Thomas Kail is a stage director who has learned to put a musical number on screen without embalming it. Around the numbers, on the evidence of Fosse/Verdon, he is still finding out what a camera can do that an audience in the stalls cannot.
Fi1m perspective
The first hour of Fosse/Verdon (2019) is set in a Munich rehearsal room in 1971, and Thomas Kail, who directed it, shoots it the way a stage director sees a rehearsal: flat and grey, radiators and paper cups, a number that does not work yet. When the Cabaret chairs finally go up on stage, the light turns amber. That gap, between the work and the show, is the thing Kail knows better than most directors working on screen, because he spent twenty years on the other side of it.
He is a theatre director first. In the Heights (2008) began his long partnership with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Hamilton (2015) made both of them famous; Alex Lacamoire on arrangements and Andy Blankenbuehler on choreography came with him from one show to the next. Television arrived with a live broadcast of Grease in 2016, and then Fosse/Verdon, which he co-created with Steven Levenson and directed five episodes of. He filmed Hamilton for the screen in 2020, and the live-action Moana (2026) is the first feature he has made without a stage underneath it.
What he can do is stage a number so that it looks like work rather than a museum piece. The recreations in Fosse/Verdon, from Damn Yankees to the early Chicago workshops, are exact without being dead, and Lacamoire's arrangements of the standards are crisp. Kail has said his job is to identify the best idea rather than to have it, and you can see that in the rehearsal scenes, where the actors are given space and the camera waits. We sat up for the chairs, and for Michelle Williams flying in to fix a number Sam Rockwell's Fosse cannot, and we spent a good deal of the remaining seven hours waiting for the series to come back to her.
Where he is weaker is everything between the numbers. Fosse/Verdon promises Verdon's story and spends most of its eight episodes circling her husband, hopping back to 1955 and forward to a death the captions count down to, and how well it plays depends on what you already know. We gave it 58, nearly all of it for Williams. We have not reviewed Moana, but the reviews so far say it adds little to the animated film and looks flat, which is the charge you would expect against a director whose eye was trained by a proscenium arch.
Kail's best screen work to date is a record of something that happened on a stage in front of people. The question for whatever comes next is whether he can make something that was never on a stage at all, and Moana does not seem to have answered it.
Biography
Thomas Kail is an American theatre and television director and producer. He directed and served as executive producer on the FX limited series Fosse/Verdon (2019), which he co-created with Steven Levenson, and for which he received Emmy nominations. He also directed and produced the filmed version of the Broadway musical Hamilton, released in theatres in 2025.
Kail directed the original Broadway productions of In the Heights and Hamilton. For the latter he received the 2016 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. He was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1999.
