Doug and I wanted to see the show, of course, but the opportunity hadn't presented itself. And so I settled in to watch the filmed version of it alone. I knew, going in, that it would be bittersweet. I didn't expect just how emotional the experience would be.
Note: this is not a review of Hamilton; people far more knowledgeable and eloquent than I have already weighed in on that for the past four years. This is just me writing about my experience of watching it.
It's important to know that I went into Hamilton cold: I've heard bits and pieces of it, but I have a policy of not listing to the original cast recording until I see a show. So I knew the basic plot, and snippets of songs, but none of the details.
I was enthralled from the opening moments: the costumes, the music - the variety of music! - the plot, the characters, the cast that was perfection... it was everything I hoped it would be. I was wistful, and a little melancholy, but I was hanging in there.
And then Jonathan Groff came on stage to perform You'll Be Back. Groff's King George is gloriously demented (damn near literally foaming at the mouth) and hilarious. Which, of course, made me think of Doug, because he would have loved that number as much as I did. And so I smiled and laughed my way through, but halfway through the very next song (Right Hand Man; Christopher Jackson's George Washington), I realized that I was crying.
I wasn't actively crying so much as my eyes were leaking, seemingly of their own volition. It wasn't the song - I mean, it's a phenomenal number, but not emotional - it was that the sadness that had been waiting for its moment just... bubbled to the surface. And there it remained, with me quietly crying through most of the rest of the show.
I say "most" because there were moments when the tears became overwhelming: Eliza's (Phillipa Soo) scream at the end of Stay Alive (Reprise) wrecked me. I had to pause for half an hour until I could get my emotions sufficiently under control that I could go on. The same thing happened after The World Was Wide Enough (Leslie Odom Jr as Aaron Burr and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton), only this time it took nearly 45 minutes - which turned out to be a wasted effort, as I wept through the entirety of Eliza and Company's Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.
Hamilton was beautiful, and it was heartbreaking, and it was uplifting. I'm so glad that I watched it, and I will absolutely watch it again, and again, and again. But it left me with a question to which I wish I had an answer: Will I ever again be able to enjoy anything without an unordered and unwanted side of sadness?
No comments:
Post a Comment