https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-and-cancellation-11594243514?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
The video debut of a Broadway hit is finding commercial success but also a social-media backlash for its positive portrayal of men who helped found the greatest nation on earth.
Todd Spangler reports this week in Variety:
“Hamilton” delivered for Disney Plus — with the musical movie of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reimagining of the founding father’s life spurring a spike in app downloads over its July 4th weekend debut.
The movie premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service on Friday, July 3. From Friday through Sunday, the Disney Plus app was downloaded 752,451 times globally…
Samantha Vincenty writes in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine:
But reaching a wider audience also brought a deluge of criticism amid the praise—including concerns about how the work lionized the United States’ slave-owning founding fathers and didn’t accurately portray history.
Hamilton supported the manumission of slaves but did not press for abolition. Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, argues in an op-ed for CNN that times have changed since the play’s 2015 debut:
“Hamilton” is a minefield of mixed messages: Is our takeaway about its main character that he is a revolutionary hero or flawed philanderer? Is its strategy of non-traditional casting a triumph that allows people of color to “rise up” or are they undermined by the irony of how their embodiment as founding fathers ignores the fact that most of the characters they play were slave owners?
“Hamilton” was the perfect play for the Obama era because it fed into Democratic liberalism’s shift away from heroes like Thomas Jefferson — who represented a figure of rugged pastoral individualism — to Hamilton, the master banker/whiz kid financial planner. Miranda crafts “Hamilton” as an immigrant “who gets the job done,” an outsider. But Hamilton in reality faced none of the discrimination wielded against immigrants that he is drawn as a model for…