tony Awards ceremony is tomorrow evening.  The Tonys are the prizes for the year's best Broadway plays.  

Early odds favor "Dear Evan Hanson" as the best musical; "Oslo," a play about the 1990s Israel-PLO peace negotiations, as the best drama; and Bette Midler as the best actress for playing Bette Midler Dolly Levi in "Hello, Dolly!"

Meanwhile in New York, "The Fantasticks" is closing.  After a 42-year run starting in 1960, the play closed in 2002 because its Greenwich Village theater space was being redeveloped.  Then, in 2005, it was revived in another theater on West 50th Street, where it has run for another 12 years.   

With "Our Town," it is one of the most durable plays of the last century, economical to produce and with an evergreen story of young love and a memorable song with a circle-of-life theme. Outside New York, it has been performed by small theater companies and school drama departments worldwide. 

Here's a little rundown from 2016.

"The Fantasticks" was designed to be small; it is performed on a spartan stage by a cast of eight actors and employs a piano and harp for musical accompaniment.  It is a little play that has gone the distance.

I used to say that I was the only person born in the 20th century who had not seen "The Fantasticks."  When I heard the play was closing, I decided it was time to buy a ticket. 

It was great fun to watch, if perhaps dated in a couple ways.  I can imagine parents taking their children to see it, at least in the years before 1994, when Disney launched "Beauty and the Beast," the first of its lavish Broadway spectacles.  The children in my Fantasticks audience loved the slapstick and jokes while their parents got the references to Shakespearean plays.  

For a light play, "The Fantasticks" has deep roots:  These trace to a doomed-lovers' story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, proceed through Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and continue to French playwright Edmond Rostand's lighter treatment in "Les Romanesques" at the end of the 19th century.  Fantasticks combines the comedic theme of the Rostand play with a later plot twist, and it includes much of the silliness of Shakespeare's play-within-a-play in Midsummer Night's Dream.  

Theater as Investment

The first investors in "The Fantasticks" were either smarter than Warren Buffett or very lucky.  Their good fortune was described in a  2010 New York Times article.

Theater is a tough game for investors.  The traditional procedure is to open in a small venue or a regional theater,  and then, if a play proves out, to move to Broadway for the big, money-making run, as "Hamilton" did. 

Another, theoretically safer way to go is to Broadway-ize an already popular property.  This perhaps started with "The Producers," the 2001 musical remake of a 1968 movie; the play won 12 Tonys and ran for six years in New York and in theaters nationwide.  It also has worked for the many Disney stories.

Two seasons ago, "Fun Home," a musical based on a first-person graphic novel was big hit. Last year, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," a novel about an autistic boy, was turned into a successful play.  

This year's Broadway adaptation is a theatrical version of "Groundhog Day," the popular 1993 movie.  

This doesn't always work, of course. Investors socked $75 million into a flawed Broadway Spiderman musical that failed to earn out and probably assured that no other superhero plays will be tried in New York anytime soon.

Back to the Tonys

Here's a fun question:  What Broadway musical won the Tony best musical award for the year "The Fantasticks" was released?  

Answer:  "Bye Bye Birdie," which ran for about 600 performances and was made into a movie.

My guess is you would have a difficult time finding anyone under the age of 50 who has heard of that play or film.

"The Fantasticks," an off-Broadway (small theater) production, was not eligible, but it has resonated with audiences in well over 20,000 New York performances, among others.

There's something to be said for staying power.

The Song

Here is a nice rendition of the play's most remembered song.

The Hamilton Ticket Problem

If someone had told me five years ago that the hottest ticket on Broadway today would be a hip hop musical about the first U.S. secretary of the treasury, I would have laughed out loud.

But that is what happened.  I have seen Hamilton, and it is great.  I think everyone should see it.

In fact, just about everyone wants to see it.  A few months ago I read a commentary by a New York professional who felt not just out of the loop but personally ashamed when forced to admit to associates that she had not yet seen Hamilton.  The sentiment seemed a bit over the top -- oh, the agonies of the upper middle class! -- but the wish to see the play is widespread and keen.

Hamilton opened at the Richard Rodgers Theater last August.  The theater has 1,319 seats, and every single one of them is sold out for every performance through January 2017.

When you combine huge demand with virtually no supply, interesting things happen.  Here are some of them.


Fraud

By September last year, people were arriving at the Richard Rodgers Theater with credible looking tickets that turned out to be forgeries when run through the entrance scanning machine.

In October, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator and star, posted this warning on Twitter:

           I have friends who have been scammed on Craig and his so-called List.
           Don’t buy Hamilton tickets off there please.

By December, it was reported that people with counterfeit tickets, or with copies of actual tickets that had been "lost," were being turned away at almost every performance.

In February, a Manhattan man responded to a Craigslist offer of two Hamilton tickets, which he purchased at a meeting on a street corner for $300 cash.  Naturally the tickets were denied at the theater.  The man's wife went to Manhattan's 17th Police Precinct and made an issue of the case.   She also offered to set up a sting to catch the fellow who had taken their money.  The police agreed, the phony ticket seller was arrested and the police found two additional bogus Hamilton tickets in one of his pockets.  Later the Manhattan district attorney announced that the bad guy, who was on parole for weapons and drug convictions, had been indicted on 10 charges.

