OH MY GOD. This is the most fucking brilliant thing I have ever seen.
It’s not just the lyrics. There are musical callbacks to Sweeney Todd all through it, Lin-Manuel’s makeup and voice, the staging callbacks, RENEE’S HAIR, my inner musical theater geek is SCREAMING.
I am not over this. If you want to FULLY get the brilliance here, you need to watch these. The opening number of the 82 production:
And “Epiphany”, one of the big Act I closers (technically “A Little Priest” closes the act, but this is a HUGE number, and Lin uses it a LOT in their version).
And seriously, if your only familarity with Sweeney Todd comes from that HORRIBLE Johnny Depp atrocity, do yourself a favor and find the 1982 version because it is amazing. This is like, formative Broadway shit for me, one of the first shows I was ever exposed to (yay cable tv).
Some thoughts about @linmanuel and Hamilton: Lin-Manuel is a year younger than me. He and I are part of that ‘bubble generation’ of kids born in the late 70s-early 80s. We’re not really Gen X and we’re not quite Millennial.
Given that, we kind of have a unique view of the world. We’re the last generation to mostly grow up without computers. The Internet came when we were in Junior High and High School. We listened to music on the radio, taping our favorite songs off it, and if we bought music it was on cassette. I know I got my first CD player as a senior in High School.
So we’re adaptable. The way I’ve put it is we’re old enough to appreciate technology but young enough to get it. This applies to music too. We grew up with rap and didn’t have autotune.
So this goes back to Hamilton. It’s a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton. On its surface it sounds ridiculous. But people of my generation have learned to be adaptable. We straddle a divide and so we’ve learned to synthesize. We take our experiences and relate it to the world as it is now. A lot of us (including Lin-Manuel) are steeped in Internet culture but we learned it in our 20s and 30s.
So it’s not so crazy an idea. He’s taking the music he grew up with and synthesizing and creating with a story that touched him. And because he straddles that line, Hamilton does too, hence its appeal to young people. And the #ham4ham videos show that he’s connected in a way that someone older wouldn’t understand. It doesn’t come across as pandering because it isn’t.
Anyway, just some thoughts from my point of view. My generation are kinda misfits, but that’s not a bad thing.
