They had beautiful voices, and they seemed to have a special passion and feel for this musical. I was immediately captivated by Lin's casting. I remember going up there mid-afternoon one weekday and opening the door, and there were eight actors standing in front of eight music stands and my first thought was, "Oh my God, they're all black and Latino." I really had not given much thought to the casting, but, you know, for someone of my generation, a show on the founding fathers meant something like 1776-a bunch of middle-aged white guys with wigs and buckled shoes. What were your first impressions of seeing these scenes played out by real people? Then there came a day, probably three or four years ago now, where he told me for the first time he was working with actors. And when Lin wrote the songs, he would send them to me over the internet, so I was getting the show piecemeal, one or two songs at a time. We said at this rate we would all be dead by the time Lin finished, so Thomas put him on a diet of I think two songs a month. ![]() I think that those were the two breakthrough songs that convinced him and certainly convinced me he would be able to do it. When he finished, he said "What do you think?" And I said, "I think it's the most amazing thing I've ever heard." He had packed the first 40 pages of my book into this 4.5-minute song and had done so very accurately. After he had fi nished writing the fi rst song, which he spent an entire year writing-I think he was already writing it when I met him-he came over to my apartment in Brooklyn Heights and sat on my living room sofa and started to snap his fi ngers and sing what is still the fi rst song. ![]() Well, I can talk about a couple of moments. If you can think back to the fi rst time or the first rehearsal you heard Lin-Manuel put this story to music, was it an immediate conversion experience, or had he convinced you before that? He very quickly made a believer out of me. I had been a fan of In the Heights and was intrigued by what he was saying. I may have been skeptical at fi rst, but I was charmed by Lin. He explained about all the wordplay and internal rhymes and rhyme endings. He said to me: "Ron, I'm going to educate you about hip-hop." And he pointed out a number of features about hip-hop that are still very relevant to the show, the fi rst of which was that you can pack more information into hip-hop lyrics than any other musical form because the lyrics are very dense and very rapid. But I could see he really wanted to capture Hamilton in the way I had in the book, but knowing nothing about hip-hop I said: "Should hip-hop be the vehicle for telling this kind of story?" If he had wanted to do a parody or something, I wouldn't have gone along with it. I could tell from that very first conversation with Lin that he wanted to do a very serious, dramatic rendering. He said he had been reading the book on vacation in Mexico, and hip-hop songs had started rising off the page. I went to a Sunday matinee and then went backstage, and Lin started telling me he wanted to do either a concept album about the life of Alexander Hamilton or, if all went according to plan, it would be his second musical. ![]() In fact it was at the same theater, the Richard Rodgers, where Hamilton is. This would have been during In The Heights? He started by telling me "This hip-hop artist," as he referred to Lin, had read my Hamilton book it made this enormous impression, and he was excited to fi nd out that he could meet me through these friends. ![]() When did you first hear someone was going to make a hip-hop musical out of your biography of Hamilton?īack in the fall of 2008, I ran into a friend in the neighborhood whose daughter had gone to Wesleyan with Lin-Manuel Miranda. This interview, by Senior Editor Tim Baker, and other articles about the Broadway phenomenon are featured in Newsweek's Special Edition, Hamilton. Ron Chernow, who wrote the biography that inspired 'Hamilton,' is both a historical consultant on the show and one of its biggest fans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |