This weekend, the Hamilton movie hit Disney+ in the form of a recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance on Broadway back in 2016. But like so many stage musicals over the years, surely a proper cinematic version, a movie adaptation, of Hamilton will one day happen? Miranda has been been asked in a couple of recent interviews and the star has been remarkably coy, but he did admit that movies of stage musicals need to be their own thing.
Speaking with Radio 1’s Screen Time podcast, Miranda said: “It just feels like we hacked the system because instead of an active translation, which is what old movie adaptions are, you’re actually getting the thing we spent six years working on.
“And you’re getting a fine film of it. So I don’t know what it does for the future of performances.
“I know that when those acts of translation happen and they work they’re amazing.
“I’m incredibly proud of John Chu’s adaptation of [Miranda’s other stage musical] In The Heights, which you’ll hopefully see next summer.”
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The Hamilton star added: “I think of Rob Marshall’s adaption of Chicago [and Hamilton director] Tommy [Kail]’s at work on an upcoming adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof.
“So there is joy and an art to that as well, but we actually get to give you the thing, which is pretty cool.”
While Variety asked the 40-year-old what a Hamilton movie adaptation would look like.
He said: “I don’t love a lot of movie musicals based on shows because it’s hard to stick the landing.”
Miranda continued: “I’m very proud of Jon Chu’s version of In the Heights.
“It is a different animal than the stage production.
“As long as I think of those as different things, it’s exciting. I don’t know what a cinematic version of Hamilton looks like.
“If I had, I’d have written it as a movie. I know [Hamilton director] Tommy [Kail] has the right of first refusal.”
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While Tommy said he didn’t know what a Hamilton movie adaptation would look like either.
The director said: “But my sense is that — and Lin might have struck on the key to it for me — when you are making an adaptation of a musical that is a movie, it shouldn’t necessarily try to be the stage play. It needs to be free from that, because you’ll fail.
“That’s something I’m going to be tasked with when I’m being asked to make a movie of Fiddler on the Roof, because Fiddler on the Roof already exists as a fantastic movie.
“I’m going to make something that lives alongside that, just like it lives alongside a high school production, a college production, and the original Broadway production, and all of the revivals of it.”
So that’s certainly not a “no” from either Miranda or Kail and they’ve laid out that a Hamilton movie adaptation would need to be its own thing from the stage play.
Considering movie musical adaptations often come years after the shows in question were in theatres, a cinematic version of Hamilton is probably years away.
By then Lin-Manuel Miranda may be too old to play the lead, but considering that Les Misérables original cast members Colm Wilkinson and Frances Ruffelle (who played Jean Valjean and Èponine) cameoed as the Bishop of Digne and a prostitute, no doubt Miranda would play another character if a Hamilton movie adaptation came out many years from now.
Yet if it’s sooner rather than later there’s no one else who could play Hamilton and no doubt de-ageing technology would be used for the scenes at the beginning when the Founding Father is 19-years-old.
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