Jarethan said:
The show is the star (it provided the material to allow his performance) and will be fine. I have to admit that I think a lot of posters on this site get a little carried away with the comparisons. The audiences will never know the difference with the replacements. The ones announced so far have great credentials and there is no reason to believe they won't be great too.
I may be less knowledgable than many on this site, but I never heard of Phillippa, Daveed, Leslie or Christopher before this show. I have seem Karen give a great performance and Victor is great in Shuffle... From postings, many of you think Victor is better than Lin. The new cast is gonna be great."
I agree with almost all of this. The show is the star, and the nature of theater--good theater, especially--is that a whole bunch of different actors will star in different roles across time and different productions. This keeps theater constantly alive and vibrant and interesting.
I do think that audiences will "know the difference" if they have listened a lot to the cast album before watching the show at least to the extent of different voices than they "expect" to hear based on the recording. With the unusual popularity of this album, that may include sizeable portions of the audiences. Or, instead of generalizing, I'll offer that I expect to know the difference when I finally get a chance to see the show in the fall, particularly with the roles of Hamilton and Jefferson. I have no way to say if it will be better or worse since my experience of the show thus far consists of extensive listening to the cast album and the few broadcast performances of a few of the numbers, all with the original cast. I've had experiences when I've greatly preferred understudies and/or replacements to original cast performances and, in a very real way, each performance a person sees is an "original broadway cast" experience for that person at that time.
The reason I feel that I will "know the difference" is due to the particular way Lin performs the role on the cast recording, with his specific phrasing and emphases and intonations as he speaks more than sings the role of Hamilton, and due to the distinctive tonal quality of Daveed's voice when playing Jefferson. Those two voices/vocal performances stand out to me on the cast album as the definitive voices of the characters, not necessarily because they are better than any other voices on the album or better than any other actors who might play the roles, but because they are, to me, the most distinctive; I never mistake their lyrics for those of any other character or their voices for those of any other actor. I've wondered if this is because most of their numbers tend to be less melodic--i.e. the music often doesn't undergird their songs to the extent that it does for many of the others, so I'm focusing more on listening to the sound of them speaking than I am to the song as a whole.
I anticipate some adjustment to hearing something different than my ear has been trained to expect when I am fortunate enough to hear (and finally see) others in the roles; this will, of course, be true of all the replacement cast members in the performance I see, but I expect to particularly note the difference with those two roles. I imagine other audience members who know the cast album well will also be noticing differences, at least to the extent of recognizing that Hamilton/Burr/Jefferson/Eliza/Angelica etc. sound different. For me, and for most, I doubt that will impinge on our appreciation of the show itself.
