July 3, 2020
It was like ten years or so ago that the United Palace hosted a one night only performance of songs from Broadway’s hit musical In the Heights. That every seat was filled was no surprise since the show’s story takes place up here and practically everybody had gone downtown to see it. What was a little surprising was hearing the audience sing along with the cast that night – and not just a couple of hardcore fans on a couple of numbers. Most of the folks on hand that night knew all of the words to all of the songs. It was a testament to the love this community feels for the man behind that production, Lin Manuel Miranda and for his art.
Sometimes it seems like everybody up here has a story – she served him a drink at Saggio, he shot an ad with him in that drugstore, he ate lunch at the Capitol and here’s a photo of him right here in New York Magazine! Here’s ours: we were at a book signing for Rita Moreno and so was he. She hadn’t arrived yet so we had an opportunity to tell Lin how much we’d enjoyed both In the Heights and Bring It On, both of which we’d seen more than once. He smiled and said something like, ‘that’s great.’ To keep the dying conversation going we asked, ‘so are you working on anything new?’
What he said next would haunt us for years. ‘I’m working on a show about Alexander Hamilton. It’s the quintessential immigrant’s story. He came here from the Caribbean. He was broke, but he was smart and he worked hard and he became one of our country’s founding fathers.’ We said wow that sounds interesting and filed it away in the back of our mind…until a couple years later when we heard about a new Lin Manuel musical at The Public. We couldn’t get a ticket. Then it moved to Broadway and we still couldn’t get a ticket. For years after that, we couldn’t get a ticket.
One of our few actual regrets in life is never having seen the show that Lin had described that day so long ago. So it was a great pleasure to learn that a performance (with the original cast!) had been filmed and that we were finally going to be able to see the show that we’ve obsessed over not having seen for so long. Guess we just had to wait for it, eh?