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A
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.
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B
Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, live with your legs, man. Santa.
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C
Santa, did you get my letter?
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B
He's talking to you britches. I'm not.
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A
Of course he did.
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B
Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. And elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus?
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A
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B
It as a gift.
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A
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C
Nice.
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B
My side of the tree is slipping.
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C
Kimber.
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B
The holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in U.S. cellular stores with sweet monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 vice connection charge credit sentinel balance due to payout earlier. Cancel Finance Agreement 256Gates $830 eligible Ford in a new line, $100 plus a month plan with auto fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line.
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A
Visit t mobile.com Holiday shopping lists are long and finding the best deals while still giving thoughtful gifts can be challenging. That's where Amazon comes in. Amazon was just named the lowest priced online retailer in the US for the ninth consecutive year by Profitero, a third party analytics and research firm. After analyzing thousands of products, they found Amazon's prices are 14% lower on average and up to 5% lower than the nearest competitor in key gift categories like electronics and toys. When you're shopping for everyone from your spouse to your second cousin's new baby, those savings really add up. The best part is you don't sacrifice selection for better prices. Amazon offers everything from major brands to unique finds from small businesses, all delivered right to your door. If you're trying to be smart about your holiday budget, and who isn't, visit Amazon.com.
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C
The year is 2016 and as increasing numbers of people flee war ravaged and poverty stricken parts of the world, the issue of rising immigration fuels populace and nationalist sentiments around the globe, causing countries to close their borders and shaking the very foundational beliefs of even the most established democracies. Britons opt for Brexit, a plan to leave the European Union as a way to regain control over that country's borders so that they can keep migrants out and in the US Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States, largely on his promise to build a wall to keep undocumented people from coming into this country. And in that year of 2016, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, a musical about Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from from a small Caribbean nation who became one of the founding fathers of America. It used the music of hip hop, pop and R and B to tell his story, and it cast black and brown actors, including Miranda himself, to play Hamilton and his fellow revolutionaries, driving home the point that everyone in this country should have the right to claim the a share of the promises it offers. Hamilton was the ninth musical to win the Pulitzer and the first written by a person of color. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. As you probably know, Hamilton is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. During that time, Miranda has become a near ubiquitous figure on the cultural landscape, and the story of how he decided to write his show after reading historian Ron Chernow's best selling biography of Alexander Hamilton has become part of theatrical lore. But there's a lot more to the show's backstory, and I'm hugely indebted to Miranda's biographer Daniel Pollock Pelsner, much of what I'm about to tell you, and I'm about to tell you a lot. Miranda was born in New York City on January 16, 1980, to Luce Townes Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr. Who when he was 18, moved from Puerto Rico to New York to study on a scholarship, eventually becoming a political strategist. Working primarily with Democrats including Ed Cox, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. The Mirandas raised Lin Manuel, who they named after the title of a favorite poem, and his older sister, Lizisita, whom the family called Sita, in Inwood, a working class neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan with a large Latino population. Lynn, as just about everyone calls him, so I'm going to do it too, attended 100 colleges, elementary and high schools, public schools for gifted kids in the city. But during the summers, Lynn and Sita spent at least a month visiting their grandparents in Puerto Rico and reconnecting with their