Excellent! Thank you!
Just watched it (had listened to the soundtrack several times, but seeing the action was a big plus (a Disney Plus))
I watched it blind the first time I saw it live. It was fantastic. A lot of people urged me to get familiar with the sounds in advance, and I’m sure that’s good too. I prefer my plays and movies to be a surprise if possible.
I’ll watch the movie, but not rushing to download it. There’s time.
I saw it live a couple years ago. My wife wanted to watch it today and I’ll admit that I felt a little begrudging about putting aside three hours on my day off for it. Then it started and I got sucked right back in again. Great show.
Watched it with breakfast this morning. It was great.
The movie was filmed “before a live audience” (as they say on TV) in June 2016. The Atlantic reviewer talks about the poignancy of looking back at that time from the present moment. His remarks made my heart ache.
…Watching the show from my couch in 2020, four years after I saw it on Broadway, was a strange throwback in more ways than one. … Revisiting the show during another election year, it was hard not to think about how Hamilton was indelibly shaped by the more hopeful times of Barack Obama’s presidency.
…Hamilton is a definitive cultural work of the Obama era. The show can trace its origins to a 2009 White House poetry jam, where Miranda performed an early version of the opening number, “Alexander Hamilton,” and earned cheerful applause from the president. …
Remember when there was such a thing as a “poetry jam” at the White House? 
And a president who could comprehend poetry and applaud it cheerfully?
…What started out as a 2013 Vassar College workshop production evolved into a 2015 smash hit at the Public Theater and quickly leaped to Broadway. Miranda had succeeded in making a hip-hop musical about the first secretary of the Treasury feel stunningly dynamic, with talented young actors of color taking on mythic roles such as Hamilton, Washington, and Jefferson. Disney+’s filmed recording of Hamilton captures that vitality—it was shot in June 2016 as the show’s original cast prepared to depart, lending it the aura of a swan song.
Then came the election…
The show’s bubble of optimism burst that November, days after the election of Donald Trump. Vice President-Elect Mike Pence went to see the musical, and after the curtain call, the cast member Brandon Victor Dixon addressed him from the stage: “We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us,” he said, adding, “We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents.” The statement, crafted by Miranda and the producer Jeffrey Seller, was predictably slammed by Trump on Twitter. The entire episode, a cultural flash point from the beginning of the Trump era, feels like it happened a thousand years ago. Where Obama had greeted the tenor of Miranda’s project with enthusiasm, Trump responded with angry tweets.
…
I signed up for Disney+ this morning mostly so I could watch this, except I bit the bullet and paid the seventy bucks for a year upfront. The way I’m rationalizing it is that I was considering going to the live theater show, and unless I lucked out and got one of the cheap tickets via the lottery, it would have cost me more than seventy bucks.
But yes, there are just too many streaming options, each with its own compelling content.
Watching it now. My wife and I were lucky to see it in Chicago without paying an arm and a leg. We weren’t in the last row, but we could turn around and touch it.
Type less, watch more
It was quite good. Not totally my cup of tea and no single song stood out as amazing, but I enjoyed it and found myself laughing quite a bit, which I did not expect.
Glad I have seen it and know what everyone has been talking about.
I was actually at Hamilton the night of the 2016 election. The atmosphere in the theater at the end of the evening was so depressing. (The show letting out around 10:50pm.)
I just watched the filmed version and it was so good!! I was so far up in the cheap (HA!!) seats I could barely see faces, so seeing all the close ups and the fluid camera movements between all the characters and all the little details I completely missed was really awesome!
Just finished watching it with the family. We came in cold, without knowledge of the music or songs or whatnot. My son had recently read a bio about Hamilton, so there was some spoilage on the plot.
I’ve got to say it’s great! Whether it’s tad better or a tad under Les Miserables (the best musical ever), will require a live performance to determine. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a musical genius and I hope to see much more from him.
The songs were catchy and tuneful. The characterizations were great; they felt real, especially for a musical. We were amused by the censoring—we’d seen a live performance of Book of Mormon, which inures one to foul language.
I have one sibling who is really into musicals, so we watched it last night.
I’m not really into musicals.
But I enjoyed it more than I didn’t.
We are huge fans of the soundtrack but have never seen it live. I tried to get tickets for my daughters’ graduations, three years apart, but tickets were hundreds of dollars EACH and I just couldn’t do it. So absolutely, now we are new Disney+ subscribers. Last night my family, now split between NJ and Colorado, watched it “together” touching base on Facetime occasionally. It. Was. Amazing.
I can completely understand why it might not seem like everyone’s cup of tea. My piano teacher can’t stand the music (or as he would say, “music”) and it’s lacking in radio-friendly hits. I resisted it for a long time myself because I am not a fan of rap or hip-hop.
But a daughter had it playing in the car once. The first thing that grabbed me was the sheer erudition of the language. Then the amazing play of rhythm and rhyme to make the five-dollar words into accessible poetry, capturing the revolutionary spirit. Then the story, told with empathy about a person who was not really likable. When these factors are layered on to the music–which improves mightily on multiple listens–the mastery of words and beats and vocal sparring, you get something magical.
Last night we finally got to see it with the missing pieces in place: the choreography, costuming, acting, sets, stagecraft. FINALLY I have the whole picture. It is a genius work of art. Even if you don’t like rap, hip-hop, musicals, or live performance in general–give this one a watch. You won’t be sorry.
This. If you watch the movie on TV be sure and put the captioning on so you don’t miss any of the mind-boggling internal rhymes. Cole Porter would be proud. The language is brilliant. Miranda is a fucking genius!
This was my mistake when watching it last night. I spent a majority of the first act completely lost, and just sorta muddling along by figuring out what was going on based on the actions not the lyrics. My wife asked me what I thought at intermission and I said “It’s ok.” The second half I enjoyed much more.
I think I’ll re-watch at some point with the subtitles on.
Absolutely necessary to get the full effect.
I was wondering how anyone can follow how great it is in person. The subtitles were essential for my enjoyment. So great.
I haven’t seen the Disney+ version yet (I will, of course), but I know the music well and saw it live when it came here on tour. I wasn’t instantly in love with it on first listen. I think there was just SO MUCH to it that I was a little overwhelmed and, while it certainly isn’t hardcore hip-hop, it’s genre-bending enough that the style is sort of one more thing to take in. But I liked it enough to listen again. And again.
One thing I enjoyed was looking at it on Genius, which I discovered just because I was looking for the lyrics for some reason. It’s got the lyrics all annotated, so you can see what’s historically accurate, what’s embellished, what parts are more-or-less direct quotes, and all kinds of stuff.
Also, I think filmed-on-stage musicals are a good thing and a good trend. It makes them accessible to more people while still preserving most of what makes them what they are. Movie adaptations can be sort of (or very) destructive to the source material. And it’s really sad seeing a good musical turned into a bad movie. I love that my friends and mom and everyone can see Hamilton and it’s the same Hamilton I saw and know and love, not a knockoff version.
Actually, I think I’ll go watch it now.