CULTURE
9:00 am PDT 7/5/2020
by
Emily Hilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspired by a 2004 biography, which soon led to a viral video presentation of the White House and, ultimately, what could be the “best musical of our generation.”
Hamilton – The musical phenomenon that will premiere on July 3 on Disney + – began, humbly, in a hammock. That’s where Lin-Manuel Miranda was resting on an excursion to Mexico in 2008, engrossed in Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography. Alexander Hamilton.
Feeling that the story of the Treasury’s first secretary would lend itself to a musical, Miranda, who was 28 then, began working on “The Hamilton Mixtape,” a loose collection of hip-hop verses and melodies. However, the project only came true at the White House. In May 2009, then-President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama invited Miranda to “An Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word,” requesting that she perform a number of her Tony-nominated musical. In the heights. Miranda accepted the invitation, but decided instead to debut a song from “Mixtape,” which would later become known as “Alexander Hamilton,” the show’s first explosive album. The performance went viral on YouTube, recording more than 7 million views to date.
In 2011 Jeremy McCarter, an employee of the Public Theater, organized a meeting between Miranda and his boss, Oskar Eustis. “When Lin came to one of the meetings in Oskar’s office, he gave me a CD: demo recordings of the eight or nine songs he had written so far for Mixtape,” recalls McCarter. “At home that night, I put in the CD, and what I heard blew my mind: amazing dramatic narratives on perfect pop songs. I remember when ‘Helpless’ ended, it was Lin singing Eliza in falsetto and rapping Alexander, just feeling so clearly : If this ends and you decide to stage it, it is the best musical of our generation. “
The show, a renewed American-origin story told by artists of color, debuted in Audience on January 20, 2015. It moved into the Richard Rodgers Theater six months later, where it has since earned $ 650 million (until COVID-19 forced it to darken in mid-March); he won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer and a Grammy; and released tour versions around the world. Disney paid $ 75 million for the live capture, shot in 2016 for $ 10 million, and scheduled it for a 2021 movie premiere.
The national closure of movie theaters indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic prompted Disney to shift gears and bring Hamilton to the public for the weekend of July 4, a rare ray of light in the summer of 2020.
#MrowbackMonday
In 2008 I bought Hamilton’s biography of Chernow to read on vacation. @ HamiltonMusical rehearsal begins today. pic.twitter.com/C1CK2Xjdxw– Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) June 15, 2015
This story first appeared in the July 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here for subscribe.
