A Disappointment This is a musical not made for people outside of the USA. I had to watch the thing again and wiki Hamilton to try to figure out who was who except for some of the bigger names. Going by the poster, this is was meant to be some attempted rise to fame of Harry Potter in Hollywood. The casting was varied, which is great generally, but not representative of history (noone looked like what they should have). Historical themes seemed to be swapped around and added in for convenience-sake. Some performances were good, Soo, Groff and Diggs, whilst others (MIranda - who was better in Mary Poppins Returns) just felt flat and tired. It felt like 6 or so cameras were placed and then just recorded. And the choreography was distracting at times, not complimentary. And character development - the only one who shows any is Soo's character. This might be a great musical, but it is not a great movie (despite what people are reviewing it as). It is hard to follow as a citizen of the world who does not know US political history details nor its players. Its cinematography, casting and set pieces felt lazy (this could have been turned into grand cinema). And it was overly long...people might expect this type of thing to go for hours on West End to get their money's worth, but 2hrs 40 is overkill in this medium. The hype behind this made me think this was b…

I suppose this movie was behind the eight ball from the very start in a way. On the one hand, there was such a tremendous hype for it as a play, it built the expectation of being blown away, and on the other hand, it being presented in its live theater version made it lose some of the visual impact of seeing it in person. We expect a greater production value on the screen. The story is great, and should be required viewing for children at a certain age. I confess, I wasn’t enthralled by it as a musical. I guess I am too used to musicals that have regular dialogue broken up by songs rather than continuous sung dialogue. If there had been dialogue surroundIng eight or ten lovely songs like Helpless, I would have given it top marks. It is still an impressive production. I feel I have to comment on the diverse cast. I am white and had no problem with the cast choices. I would have cried foul if they had presented an all white cast as some seem to think was required. I had an acquaintance complain, “What if they cast a white actor as Martin Luther King? And all I can do is flip it upside down. There are only a half-dozen people of color in our history books for every hundred Caucasians, and if it reaches the point where whites stop whining when people of color play those roles, I am convinced that people of color will be totally fine with whites playing the roles of people of colo…

This is not a Movie. It is a television program. It is a filmed stage play that is being broadcast on television. These things do not add up to this being a film, not even a TV-movie.

"My name is Alexander Hamilton/And there's a million things I haven't done/But just you wait, just you wait," Lin-Manuel Miranda sort of sings at the beginning of Hamilton. About three hours later we're still waiting. Hamilton is divided into two acts. The first covers Hamilton's arrival in New York City in 1776, his work as General George Washington's aide-de-camp during the American Revolution, and how he met and married Eliza Schuyler. The second covers Hamilton's postwar work as the first United States Secretary of the Treasury and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. The first act is strictly hagiographic; Hamilton is so messianic that Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) might as well be called Judas. Watching the meteoric rise of the protagonist's military and political career unfold in song and dance form, I began to experience a revelation; if they changed the historical pe-riod and characters, this could easily become Forrest Gump: The Musical. We never really get a sense of why Hamilton was so special, important, and essential in the lives of so many people; his success seems to be the result of a geographical-temporal accident — that is to say, Hamilton is always in the right place at the right time. Miranda has allegedly written songs with many adjectives and very few verbs; lyrics that care more about the 'what' than the 'how' and 'why'. "How does a bastard, orphan, son of…