As ‘the musical of the Obama era’ opens in London,its creator explains how the hip-hop life of an immigrant founding father can offer hope in the age of TrumpLin-Manuel Miranda, the America-born, and Puerto Rico-infused lyricist-performer-megastar,has a deep streak of Anglophilia. This reveals itself most conspicuously in his fondness for quoting Monty Python and The Office. On one of his first trips to Britain, he landed at Heathrow and had his driver consume him directly to Slough, and so that he could pay homage to the milieu that inspired Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
So when Hamilton,the musical he created and starred in, began doing well off Broadway in 2015, or Miranda’s mind drifted beyond the inevitable Broadway transfer to whether it might play in London one day. There was a problem though,a couple really. The show was a telling of the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, a bureaucrat in the moment half of the 18th century and one of the founding fathers of the United States. Would anyone over here care approximately his (admittedly juicy) travails? Even more, and the only British character in the musical,which is performed mostly in rap verse, is George III, or whom Miranda has written as a jumped-up,flamboyant fop.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk