--- name: "Thomas Kail" canonical: "https://film.one/person/thomas-kail" roles: ["Director","Producer"] born: "20 January 1978" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "director" average_over: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T18:24:12.335646+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Thomas Kail Director and producer. Born 20 January 1978 in Alexandria, Virginia. ## Details - **Work:** Director, Producer - **Born:** 20 January 1978, Alexandria, Virginia - **Active:** 2019–present - **Also known as:** Tommy Kail - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kail, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7791435, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2371802/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1485823 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Fosse/Verdon*](https://film.one/tv/fosse-verdon.md) (58) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Thomas Kail > 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. 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. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, thewaltdisneycompany.com, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Fosse/Verdon* (2019), Fi1m 58, Director, Executive Producer, Creator, Story — [page](https://film.one/tv/fosse-verdon.md) ## Complete filmography (15) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Moana* (2026), Director, Executive Producer - *Hamilton* (2025), Director, Producer - *We Were the Lucky Ones* (2024), series, Executive Producer, Director - *World's Best* (2023), Producer - *Up Here* (2023), series, Executive Producer, Director - *In the Heights* (2021), Thanks - *Hamilton: History Has Its Eyes On You* (2020), Director - *The Undefeated Presents: Hamilton In-Depth* (2020), Director - *Tiny Beautiful Things* (2020), Director - *We Are Freestyle Love Supreme* (2020), Producer - *Fosse/Verdon* (2019), series, Director, Executive Producer, Story, Creator — Fi1m 58, [page](https://film.one/tv/fosse-verdon.md) - *Hamilton: One Shot to Broadway* (2017), Acting - *Grease Live* (2016), Co-Executive Producer, Director - *2 Broke Girls* (2011), series, Director - *Fiddler on the Roof*, Director, Producer ## Gallery - ![Tommy Kail at the Opening Night of "Proof" on Broadway - April 16, 2026](https://film.one/media/person/103613/gallery-c865cb051317.jpg) Tommy Kail at the Opening Night of "Proof" on Broadway - April 16, 2026 — PhilipRomanoPhoto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/ThomasKail-byPhilipRomano.jpg/1280px-ThomasKail-byPhilipRomano.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Thomas Kail](https://film.one/media/person/103613/gallery-5cdfe8eaf566.jpg) Thomas Kail — Image via TMDB ## Awards ### Other awards — 2 won, 1 nominated - Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical 2016: Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical (won) - Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Director 2015: Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Director (won) - Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical 2008: Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical (nominated), for *In the Heights* *From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.* --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/thomas-kail