Beyond ‘Hamilton,’ for Better and for Worse

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/arts/music/the-hamilton-mixtape-lin-manuel-miranda.html

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“Hamilton” has been the rare production that extends the creative potential of musical theater, provides historical commentary, remakes Broadway’s racial dynamic and, when asked, rises to the political moment. It is as much of a cultural juggernaut as any theatrical production with a usual audience of about 1,300 can be.

Even more promising, though, is the “Hamilton” diaspora, the show’s still-evolving potential to shape culture beyond its walls. Key members of the original cast — Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr. and Christopher Jackson — are beginning to appear in other projects, several reaffirming the lessons of “Hamilton.” Their new work is becoming a sort of referendum on the world Mr. Miranda imagined and wrote into life, but one that’s not always easy to recreate beyond the stage.

Mr. Miranda, who in addition to his Tony victories for “Hamilton,” has also received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy, is making the democratizing of “Hamilton” a continuing part of his creative platform. His most immediate project is the release of “The Hamilton Mixtape,” an album that takes his show off the stage and puts it in the mouths of a winning group of singers and rappers: Kelly Clarkson, Nas, Alicia Keys, Chance the Rapper and more.

This isn’t the only time that the music has been divorced from the show — the cast album of “Hamilton” has undoubtedly been consumed by many more people than have been able to see the musical in person. (Since its September 2015 release, it has posted 829,000 album sales and 883 million streams, according to Nielsen Music.) But the soundtrack is still a collection of musical-theater songs, and Mr. Miranda has wider, more ambitious goals for his music.

By and large, the singers on “The Hamilton Mixtape” treat Mr. Miranda’s material reverently, as interpreters handling a precious jewel: Ms. Clarkson on “It’s Quiet Uptown,” Ms. Keys on “That Would Be Enough.” Others go above and beyond: John Legend gives “History Has Its Eyes on You” a bolt of 1960s soul dignity, shaving it down to an urgent piano arrangement. Andra Day adds swing and sass to “Burn,” and Usher gives “Wait for It” a sensuality the original lacked (and maybe wasn’t suited for, though that’s no obstacle).

The savviest moment here is “Helpless,” which revives the playful singer-rapper chemistry between Ashanti and Ja Rule, and draws a direct parallel between Mr. Miranda’s songwriting and real-world pop. Like the best parts of this collection, this tale of puppy love suggests that the ideas Mr. Miranda seeks to spread have always found a welcoming home in pop music.

“The Hamilton Mixtape” serves as a proxy for how “Hamilton” has entered the wider popular imagination, but Mr. Miranda is also beginning to present work outside of that umbrella. He was one of the songwriters for “Moana,” the new Disney film set in the Pacific islands, the highlights of which include the soaring anthem “How Far I’ll Go,” sung by Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) and the wry “You’re Welcome,” with the familiar Miranda blend of singing and rapping, performed by Maui (Dwayne Johnson). (For good measure, “Moana” also features brief vocals by Mr. Jackson and Phillipa Soo, who played Eliza Schuyler in “Hamilton.”) Mr. Miranda is a natural in this context: matching exposition to melody is one of his many gifts. Disney should call him if it ever gets around to making a film with a Latina princess.

Mr. Miranda’s reach is also expanding in a manner unusual for even the most acclaimed of Broadway talents. He has appeared on “Drunk History” on Comedy Central, telling a loose-tongued version of the Hamilton story. He will star alongside Emily Blunt in the film “Mary Poppins Returns,” and he recently signed on to produce film and TV adaptations of Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy series, “The Kingkiller Chronicle.” He has also been active in bringing attention to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and raised money for the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights.

For some “Hamilton” stars, leaving the stage has meant a turn to music. Mr. Odom has released two albums: a self-titled collection of standards, and “Simply Christmas,” a holiday set. He has a sterling voice, and in his music he is much more comfortable with his upper register than in “Hamilton,” where his role as the villain Aaron Burr only sometimes (“Dear Theodosia”) allowed him to showcase his tender side. He even brings a level of dignity and creativity to the commercial he recorded for Nationwide Insurance, taking that company’s seven-note jingle and building a short song about life’s complexities around it.

Like Mr. Odom, Mr. Diggs is a musician, and in September he and his avant-rap troupe, Clipping, released a new album, “Splendor & Misery.” In “Hamilton,” Mr. Diggs had perhaps the most complex task, playing both the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, and rapping in warp-speed cadences that are difficult to replicate. In his own career, he is a rapper, too, and an intricate one, but his subject matter is even more provocative. “Splendor & Misery” is a striking tale of interstellar slave rebellion, heavily inspired by black science-fiction writers. Like “Hamilton,” it’s about re-empowering the disenfranchised by upending the system used for oppression.

At the same time, Mr. Diggs has been appearing in the far smoother environs of the network sitcom, with a recurring role on “Black-ish,” the ABC family comedy about the intersection of contemporary race and class anxiety. Mr. Diggs plays Johan, the brother of the matriarch, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross). He’s a spoken-word poet just home after living in France, given to saying things like: “This chilled butter wreaks havoc on a croissant. You Americans and your mania for refrigeration.”

Initially, Johan is there to serve as an antagonist to Andre (Anthony Anderson), Rainbow’s husband, who is perpetually trying to hold his heritage and the lessons of his upbringing close in the face of professional ladder-climbing, financial success and suburbanization, and whose perception of race relations is forged in the shadow of the civil rights era. But “Black-ish” is too nuanced to make Johan’s bohemian self-righteousness one-note. Outside of his sister, Johan finds the most common ground with Andre’s stodgy, irascible father (Laurence Fishburne). They’re both skeptical of the utility of voting, but, even so, are both agitated by voter suppression. And most surprisingly, after a dust-up with the police (it takes place offscreen), Johan seems shaken up, and pulled closer to Andre’s worldview, doubting even his precious poetry. (Mr. Diggs has also appeared, lip-syncing lyrics written and performed by Nas, in awkward interstitial segments of “The Get Down,” Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant love letter to the early days of hip-hop.)

Unfortunately, projects featuring the women of “Hamilton” are moving more slowly. On Dec. 4, Ms. Soo will begin playing the title role in “Amélie” in Los Angeles before it goes to Broadway. Renée Elise Goldsberry, who played Angelica Schuyler, will play Henrietta Lacks in the coming HBO adaptation of Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

The power of “Hamilton” becomes most clear when one of the principals materializes in an ecosystem that’s far less diverse, nurturing and welcoming. In “Hamilton,” Mr. Jackson played George Washington as a wise older-brother figure, stern boss and deliverer of tender soliloquies about the limits of executive power. On the new CBS procedural “Bull,” he is Chunk Palmer, a former college football star reborn as a style consultant for besieged defendants in need of a sartorial boost.

“Bull” is prototypical network prime-time chum: Each self-contained episode revolves around a single legal case; the protagonist is an omniscient, infallible, borderline unethical white man. In some episodes, Mr. Jackson has barely a dozen lines — he is a bit player, part of a team built largely to emphasize how many different sorts of misfits Bull (Michael Weatherly) can wrangle to work under him.

Even the wardrobe fails Mr. Jackson here. He is meant to be the fashion expert, but apparently believes that a peak-lapel salmon blazer goes with a muted button-down-collar multicolor-striped shirt paired with a paisley tie. (Whoever knots his ties should be reassigned to craft services.)

Watching “Bull” after seeing “Hamilton,” it is difficult not to want to reach into the television and yank Mr. Jackson to higher ground, somewhere beyond the reach of trite stories and synthetic fabrics. His work on the show serves as a reminder to never again casually dismiss the talented actors who are cashing checks by working on a structurally unforgiving procedural. And it’s also a reminder that vast swaths of contemporary pop culture aren’t designed to showcase diverse talents and narratives — gatekeepers are still coloring within old lines. Even though it tells a story from more than two centuries ago, Mr. Miranda’s “Hamilton” still manages to show the world as it could be, not as it is.