July 3, 2020 9:25 am ET
There are plenty of reasons to watch the Broadway show-turned-movie Hamilton more than once. Newly released on Disney Plus, themusic is intoxicating, the story captivating, and if you’re going to listen to the soundtrack of a sung-through musical, you might as well just watch it.
But if you’ve never seen it before, there’s a good chance you’ll benefit from watching it a second time (at least).
The music and lyrics come at you so fast — some rapped, some sung — you might miss a lot of iconic lines while entranced by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliance. So in the same way you pick up details the second time you watch any movie, we’re willing to bet the same is true for Hamilton first-timers.
In a 2015 interview with Grantland, Miranda said:
“You could do a Les Mis–type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you’re writing a typical song — that’s maybe got 10 words per line. Whereas here we can cram all this [expletive] in all the margins.”
So how fast is Hamilton? After its Broadway debut in 2015, FiveThirtyEight put together a couple mind-blowing stats about the pace of the Founding Father’s story. The site’s research says it wouldn’t really be 12 hours long if performed at the pace of a more traditional musical, but it would definitely be longer.
Hamilton averages a whopping 144 words per minute with 20,520 total words and a cast album length of two hours and 23 minutes. And it would take up to six hours to perform at the pace of other Broadway shows.
FiveThirtyEight compared Hamilton to other shows “that are roughly representative of the range of Broadway musicals,” such as Phantom of the Opera, Oklahoma!, Pirates of Penzance, Company, 1776, Candide and Spring Awakening.
Of the seven musicals analyzed along with Hamilton, the next Phantom had the next highest word count at 6,789 but averages 68 words per minute.
Company is second to Hamilton in words per minute, but it’s still at only 83 and is barely an hour long.
Pirates of Penzance is the next longest musical on the list behind Hamilton at an hour and 43 minutes, but with just shy of 6,000 total words, it still only averages 58 words per minute.
The “Hamilton” score still has a fair amount of variation in pace — the fastest tracks are just shy of 200 words per minute, while the five slowest fall in the range of 64 to 80 words per minute. Three of the slow songs belong to King George III (Jonathan Groff), a political and musical intruder in the show, and are explicitly intended to set him off from the rest of the characters.
If “Hamilton” were sung at the pace of the other Broadway shows I looked at, it would take four to six hours (Miranda’s guestimate was off by half).
Even more amazing, two of the fastest verses in Hamilton —one in the song “Satisfied” and one in “Guns and Ships” — average at least five words per second.
Per FiveThirtyEight’s analysis, in “Guns and Ships,” the character Marquis de Lafayette manages to shove 19 words into three seconds for an incredible 6.3 word-per-second average, and Angelica Schuyler in “Satisfied” sings 5.0 words per second with 121 words in 24 seconds.
So as we said, with songs that fast, you may need — and want — to watch it more than once.
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