bonds to the island. Music played a major role in Lynn's life almost from the start. He had his first piano recital when he was 6, and according to his biographer, Pollock Pelsner, he was so thrilled with the applause, he got when he played his assigned P that he kept playing others until his teacher dragged him off the bench. His parents loved musicals. They'd spent their wedding night seeing one at the Public Theater, and they regularly played cast albums at home. Sita, six years older, was into hip hop and introduced her little brother to that music. And Hunter had a robust arts program that included three theater groups, including one that produced student written work. Lynn performed regularly. He played Conrad Bertie in Bye Bye Birdie and Bernardo in west side Story. But when his girlfriend took him to see Jonathan Larson's rent for his 17th birthday, he was blown away. Its music sounded like stuff he could hear on the radio, and its characters seemed like real people he'd seen on the streets of New York. He went home and started writing his own musical. It was about a fetal pig who seeks revenge on the kids who attempt to dissect him in their school lab. The score ranged from reggae to rap, and it was a hit with Lynn's schoolmates. When he got to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Lynn intended to focus on filmmaking. That plan changed when he discovered that the classes available to freshmen were on film history and theory and that students weren't given access to film equipment until their junior year. Too impatient for that, Lynn pivoted back to theater with a vengeance. He wrote so many shows at Wesleyan that one classmate actually advertised an evening of one acts by saying that it included absolutely nothing by Lin Manuel Miranda. One of the shows Lynn started working on at Wesleyan was In the Heights, a musical about the everyday people who live and work in Washington Heights, a Latino neighborhood near his own of Inwood, but that he chose because he thought its name sounded better for a musical. Shortly after he graduated From Wesleyan in 2002, a group of students he slightly knew from school expressed an interest in producing it. One of them was Thomas Kael, a director they clicked. For the next four years, the two Wesleyan grads worked together in developing in the Heights. During that time, they resisted the efforts of professional producers who wanted to add grittier and more stereotypical elements to the show, like having the characters use drugs. They found better producers in Jill Fuhrman, Kevin McCallum and Jeffrey Sellers, and they recruited the playwright Kiara Alegria Hudes to work on the book and to keep it centered on the regular kind of people Lynne grew up knowing. During that time, Lynn supported himself doing substitute teaching at his old public school, Hunter. He liked being back there, and he considered giving up his hope of making it in the theater to teach full time. But encouraged by his father to pursue his dream. He and Cale kept working on in the heights. Finally, in 2007, their musical opened at the then new performance space 30 Arts, located far on the west side of Manhattan. The show, which I was lucky enough to see early in its run, became a must see for theater lovers and a year later in the Heights opened on Broadway where it ran for three years and won Tonys for Best Musical and Best Score. It was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2009, the year that Lynne Nottage won her first Pulitzer for Ruined. It was after that success that Lyn and his soon to be wife Vanessa Nadal took a vacation at a resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. There, Lynne dug into Chernow's book on Hamilton and discovered that Hamilton's journey from the small islands of Nevis and St. Croix to New York reminded him of his father's life changing journey to the city from Puerto Rico. He also felt that Hamilton's talent for channeling the rebellious spirit of his time into his writing reminded him of the rappers he had grown up loving and who did the same thing 200 years later. He began writing what would become Hamilton's opening song before he even left Mexico. When he got home, Lynn reached out to Chernow and persuaded the author to let him adapt his book. Chernow was a little skeptical about the hip hop approach until he heard the song Lynn had completed. How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence impoverished and squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar, the ten dollar founding father without a father? And when the Obamas invited Lynn to perform something from in the Heights and for an evening of poetry that they were hosting in the White House, he instead performed Hamilton's title song for them too. A recording of that performance went viral, encouraging him and Cale to further develop what they were then calling the Hamilton Mixtape. With Cale's continual prodding, Lynn finished a half dozen more numbers, including Hamilton's I Want Song My Shot and King George iii' sneering jibe at his former subjects, you'll Be Back. And he played them in a concert for the American Songbook series at Lincoln center in 2012. The response was even more encouragement. For a short period after