The release of the hit play Hamilton in movie form on the streaming platform Disney+ (July 3) feels especially timely thanks to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down Broadway until at least 2021, and Black Lives Matter protests have sparked a conversation about race throughout the United States. But as set designer David Korins puts it, “Since it was created, it was timely. We were going into the 2016 election. I was fortunate enough to be in the theater the night Barack Obama watched the show. It was an out-of-body experience.”
Hamilton began as an off-Broadway production at New York's Public Theater in 2014. Even then, the show attracted audience members including Madonna, Michelle Obama, and Salman Rushdie. “I knew we had something,” says Korins. “I knew that it had captured a very important moment in time. It was important with a capital I.” The show moved to Broadway, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, in 2015, and has only continued to explode in popularity since that time. The Disney+ film, which will bring a show that was previously impossibly to score tickets to into the homes of the masses, features footage from a 2016 performance, with creator Lin-Manuel Miranda in the role of Alexander Hamilton.
Since the beginning, the design of the stage hasn't changed much; its main features are a wooden balcony and a spinning turntable on the floor. Now an iconic part of the set that feels like part of the choreography, the latter almost did not happen. Korins says he pitched the idea in his initial interview for the job, and director Thomas Kail replied, “Let’s put a pin in it.” They tossed around other ideas for “months,” says Korins, before adding the turntable back in. “Thomas and the choreographer said, ‘If you can show us 10 moments in the show where you’d use it, we’ll think about it.’ I sat down and thought about 10 moments, and then we put it in. Now, one of the things I am most proud of is the tight-knit, cohesive storytelling. It’s hard to tell where choreography starts and scenery starts.”
One fascinating piece of the Hamilton origin story is the set design ideas that could have been, or what Korins calls their “said-no-to-this pile,” after the musical number “Say No to This” in the play. “We started with an all-dirt floor. We had a version where there was a pool of water on stage. We had a version that was an enormous oversized piece of parchment paper with a quill sticking out of it kind of like a crow’s nest,” he says. They even floated the idea of creating a more modern look, with “all-black slick floors and stainless-steel catwalks.” Other possibilities included catwalks that would extend into the audience, a set that would have looked like a “massive oversized base of a column, to talk about the profundity of the building of the country,” and finally, “an oversized picture frame, where we’d introduce the founding fathers in this big tableau and then have the picture frame fall to the ground and have them walk through it almost like they are breaking the fourth wall or the metaphorical frame.”
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In the end, Korins is happy with what they settled on. “There isn't a board that is placed, or a brick that is distressed or a bucket that is hanging or a rope that is coiled or anything that is not an intentional choice,” he says. He's also excited for more people to have the chance to see the show, and his hope is that this film “will keep theater in the center of the conversation” at a time when artists everywhere are struggling.
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“This will never replace the live event. It is staggering what you see live. But for a $6.99-a-month membership, now people get to enjoy this film which is so much about a revolution. The story of the country then told by what the country looks like now is incredibly powerful,” Korins says. “Getting to witness an African American man play George Washington is just an incredibly powerful thing. It is one of the beautiful balms that the world needs right now.”
