Whenever Broadway has a hot ticket—and in recent history no ticket has been hotter than “Hamilton”—there is always the temptation to indulge in what Donald Trump has called “truthful hyperbole.” That is, to tell people that you’ve seen it when, in fact, you’ve only walked along West 46th Street in Manhattan and seen the marquee or witnessed audiences emerging from the theater.Now comes a documentary, “Hamilton’s America,” that will give you ammo to back up your harmless prevarication or, at any rate, to give you a more complete picture of just how this astonishing musical came to revolutionize Broadway. The 84-minute film, directed by Alex Horwitz, a Weslyan College friend of the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is a fascinating and inside look at musical’s journey from page to stage. After premiering at the New York Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary kicks off the fall season of the “Great Performances” series on PBS on Friday, October 21.In a first, the documentary will also be simultaneously live-streamed on the Facebook page of ‘Great Performances.’Three years in the making and edited down from more than 100 hours of video, the documentary features intimate snapshots and footage of Miranda, from the first moment of inspiration - reading a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton on a beach during a vacation - to the slow space of the show’s development. (At one point, progress was marked by the creation of one song per year.)The quintessential New York aspect of “Hamilton” is present in trips to historic locations—none more historic than Weehawken, New Jersey, where Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by his political nemesis Aaron Burr. Moreover, the eclectic impact of the musical is reflected in the range of interviews, from Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to musicians such as Black Thought, Questlove and Nas to composer Stephen Sondheim, the eminence grise of the American musical theater who has long been a mentor and inspiration to Miranda.What comes blazingly across in the film is a ferocity of faith in this country - both on the part of Miranda and on the part of his subjects. A welcome respite from the ugliness of the current presidential campaign. Whatever their political differences, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, as well as their contemporaries, were inflamed with the Great Experiment called America. And Miranda has captured that passion and translated their epic story into modern and multicultural parlance. In the process, he has managed to share his deep faith not only in America but also in the Broadway musical.The playwright Arthur Miller once observed that when one is confronted with great art, whether it is a painting, a symphony, a film or a play, the only proper response is gratitude. That is the feeling engendered by the disciplined portrait of the show as expressed in “Hamilton’s America.” And it should lessen the anxiety of Broadway aficionados and cultural mavens longing to get into the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
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