that, Lynn worked with a playwright on a book for the show, but everyone eventually agreed that those scenes slowed the show down. The next year, he and Cale honed the sung through approach at New York Stage and Film, Vassar College's incubator for new works and finally, on January 20, 2015, almost six years after Lin had sung at the White House, a production opened at the Public Theater, where the show's name was shortened to Hamilton. The cast had emerged almost organically. Right from the start, Lynn knew that he wanted Chris Jackson, the charismatic romantic lead of in the Heights, to play George Washington. The verbal dexterity of Daveed Giggs, a standout in the hip hop improv group Lin had co founded, made him unnatural for the dual roles of the fast talking Marquis de Lafayette in the first act and a hip cat styled Thomas Jefferson in the second. Renee Elise Golsberry, who had made a name for herself as a memorable replacement in such productions as Rent and the Lion King, had to be talked into auditioning for the role of Hamilton's sister in law and intimate confidant Angelica Schuyler. But once she did come in, Goldsberry so aced the song satisfied that Lynne began to look for more ways to bring Angelica into the action. It was Tale who discovered Philippa Sue, a recent Juilliard grad who was performing as the title female character in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy's musical adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Sue was perfect to play Hamilton's wife, eliza. Leslie Odom Jr. Who had worked primarily in LA, including in a recurring role on the TV show Smash, got the key part of Hamilton's nemesis, Aaron Burr, after he happened to see an early reading of the show and sent Lynn a tweet congratulating him on it. Lynn's response was to invite Odom to join the work in progress. The chemistry between those principles and an ensemble that included such future stars as Ephraim Sykes, Anthony ramos and Ariana DeBose was electric. The show was extended at the public three times. Everyone came to see it, from former Vice President Dick Cheney to the iconic rapper Buster Rhymes. And everyone, conservatives, liberals and progressives, loved it. I loved it too. I saw it twice. I was nervous the second time because I thought it might not live up to what I'd seen the first time. But it did. As you might expect, there was immense pressure to rush the show to Broadway so that it would qualify for that year's Tonys. But Lynn and Cale wanted to do more work on the show, and winning the Tonys wasn't a lock. No one knew if a hip hop show about an almost forgotten historical figure would play to uptown Broadway audiences. A bio musical about the hip hop icon Tupac had closed after just 38 performances, and a rock version of President Andrew Jackson's life had limped through 94. But Hamilton proved different. By the time it officially opened at the Richard Rogers Theater on August 6, 2015, its advance sales were nearly $30 million. And when prices climbed as high as 900 for a single ticket, the producers set up lotteries so that people who couldn't afford those prices could still have a chance to see the show. And Lynn created Ham for Ham, a series of pre show outdoor concerts that featured cast members from the show performing for free. And eventually performers from other shows on Broadway joined in, too. Hamilton would eventually earn 16 Tony nominations and win 11 of them. It also won the Grammy for best Theater album, a Kennedy center honor for Lin and the three collaborators he called his Cabinet, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, orchestrator Alex lacamore and of course, Thomas Kail. And as you know, Hamilton won the Pulitzer when the show opened in London. It won seven Olivier Awards, including best Musical, and it's still running there. The first national US tour went out in 2017, and the demand to see the show was so high that additional tours were added. One is still traveling around the country, and a professional film capture of the original cast was released on Disney plus during the early months of the COVID shutdown and is still available on that streaming service now. There has been some backlash. Shortly after Hamilton moved to Broadway, cast members who had been with the show before it opened at the public pushed for a share of the growing profits. The producers resisted at first, but eventually agreed to split 1% of the Broadway profits and a smaller portion of the profits from touring productions among those original cast members. Meanwhile, over the years, critics have also called Miranda out for celebrating men like Washington and Jefferson as champions of democracy while downplaying the fact that they were also slaveholders. Donald Trump got into the naysaying, too, after then Vice President elect Mike Pence attended the show and actor Brandon Victor Dixon, then playing Aaron Burr, interrupted the curtain call to urge Pence and Trump to, quote, uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. Trump became even more annoyed when a scheduled return engagement of Hamilton pulled out that run at the Kennedy center when Trump took over the institution earlier this year. But Hamilton continues to sell out at the Rodgers, and recently, when Leslie Odom Jr. Returned to reprise his Tony winning portrayal of Burr, Hamilton shot right back up to the top of the Broadway grosses, taking in as much as $4 million some weeks. Miranda has kept busy, too. Even during the six years that it took to get Hamilton to Broadway, he had juggled other high profile projects, including collaborating with Tom Kitt and Amanda Greene on the cheerleading musical Bring it on, translating songs into Spanish for the 2009 revival of west side Story, appearing in the encores productions of Merrily We Roll along and Tick Tickets. Boom. And fulfilling a childhood dream writing songs for the Disney animated feature Moana. In the years since, Miranda has written several scores for Disney films. He's played the lamplighter Jack in the film Mary Poppins Returns and the Pira Agua guy who sells shaved ice treats in the movie version of in the Heights. He stepped back into the role of Hamilton for a series of performances in Puerto Rico to help raise money for the island after it was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And he produced and directed the movie version of Tick Tick Boom with Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson. Last year, Miranda and Issa Davis, herself a Pulitzer finalist, released a concept album based on the cult movie the Warriors. And just a couple of weeks ago, the casting notice for a workshop production of the show they're calling warriors was posted. So fingers crossed that we'll get to see it on a stage before too long. As I said earlier, I've borrowed extensively from Daniel Pollock Pelzner's Robert recently released book Lin Manuel Miranda the Education of an Artist. And so I am thoroughly delighted that Pollock Pelzner accepted my invitation to join me in this episode to talk even more about Lin Manuel Miranda and the making of Hamilton. Hello Daniel Pollock Pelsner, welcome to all the drama.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [22:48]
C
I'm going to start off by asking when and how did you first see Hamilton?
- [22:58]
B
I first saw Hamilton in 2015 in July when it was in previews on Broadway. I'm a Shakespeare professor by training and I had gotten into thinking about who our Shakespeare's might be today, who's telling the big scale national stories in innovative dramatic forms that help us reconsider who we are as a people. And my memory is that Oscar Eustace at the Public Theater had told me, you want to find a Shakespeare today? Check out this guy in Manuel Miranda who's just written a hip hop musical about the American Revolution. And I was intrigued but skeptical, but we were able to get tickets to see it in previews. I had seen his previous musical in the Heights because my grandma grew up in Washington Heights and wanted me to see it and that was great. And then the night that my my wife and I went in July 2015, sitting down the row from us was Vice President Joe Biden. And watching this Series of American vice presidents and presidents on stage, sitting down the row from the current vice president made me feel like, wow, this is as close as I could get to seeing Henry V next to Queen Elizabeth in 1599.
- [24:10]
C
How many times have you seen Hamilton since.
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B
Then? I went to cover it in London and then in Puerto Rico and then in Chicago and then in Portland and then back in London and then I guess a couple of times on Disney. So maybe seven or so.
- [24:30]
C
Wow. Now you have already identified yourself as a Shakespeare scholar. And so what then drew you as you watch that preview to writing? Spending time writing about this guy, Lin Manuel Miranda, who had already won a Tony but wasn't as famous as he is now.
- [24:58]
B
That's right. Well, I was just. I was thrilled by the wordplay and the linguistic inventiveness of Hamilton when I saw it. I remember when Hamilton says to Aaron Burr, you punched the Burr, sir. The pun on Burr and sir was just thrilling. And I had actually been an American history major in college, and my advisor, Joanne Freeman, was a scholar who'd written a book about the culture of dueling in the early American Republic. And so when we got to the song the ten Dual Commandments, that was like a musicalization of Joanne Freeman's argument about how dueling worked. It turned out she. She'd been a little bit of an advisor on the show. So I was drawn in there. And then in the second act, when Hamilton is trying to get his debt plan through and he writes to his sister in law, Angelica, my dearest Angelica, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. I trust you'll understand the reference to another Scottish tragedy. Without my having to name the play, I was like, oh my God, I recognize the reference. Lin Manuel Miranda, you're. You're beaming me Macbeth signals that this is where I should be spending my time. And so I was thrilled to dive into all of the layers that go into making the show so exciting.
- [26:12]
C
I love listening to you quote in the way that people quote Shakespeare. As you're quoting.
- [26:18]
B
Right. The number of 5 year olds in America who can now quote every line of Hamilton, I think exceeds the level of familiarity that anybody has with Shakespeare these days.