This made for a feel-good story that was reported by news outlets across the country and even in parts of Europe.  Unfortunately, it was almost certainly a one-off.

I just looked on Craigslist and found two offers of center orchestra Hamilton seats for $220 and $350 each.  I'm pretty sure that anyone who buys those tickets is going to be refused admission to the theater.

In fact, Craigslist is not the only source for fake tickets.

A couple weeks ago, a California billionaire who also appears on the CNBC Shark Tank show was surprised to find that the Hamilton tickets he had purchased on StubHub were fake.  He threw the usual rich-guy hissy fit --  "Do you know who I am!" -- but still was not allowed into the theater. (StubHub probably refunded the guy's money, but he surely would have preferred to see the show.)

Hamilton ticket buyers are urged by everyone from the show's promoters to the NYPD to purchase tickets only from reputable sellers.  But this introduces another problem.


Cost

Hamilton tickets, when you can find them, are priced from $67 to $177 (and $549 for "premium" seats), plus facility fees and markups by Ticketmaster.com, which handles the transactions.

(People hate Ticketmaster, by the way.  Consumer sites are filled with complaints about bait-and-switch seat locations and 30-minute wait times to speak to employees who refuse to fix problems.  Personally, I think the company's fees are unusually steep.)

After Hamilton opened and drew rave reviews, its run was extended two times and months' worth of tickets were released in two batches.

In one case, it was estimated that "bots," computerized telephone buying programs, purchased as many as 20,000 tickets, presumably for resale at much higher prices.  (People who attend Bruce Springsteen concerts have complained for years about rigged ticket purchases like these, but it seems to be a new problem on Broadway.)

One person who traveled to the theater's ticket office observed a similar action on the ground.

           One day last October, a new block of Hamilton tickets went on sale; I was there on
           line a half-hour before the box office opened. I got TO the box office THREE HOURS
           LATER. Why? Because the front of the line -- about 90 people in all that day --
           consisted entirely of young people (age 16-20) who were working for scalpers. The
           scalpers made no attempt to conceal what they were doing; I watched them peel off
           $100 bills from a large wad. They give the $$ to one of the young people, told the kid
           how many tickets to buy and in which location of the theater, then the scalpers stood
           outside the theater door to take possession of those tickets as soon as the kid finished
           at the box office.

I just looked on StubHub, which is regarded as a reputable reseller, and found tickets to the Saturday matinee performance priced between $450 and $850 per seat.

And Ticketmaster offers a resale programs whose tickets will not be turned away at the theater door.  Its prices for the Saturday matinee were higher, however -- $625  to $3,429 a seat.


Fairness

The people who invested early in Hamilton have made out very, very well.  Lin-Manuel Miranda is getting plenty of money for originating and developing this show.  Recently, it has been reported that cast members will share in the profits of this enterprise.   All of this is fine with me.  We should hope for more such projects.

I find it more difficult to justify the scalpers' profits, including those of the legal scalpers on StubHub and Ticketmaster.  They exist only to maintain the integrity of the tickets they sell and to harvest the highest possible prices for access to a play whose success owes nothing to them.

In fact, there is a developing resentment among the proles -- black families and low-income high school students, among others  -- about the exorbitant cost of access to a piece of art that validates their ancestors' participation in the founding of our country.

Over time, of course, even everyday people will get a chance to see Hamilton.  At this point, ironically, it has become a feel-good entertainment for celebrities and rich people who need its message least.


Other Opportunities

Every Hamilton performance is preceded by a raffle of 21 first-row seats.  Winners pay $10 each to see the show.  Given the interest in the play, the odds of winning one of these raffles are not good, but the gesture is a nice one.

New productions of Hamilton are planned next year -- Chicago and San Francisco in March, Los Angeles in August. There also is talk of a London opening.

The Hamilton soundtrack is available on Amazon Prime, as an MP3 album, an audio CD, and even on vinyl.  It's worth a listen before or after you see the play.

Hamilton

Below is a 2012 White House rap performance of what became the first number of the hottest Broadway ticket in town today:  "Hamilton."

It's worth a watch.



Lin-Manuel Miranda, the performer and writer, plays here the part of Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton dead in a duel.  On Broadway now, Miranda plays Hamilton and Burr is cast fabulously by Leslie Odom Jr., whose name we will hear again and again.

The play/musical/opera uses current vernacular but captures the essence of our founders' intentions and arguments, specifically through Alexander Hamilton, who in retrospect may have been the best of the group.  (If anyone wants to put forward a better candidate, I dare him to find one.)


I saw the play this week, and it is really, really, really great. It reminds us why the American Revolution succeeded while the French and Russian revolutions failed.  It appropriates our founding documents to include all of us, which, over time, they did. It shows us Alexander Hamilton, a flawed man like all men, but one who left his mark on history.

When I got home, I looked to find tickets for friends.  Alas, the entire New York run is sold out.  In a way, this is good.  It signals that "Hamilton" and its themes will be reverberating in performances for many years to come.

There are several other youtube videos of this piece, but they aren't that good.  If "Hamilton" comes to your city, buy tickets and go.