Hamilton is coming to London in 2017. Excellent!! I wonder when tickets will go on sale and if it will be as hard to get them as on Broadway.
Miranda describes the difficulty they had with the show’s flow that this song solved. After Eliza’s furious “I hope you burn,” they had trouble showing the audience how the two could plausibly be reconciled.
One member of the crew – the choreographer, maybe? – and his wife were going through a family crisis with a terminally ill child. And in writing a note to them, Miranda said, “There are moments that words can’t reach.” And that, he said, was the key that unlocked that song.
When the song was done, he sent it to them, saying that he didn’t know if this was a good idea or not; feel free to never listen to it…their child had passed away.
They told him later they listened to it every day for a week.
Nice story - thanks.
Thank you for sharing this story. That is one of my favorite songs in the show. Even the reprise later “Best of wives the best of women” gets me a little.
FF to 14:15 to hear the Lin-Manuel Miranda related content in [this Radiolab episode about the deathwatch beetle](Lin-Manuel Miranda). It helps to listen to the whole thing though to get the context.
A slightly fictionalized version…
The Ten Dollar Founding Father Without a Father will stay on the ten. Andrew Jackson will get the heave-ho from the twenty.
They wanted to put Rosa Parks on the back of the bill, but her picture refused to stay there.
Heh. Looks like it’ll be Harriet Tubman - a remarkable woman in any era, and of any race.
I guess they’ll escape from my wallet even quicker now.
Just listened to Hamilton for the first time on a road trip this weekend and still reeling.
Literally did a cheer at the shout out “Sit down John! You fat motherfucker!” and Cabinet Battle 1 is one of the most brilliant book numbers ever written (“wha-ever the hell it is you do at Monticello!”), but Quiet Uptown is probably my favorite number in the piece.
Bah, blasted outage! I’ve been waiting for two days to deliver this vital statement: Quiet Uptown breaks my heart something fierce so I have only been able to listen to it twice so far, but my current favorite is Dear Theodosia. Or at least that’s the one that’s currently playing in my brain, although I enjoy the intricacy of other songs like The Ten Duel Commandments, Satisfied, Yorktown, Non-stop, and My Shot. And pretty much all the others.
I listed to it this weekend on a road trip as well. On the way up I heard the first part, twice, and on the way down the whole thing. I am blown away. The last song finished a few blocks from my house, giving me enough time to dry my tears before going inside.
And I can’t get King George’s song(s) out of my head. Da de da da da…
“They will tear each other into pieces, Oh My God this will be fun” - my daughter and I kept singing that when the topic was the Republican presidential race.
Not to be pedantic, but you dropped an internal rhyme.
“They will tear each other into pieces.
Jesus Christ, this will be fun.”
The reprise of Stay Alive is also pretty powerful.
If Lin Manuel Miranda never does anything more artistically challenging than an episode of Two Broke Girls in his future career, he can still be called a genius for the rest of his life.
Rightfully so. His other show In the Heights is also brilliant and is playing on London’s West End (in the Kings Cross). Airfare and tickets to that show probably cost less than tickets to Hamilton. If you can swing it, it’s probably worth the trip. http://intheheightslondon.com/
The show now has a record number of Tony nominations: http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/03/entertainment/tony-awards-nominations-2016/index.html
16 nominations in 13 categories (the two male leads and 3 of the featured cast are in the running against one another).
The current musical with the most wins in a year is The Producers with 12 – it had 15 nominations in 12 categories and swept them all (and had the same deal with the male actors). So people will be counting as the awards progress.
I’m late to the party, and know nothing about Broadway or musicals; but I listened to the album out of curiosity and think it’s a staggeringly brilliant piece of work. There are a couple of things here and there that jar - the ‘pennyless’ and ‘any less’ rhyme, and ‘she expecting me and she’s expecting’ - both made me groan; - but out of thousands of lines they are hugely in the minority.
As a non american I can see why the story of the fight to identify what America is would be salient today and resonate so strongly in this delivery - ie modern American music, but the idea is one thing; - the execution is unbelievably well achieved.
(As a Brit, the guy playing George III’s accent is astonishingly bad. Dick Van Dyke bad)
My favourite performance amongst many fine singers is the singer who plays Mrs Reynolds.
Thanks to the Dope again for stretching my musical limits. I have never before listened to a musical’s soundtrack.
MiM
Coming to Chicago, and tickets are already supposedly impossible and/or outrageously expensive. So count me out. (Glad the wife agrees!)
There was a brief window of time tonight (less than an hour!) when a few face value tickets for November & December just went on sale through Ticketmaster and I managed to pick one up before they all sold out again! Woohoo! I’ll actually be seeing the show!