- [26:31]
C
Now, as I read through your book, it seemed to me that you had talked to everyone in New York who walked by Lin Manuel Miranda in the street. This is a wonderfully thorough, comprehensive biography. And I wondered, what's the most interesting thing you learned about him?
- [26:56]
B
Well, it's a sweet way of you to describe it. That was for me, the great joy of the project was getting to immerse myself in the Mirandaverse and get to know everybody, from Lyn's amazing parents who gave him drive and emotional support and belief in his potential, to his elementary school teachers, to his professional collaborators and masters of musical theater form. And I will tell you one thing that I did not know before going into this project. I had thought Lyn wrote Hamilton because he picked up Ron Chernow's biography when he. He was going on vacation from in the Heights and got sucked into a story that reminded him of his father as hip hop stories, which is true, but I hadn't known that he had actually written a project about the Burr Hamilton duel in his 10th grade American history class. And his high school girlfriend, Meredith, had saved a copy of the script that Lin Manuel wrote. And it was amazing to find lines in that script that made it actually into the Broadway musical and. And to see how fascinated and adolescent Lin Manuel was with the story of a brilliant, ambitious figure who died before he could fully realize his promise. And that was a narrative that had haunted Lin Manuel since he was a child. And he had lost a very dear friend in preschool through a tragic accident. And then his first girlfriend in high school was hit by a car, and he started to become terrified that he or somebody he loved would die before they had fulfilled their life's course. And especially becoming obsessed with the musical Rent and getting interested in the life of Jonathan Larson, the composer who died the night before Rent opened, really made that a palpable fear for him. And you can see that coming out in his adolescent screenplay for a movie about Hamilton's last days, especially once you learn that Hamilton's own son had died in a duel as well, on the very same spot. He told me he got a B minus on the project because his teacher thought he was too focused on the kind of psychodrama of somebody who was afraid of death and less attuned to the history dynamics of it. But I love seeing that kind of embryonic vision of an obsession that would then bloom into this masterwork a couple decades later.
- [29:11]
C
This may seem an obvious question, but it's one that I ask in all of these episodes, or why do you think the Pulitzer jury awarded its prize to this show? They don't often do musicals.
- [29:31]
B
Well, I think when Hamilton won it, it wasn't much of a surprise to anybody. Stephen Schwartz, the composer of the musical Wicked, told me about seeing Hamilton in a workshop before it opened. And the only thing he remembered saying to Lin Manuel afterward was this show's gonna win the Pulitzer Prize. Lin Manuel remembered a couple of other notes that Schwartz had given him about the length of a number in Act 2. But I think a lot of people had that sense that this was such a thrilling and innovative style for representing fundamental questions about who we are as an American people who tells American stories, and how we come together and fracture apart as a political community. And it was such a cultural juggernaut by the time the Pulitzer committee came to vote. Very, very rare to have a show that popular, that was also that sophisticated and innovative. And at the same time, even though, you know, nobody had done a multiracial hip hop musical about the American Revolution before, it was also a show that was deeply conscious of its debts to musical theater history, to hip hop history, even to Shakespearean dramatic history. And so it was a. It was a type of innovation that was also very legible within theater history and that loved tipping its hat to Gilbert and Sullivan, to Macbeth, to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Jason Robert Brown, along with Biggie and Eminem and Tupac. And so I think that combination of brilliant creativity and novelty and variation within traditional forms made it really irresistible.
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C
Does it seem to you, I mean, we can't predict the future, but does it seem to you a show that will stand the test of time? As I've gone through these plays and musicals that have won the Pulitzer, there are many that we all know, but there are also some that have sort of receded into history, right?
