Can Lin Dig It?

August 5, 2024 7:02 AM

Twelve years ago, songwriter/actor/singer/filmmaker/rapper/librettist and Emmy/TONY/Grammy/Pulitzer winner and MacArthur fellow Lin-Manuel Miranda started work on an unlikely-sounding project: a musical about the United States' first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. After resting on his laurels a bit, he has announced his next project: a musical based on Sol Yorick's novel The Warriors.

The original novel has already enjoyed a film adaptation from 1979, one now regarded as a cult favorite. Miranda's announcement of the project on Instagram suggests that he's also incorporating references from the film as well - including the film's most famous line, a line which was improvised by actor David Patrick Kelly. A concept album for the project drops this October.

Fun history geek fact - Yorick based his novel on The Anabasis, an ancient Greek military account of a group of Greek mercenaries who got trapped in Persia after backing the losing side in a civil war. (That's why people named "Cyrus" and "Creon" show up in The Warriors, by the way.)

posted by EmpressCallipygos (30 comments total)

This really sounds like a throw-away gag from the simpsons
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:23 AM on August 5 [11 favorites]

I am right on the line between excited and really uneasy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 AM on August 5 [3 favorites]

always wondered about the "Cyrus" thing, and now I know. Thanks, Empress!

also, this reminds me it's time to introduce the kiddos to the original. this should be fun.
posted by martin q blank at 7:28 AM on August 5

My high school Latin teacher showed us parts of the movie because of the Anabasis connection. It really does drip with all the themes you'd expect from the epics of classical antiquity, just in a really campy 70 manner.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:39 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

Anabasis Xenophon, it's based on Anabasis [by] Xenophon
And there's a million gangs that haven't come
But just you wait, just you wait.
posted by dannyboybell at 7:42 AM on August 5 [5 favorites]

I'm...kind of on-board with this one, despite my initial instincts. Could be really fun. Looking forward to the musical version of the scene where the Lizzies lull the Warriors into a stupor with their bisexual wiles, then try to assassinate them, with the clear subtext of Rembrandt, the graffiti artist in the gang who's the only one who sees what's going on with the seduction, and who's described in the Warriors wiki as "a little soft around the edges," being queer himself. Make it happen, Lin.
posted by mediareport at 7:48 AM on August 5 [2 favorites]

This is a genuine question: has Hamilton had any enduring cultural impact? It was inescapable for a couple of years there but over a decade later it feels like Avatar, this absolute tidal wave that crashed on to the culture, then ebbed away, leaving almost no trace.
posted by saladin at 8:08 AM on August 5 [3 favorites]

Surely there was a bit of confusion and Miranda is actually planning to adapt the Warriors novels.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:20 AM on August 5 [2 favorites]

It was inescapable for a couple of years there but over a decade later it feels like Avatar, this absolute tidal wave that crashed on to the culture, then ebbed away, leaving almost no trace.

My pet theory here is : Trump winning the election flipped the switch on perception of Hamilton, from "politics is cool now and this is great" to "politics is shit now and this is cringe."
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:51 AM on August 5 [7 favorites]

saladin: This is a genuine question: has Hamilton had any enduring cultural impact?

I would say yes, based on the hype around movies that were Broadway shows. Wicked, for example, or the re-re-make of Mean Girls I don't think would have happened without Hamilton showing that people will shell out big money to see good production values behind great voices. And that makes more space for theater in general.

In terms of "did it change Americans as a people?" More citizens will recognize the names that get dropped by MAGA fruitcakes and the January 6th rebels, and will probably have a strong association -- good or bad -- based more on the play/movie than on their little-remembered history classes.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:47 AM on August 5 [2 favorites]

Um, yes, as someone who was obsessed with Hamilton and still kinda is. People are still quoting it that I see and that's not just the theater kids, either.

That said, I'm a big fan of LMM, but this subject matter does...not excite me or sound like something I'd be into :(
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:03 AM on August 5 [3 favorites]

has Hamilton had any enduring cultural impact? It was inescapable for a couple of years there but over a decade later it feels like Avatar, this absolute tidal wave that crashed on to the culture, then ebbed away, leaving almost no trace.

there are are still four full companies of Hamilton performing right now (New York, US Tour, Singapore, UK Tour)

"The Room Where It Happens" has gained a life of its own as a convenient shorthand for the value of being an insider, and the way that most important political and strategic decisions are not made democratically, but in small groups of powerful people. I know many people who use the term who haven't seen Hamilton or are fans of musical theatre.

The careers of Leslie Odom, Jr, Renee Elise Goldsbery, and Jonathan Groff skyrocketed after the show's Broadway run.

No, it's not the same sort of mania that we went through in 2018/2019 when it seemed to drown out any other form of musical theatre that existed (and I'm honestly glad for that, because it was a bit much), but Hamilton is still relevant and still has, dare we say, a legacy.
posted by bl1nk at 10:11 AM on August 5 [10 favorites]

has Hamilton had any enduring cultural impact? It was inescapable for a couple of years there but over a decade later it feels like Avatar, this absolute tidal wave that crashed on to the culture, then ebbed away, leaving almost no trace.

I mean, it's a Broadway show, and it's live theater. Broadway is never going to have the same visibility as movies or TV. But it's still selling out and has multiple touring companies plus it's running in more than one country, and for a Broadway show that is damn good.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:45 AM on August 5 [3 favorites]

If history has taught me anything, it's that my delight in a Lin-Manuel Miranda work cannot be predicted by a brief summary of its inspiration (e.g. "first US Secretary of the Treasury").

This sounds ... not that great to me (haven't seen the movie, really don't like things with fighting at the core of the plot), which means I will undoubtedly play it non-stop once it comes out.

Thanks for posting this, Empress!
posted by kristi at 10:53 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

That said, I'm a big fan of LMM, but this subject matter does...not excite me or sound like something I'd be into :(

I'm pretty sure 99.9% of theater fans and 99.99999% of everyone else would have said the same about Hamilton before it happened.
posted by dmd at 10:57 AM on August 5 [7 favorites]

literal samples of conversations between my wife and I about musical theater over the last decade

2016
Me: "... oh, yeah, it's a musical about the Founding Fathers and the first Treasury Secretary, but it's hiphop and has racially flipped casting."

Wife: "I like the hip hop and racially flipped casting, but I don't know about the politics stuff. Sure, let's check it out and ..." "... OMG, I was not ready for that."

2018
Me: "... oh, yeah, it's a play about a Canadian town in 9/11, told as an oral history musical."

Wife: "I can think of a dozen ways that may be done in poor taste, but you seem excited so ..." "... goddamn, that was amazing."

2019
Me: "... oh, hey, that woman who did that musical based on War and Peace as a sort of Balkan/Slavic cabaret is now doing a metatextual adaptation of Moby Dick"

Wife: "that sounds ... you know, fuck it, if the last few years have taught me anything, the weirder the premise is of a musical, the better it will be. This sounds amazing."

Reader, it was.
posted by bl1nk at 11:13 AM on August 5 [10 favorites]

I have been hoping he would make a professional wrestling musical because I know he is a fan (maybe in the vein of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which rules), but this is close enough.
posted by Tesseractive at 11:26 AM on August 5

I hope they're not writing Eisa Davis out of this story. She isn't mentioned in the Playbill article and I find it hard to believe there could be a jump from "concept album" to musical without her.
posted by chavenet at 12:29 PM on August 5

Hyper-local tangent for NYC people: weather permitting, there is due to be a free screening of the film AT Coney Island on August 8.

Even though Coney Island is supposed to have been cleaned up, you can still find a LOT of WARRIORS-themed souvenirs and Swag there. The part of the Boardwalk that was their clubhouse looks very different, alas.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:29 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]

Never forget the entire White House laughing at LMM when he announced Hamilton's concept. And yes, he clearly knew they'd laugh, and hammed it up. I appreciate that he's still willing throw the wildest concepts out there and trust that it'll work.

As for the lasting legacy of Hamilton - go on tiktok. Snippets from Hamilton still go viral there as songs at least once a year. And LMM himself has maintained his relevance through writing songs/scores for Disney. He himself has stepped out of the public spotlight a bit, probably as a byproduct of working on something and having a young family. People were starting to get a bit nasty about his "theater kid" persona so it's probably better for him to have a lower profile and let the work speak.
posted by lunasol at 1:27 PM on August 5

As they say in the film version... LET'S GET DOWN TO IT, BOPPERS.

I'm sort of looking at this concept askance, but also, I mean, who'd have thought that Hamilton would work, so maybe he'll pull it off. NYC is no longer the NYC of the late 70's, but I could see it still working. Maybe more of a handwavey NYC of legend than the current version of the city.

I think Hamilton is still huge at least among a bunch of theater-kid types (kids and adults), even if the general public has moved on. (Has it? I can't tell.) But it mainstreamed hip-hop and rap in a way that nothing else has before this - I know folks in their 70's who were happily listening to mad rap battles without necessarily realizing they were listening to that rap stuff.

For years in musical theater, I'd been thinking there was a cross-pollination and mash up waiting to happen between traditional musical theater and rap music - both genres have a love of peculiar wordplay, but Sondheim's witch's rap in the midst of "Into The Woods" was about as far as it got in the mainstream of musical theater for a while. Hamilton hit that overlap between the genres perfectly. I think there's a few more years left before we get people who imprinted on that as younger theater nerds getting to the point where they are generating good art partly inspired by it, but I think it's going to have a long lasting impact on the genre.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:58 PM on August 5

People were starting to get a bit nasty about his "theater kid" persona so it's probably better for him to have a lower profile and let the work speak.

He also advocated for PROMESA, a colonialist law that increased US government control of Puerto Rico's economy in the wake of Hurricane Maria and resulted in a wave of austerity measures and privatization.

He eventually retracted his support, but by that time the damage was (and continues to be) done.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 2:06 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]

the standard take on hamilton is, yeah, it immediately lost all cultural relevance in november of 2016, once poptimistic liberalism was shown to be feckless against the rising tide of, well, you know. the rising tide.

which isn't an unfair take. the bad things about hamilton — take as one example its attribution of the acts of cato howe to the man who kept him enslaved — came to outweigh the good things, things like how it materially diversified casting in broadway productions after all the everything started.

i like the catchy tunes in hamilton (and relatedly i entirely love the moana soundtrack), but hamilton's defanged politics were only tolerable in a world where so many of us thought that we didn't need fangs.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:13 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]

I dunno... I'm not a musical-head, but I can hum along to tunes from several recent musicals. And some musicals I know pretty well. There's usually one tune from every big show that breaks out and makes it on the radio, or gets performed a lot, becomes a meme or a hit.

I cannot remember or even imagine a single song from Hamilton. I'm not saying it's a bad show, but (IMO) the music is really forgettable. As in, I have completely forgotten it.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:12 PM on August 5

This is a genuine question: has Hamilton had any enduring cultural impact? It was inescapable for a couple of years there but over a decade later it feels like Avatar, this absolute tidal wave that crashed on to the culture, then ebbed away, leaving almost no trace.

what does enduring cultural impact mean to you? it really was a very good musical, what else was it supposed to do?
posted by Sebmojo at 6:14 PM on August 5 [2 favorites]

take as one example its attribution of the acts of cato howe to the man who kept him enslaved

this is kind of a reach ngl
posted by Sebmojo at 6:18 PM on August 5 [1 favorite]

I mean it’s a synecdoche for generally being far too nice to people who enslaved other people, and for getting a little, i dunno, sfumato about hamilton’s own views re: slavery, also the schuyler family. i just got really irked when i looked up the name of the guy i didn’t know and found out the play realllly misrepresented everything about him.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:34 PM on August 5

If you’ve only seen the film and haven’t read The Warriors, I strongly encourage you to take an afternoon or so and do so. It’s excellent and quite unlike the movie - where the film version gives us goofy wacky older teens and adults, glorifying and validating their actions in what amounts to a fantasy NYC, the book is… not that. It’s about kids - children - who lunge at violence and play acting as adults in response to poverty, deep deprivation and despair. It’s not entirely joyless but it is absolutely wild to me to compare them.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:37 PM on August 5

I have yet to see Hamilton, which must mean it isn't very important, and in fact, it may not exist. From what I can tell, politicians having rap battles to determine who goes to Cat Heaven is a poor premise for a musical.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:03 PM on August 5

Similarly, I've never seen Titanic and at this point it's a running joke with my wife.

I don't know how that relates but it's true. I don't know that Titanic really influenced anything and I think I'd say the same about Hamilton. Though I think Hamilton is worth a watch, there are some excellent performances in it.
posted by VTX at 8:32 PM on August 5