[See my exclusive interview with Hamilton bassist Jordan Scannella conducted while riding fast on two bicycles along Georgia's Silver Comet Trail.]
Before the show, there's the set to admire. It's a three-story collage of façades - brick, wood, plaster. There are gangplanks and stairs, ropes, warrens, and skywalks for variety of entrances and exits. There's little room for pieces to fly in or scenery to drop so we're going to be looking at the same sepia-toned set the whole time. No crashing chandeliers or helicopters lifting off: spectacle and color are going to be scaled to what humans do in the space.
Once the show starts, the ensemble, barely present on the recording, is fairly ubiquitous on stage. Dancers outnumber the principals nearly three-to-one. They stretch, climb, jump, twist, flex -- anything a fit human body can do to draw our attention to shifts in the mercurial lyrics. They mime battles, a hurricane, even a split-second hanging. Their basic costumes are beige undergarments, but they occasionally don colorful clothes for a change of scenery. Often dancers flow in with chairs and tables for principals who sit just long enough to sign their initials before the next incident.
Then you see over time an "ensemble" in the larger sense of co-ordination and camaraderie. I'd heard Act One as mostly exposition of Hamilton's early years and of Revolution. Seeing the show, I understood that the main action of Act One is about bonding: "scrappy and hungry" Hamilton gains buddies in a tavern, a friend in Burr, the adoration of two Schuyler sisters, the patronage of George Washington, and a company of soldiers. The friends' reactions to each other, often reinforced by the ensemble's close interactions, make you feel a part of a team. Hamilton is a warm show, like Miranda's earlier In the Heights.
Thomas Jefferson reboots the show when he enters stage center in a purple suit at the top of the stairway at the top of the second act. Now it's all about Hamilton's confrontations with Jefferson, highlighted by two cabinet meetings played as rap battles emceed by George Washington. At the Fox, Warren Egypt Franklin's Jefferson appeared as a Goliath to his little David, diminutive Pierre Jean Gonzalez as Hamilton.
Contrast intensifies our focus on individual players when the ensemble clears out. For comic relief, King George gets to interact directly with "his" people in the audience. We don't need words to understand the emotion when Mrs. Eliza Hamilton, betrayed, burns her husband's letters. Dressed in black, Aaron Burr makes a brooding visual presence even when he isn't singing. We see how his resentment builds while he's shut out of the deal-making in "The Room Where it Happens."
Onstage, two meta-theatrical events make more sense seen than heard. In Act One, Angelica rewinds the scene in which Hamilton courts and marries her sister, replaying it with herself as the bride. The fatal gunshot is suspended in time for characters to re-enact bits of Hamilton's story, heightening the impact for us when the bullet hits him.
That's human-scale spectacle, worth the price of a seat in a live theatre.
from the Fox Atlanta Company's website:
HAMILTON is the story of America then, told by America now. With book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, direction by Thomas Kail, choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, and musical supervision and orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire, HAMILTON is based on Ron Chernow’s acclaimed biography.Atlanta presents the "Philip" cast, one of three official touring companies, with Pierre Jean Gonzalez (Hamilton), Stephanie Jae Park (Eliza), Jared Dixon (Burr), Ta'Rea Campbell (Angelica), Marcus Choi (George Washington), and Warren Egypt Franklin (Lafayette/TJ).
[While Lin-Manuel Miranda was still in grade school, I packed a rap song with history. See Rap About Magna Carta (09/2021).]
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