- [31:35]
B
Well, it's certainly tough to predict. It's only been 10 years that it's been out. Like, I mean, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. After Shakespeare's plays were performed, they had basically dropped out of the repertory because Puritans had shut down the theater in England. They wouldn't be revived for 50 years. So it's tough to know, but I think already we've seen such a life cycle in the reception of Hamilton. We went from it being the toast of the Obama era, the show that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were both seeing and were inviting the cast to the White House to perform to the sort of scourge or. Or nemesis of the Trump era, when. When Vice President Pence was requested from the stage to try to allay the fears that he and Trump were not going to represent all Americans. And Trump denouncing the show, calling for an apology to a show that could be a kind of emissary for the US Overseas when it opened in London and after Brexit, a kind of counter narrative to nationalist isolation to assure the cavity. Totally different relationship to colonialism and debt when it opened in Puerto Rico in a very different situation to a show that was really both embraced and criticized heavily during the height of the Black Lives matter movement in 2020 for centering, you know, slave owning founders at the heart of its narrative. To a show that at least the experience of my students and my children and their friends has really been rediscovered by another generation of. Of people who just love its verbal swagger and energy and its variety of music. So it seems Even just within 10 years, it's gone through the sort of cycles of, you know, rapture, backlash, backlash to the backlash and rediscovery in ways that most things don't go through even one stage of which makes me optimistic. I think the real test will be what happens after the original Broadway run ends, and maybe that won't happen for another 25 or 30 years if it follows the path of the Lion King or Wicked, but what its life will be in school theater and amateur theater, in school curricula. The Afterlife of the Cast Album There are all these ways that shows live on after their original Broadway incarnations, and Hamilton has the thrill of a Disney recording of its original cast. And I think all those things make it likely to me that it's going to have a pretty long and nuanced and rich afterlife.
- [33:59]
C
One of the things that I remember when the phenomenon of it first started blooming, people talking about was that this was a trendsetter in the sense that Rent had been introducing a new style of musical, a new sound to musical. And yet I don't think we've seen a lot of similar shows. And I'm wondering why you think that is. Shows that use hip hop, shows that are as inclusive as Hamilton is.
- [34:39]
B
Yes, you're absolutely right. I remember, I think back in 2015, Stephen Sondheim said, you know, mark my words, there's going to be an Abraham Lincoln rap musical. And that didn't happen as far as I know. So one way to see it would be that it required a certain virtuosity, and it required a composer who had been steeped in the language of hip hop ever since his older sister let him sneak Black Sheep tapes from her cassette collection in the early 80s. Like, you know, Lin Manuel had had by the time he started composing HAMILTON, A good 25 years of beats and flow and cadence and verbal dynamism in his ears that allowed him use this work. But I think he would say, well, I don't want to speak for him. I would say that for Him. The lesson of a composer like Jonathan Larson wasn't you should redo 19th century opera using grunge rock. It was you should find the musical style that suits the story that you're telling and you should write the show that only you can write. And so that's not a genre specific lesson. That's Lin Manuel getting permission from Jonathan Larson to say that the music that Lin Manuel loved all belonged on a stage. And that's rap. That's also R and B that we get with the Schuyler sisters and say no to this. That's the legacy of jazz and spoken word. We get with Jefferson, that's, you know, Brit pop that we get with King George. That's full on razzle dazzle, musical theater Kander and EBB style that we get with with Room Where It Happens. And that's. And that's, you know, full on intense hip hop stylings that we also get in, you know, in my shot say. So I. Where I see that legacy more is in a show like Hadestown, which is folk blues retelling of Greek myths in a way that's hugely popular, particular with. With audiences of my students age. And you could, you know, in a way you could listen to it and say, well, it has nothing in common with Hamilton, but you could Mitchell that she's been working on the show for a long time, but is in that spirit of somebody who took the music as a singer songwriter that spoke in her veins and found a way to retell a familiar story through that style in a mode that illuminated broader issues of labor, of climate, of love for a new audience. Or you could hear Shana Taub with her, I think phenomenal new musical suffs about the suffragist movement that she writes in a combination of some historical forms as Lin Manuel uses when he trots out 18th century Bach for the Farmer refuted. Shana Taub is drawing a little bit on 1920s ballad styles, but she's also grooving to funk and to folk and to Broadway styles as well. And she's using totally non traditional casting in this musical stuff and that it's an all female and non binary ensemble playing Woodrow Wilson and his associates alongside Alice Paul and other radical suffragists. Yeah, so I think if you look a little beyond, beyond the specific mode and take the spirit of it, you can see other people who are. Who feel like space has been opened up for them to tell the stories that matter to them in the style that's authentic to them.
