Critic Reviews

Director Thomas Kail’s filmed version of the blockbuster musical Hamilton, available Friday on the Disney Plus streaming service, surely is the greatest translation, democratization and preservation of any Broadway show, ever.

Kail’s camera captures actors’ intimate faces during key moments in a way impossible for theater-goers and incorporates audience reaction to create an electric filmed version.

Entertaining, energetic and unfailingly smart, this is theatre at the highest level, performed by a cast without a weak link. You can’t say no to this.

Hamilton stands as a reminder of how hard it is to get a democracy right, and how necessary it is to keep trying, as long as it takes.

To see performers of color so joyously at home in their roles as founding fathers and mothers, as leaders, as American myths was always one of the show’s chief gifts. In reenvisioning our past, it gave a salutary jolt to our present and helped remap our future.

It keeps all the power of a live performance while simultaneously adding a filmic pizzazz including some breathtaking aerial shots. There is extraordinary direction – again under Kail – so that the cameras capture the mise en scène of theatre without losing any of the closeup intimacy of film.

Would it have been better to be in the room where it happened? Sure, the magic of watching excellent musical theater happening in front of you is impossible to re-create. But as the recent “Cats” movie proved, sometimes veering too off-course from the stage production isn’t great, either, so why not embrace a filmed version of this spectacular thing?

The film is at times deeply moving and, for a show that is virtually all song and no dialogue, extraordinarily character-rich.

The filmed version of the Broadway sensation makes for immersive, exhilarating, magnificent cinema, almost sure to thrill first-time viewers as well as diehard fanatics who have seen the stage production once or twice or a dozen times.

Do not throw away your shot at watching Hamilton’s original cast both make and recreate history. ‘Satisfied’? You will be.