- [37:56]
C
One other thing I've Noted as I looked back at these shows, is that for some of the playwrights and composers who won the award, it was a little bit intimidating in the sense of, well, I. How do I live up to this? And although we've had Lin Manuel's work in Disney animated films and so on, we've yet to have another full Broadway production. Do you think that the prize weighs on his mind as well?
- [38:38]
B
Absolutely. The legacy of Hamilton is a daunting one. And he told me many times that he had to remind himself, don't think about topping Hamilton. Don't think about trying to one up it. He always says he knows Hamilton is the first line of his obituary, which I think for him, you know, you could interpret that as like, I can never do anything better. I think for him, it's a reassurance for a guy who's been haunted by the specter of death throughout his life. He now knows his legacy is going to be secured. And actually what Hamilton did was, was free him up to pursue what he had always wanted to do, which was make movies. He wanted to be a film major at Wesleyan. Had there been fewer requirements for checking out the school's video cameras, he would have been a double major with theater. And so what he wanted to do after Hamilton was learn how to make movie musicals. And he apprenticed himself to the director Rob Marshall on the set of Mary Poppins Returns to learn how to stage an ensemble musical number. And he trailed John M. Chu on the making of in the Heights, the film version, to learn how to, you know, turn his own story into a Hollywood style epic dream. And then he made Tick Tick Boom, his movie about Jonathan Larson, his own composer hero. So he certainly has more movie musicals on the horizon, but he also has more stage projects, too. And so his next announced project is an adaptation of the cult gang film the warriors from the 1970s, which was sort of his nightmare as a child seeing at a young age about a gang wrongfully accused of murdering a citywide truce leader who has to to fight their way back from the Bronx to Coney island with every other gang in the city trying to take them down. And he and Issa Davis, wonderful playwright and composer, made a concept album of warriors that came out last year. And it is. It's what Lin Manuel had wanted to do with Hamilton released it as a concept album, then he turned it into a stage show. But warriors, they went full on Jesus Christ Superstar with a just a sung through recorded experience. And now they're going to translate it for the stage. And I Don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to it or some of your listeners have, but to my mind warriors is the most thrilling music Lynne has written since Hamilton, and it's also taking him in totally different musical directions. So I'm really excited to see what that looks like.
- [40:53]
C
Me too. I've heard it. It's pretty terrific. It's also, I have to say, been pretty terrific talking to you. For a Shakespeare guy, you know a lot about musical theatre.
- [41:04]
B
You know, musicals were my first love. My, my. My grandparents lived in New York. I grew up in Portland, Oregon. But every spring break we'd go and visit them and they were divorced, which is tough on my mom, but great for me and my sister because they competed against each other for our affection with Broadway show tickets. So seven days in New York, we would see nine shows. And that was my. The foundation of my whole cultural education. And I feel like I've taken a long academic route to get back to what I love.
- [41:33]
C
Well, we hope you stay and find some other person or subject to write about because really appreciate your talking with us and sharing so much about Hamilton here, but also in your book. And so I want to thank you for both.
- [41:58]
B
Thank you so much, Jan, for having me on. I really, I love the premise of your show and I want to give a shout out to the Chiara Alegria Hudes episode on Water by the Spoonful, which is one of my favorite plays in the world and is actually the play seeing it in 2014 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that made me start writing about playwrights who are alive instead of Shakespeare who never returned my phone calls. Chiara led me to Lynne, so were it not for that show, I would not have written this book.
- [42:25]
C
That's great. Again, thank you so much.
- [42:27]
B
My pleasure.
- [42:31]
C
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me@janbreadleradio.com.