The original cast of Hamilton, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jonathan Groff, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs, and Leslie Odom, Jr., reunited yesterday at The Tony Awards to celebrate the musical’s tenth anniversary.
They didn’t just stand there and pose for the cameras. Instead, they performed a medley of the show’s songs. So, it felt like you were getting all of Hamilton in four minutes and eighteen seconds.
What a performance! There were definitely some broken legs in the audience after watching that.
The only negative is that it proved that even though this was Broadway’s most lucrative year ($800 for George Clooney to bore you to tears), it wasn’t a very good one. Not like the year that Hamilton changed the game!
Ten years ago, Hamilton lit a fire on Broadway! And it has never been the same. In 2006, the Broadway musical dominated the Tonys with a record-breaking 16 nominations and 11 wins.
In honor of the show’s 10th anniversary, the original cast is reuniting for a special, and I am sure memorable, performance at the Tonys.
The reuniting cast is: Carleigh Bettiol, Andrew Chappelle, Ariana DeBose, Alysha Deslorieux, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Sydney James Harcourt, Neil Haskell, Sasha Hutchings, Christopher Jackson, Thayne Jasperson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Stephanie Klemons, Morgan Marcell, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Javier Muñoz, Leslie Odom, Jr., Okieriete Onaodowan, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Jon Rua, Austin Smith, Phillipa Soo, Seth Stewart, Betsy Struxness, Ephraim Sykes, and Voltaire Wade-Greene.
Yesterday was Saturday Night Live’s first episode during his second term as president. So, of course, they started off the episode by tackling his frightening first week in office again.
They did that by taking it back to 1776, when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. And if you do that, you need Alexander Hamilton. So, Lorne Michaels asked Lin-Manuel Miranda to reprise his most famous role 24 hours before the show went live. And the musical genius said yes.
And we are happy Lin-Manuel Miranda Cosgrove did because his appearance made a spot-on sketch even funnier! Especially when he broke. But he did try his best not to laugh. It was just too hard not to.
No matter what John Legend does, I will always love him because he wrote All of Me for his wife, Chrissy Teigen. And what woman would not dream of her husband doing the same?
Lin-Manuel Miranda also wrote a song for his wife, Vanessa, and we heard it in Hamilton.
Today, when the musical magician was on The Drew Barrymore Show to promote All In: A Comedy About Love, she wanted to know if he would ever write a romantic musical for his wife.
“Oh, they’re all for my wife, though. They all have been. I mean, the character in In The Heights is named Vanessa, for gd’s sake,” he told her. “But you know it’s fun. It’s really funny, actually, because there’s a song in Hamilton called That Would Be Enough. And there is no historical precedent for that song. It’s just Eliza saying, like I just needed to be here, like that’s all I need. And I wrote it in a hail of snot and tears. Like it was one of those songs I didn’t find it in a historical book. I just was like feeling it for my wife. And I wrote the song. And I played it for her; my wife is a lawyer, and she’s very even-keeled. So I play it just like and ‘That would be enough.’ And I serenade her, and she goes, ‘Good.’ Yeah. It’s kind of like you heartless monster. But that’s my little love song to her in the middle of that show.”
How sweet is that? And when you listen to the lyrics, you can hear that they are about him spending so much time writing his musicals. As long as he comes home to her, she is OK with him doing that. At least, he wrote that way for her.
Sweeney Todd just moved into the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway. It is located next to the Richard Rodgers Theater, where Hamilton is still going on. So Lin-Manuel Miranda, being the neighborly man that he is, thought he would invite his neighbors for a song, and they said yes.
So today, both casts got together and told the story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to the music of the Founding Father who was shot and killed in a duel gone wrong.
There really isn’t much to say except that it is brilliant. Josh Groban, AnnaLeigh Ashford, and everyone else who performed at today’s Ham4Ham hit it out of the park! Bravo! Bravo!
But I have to say, as a NYer who spent a lot of time on Broadway. I would be so pissed if traffic was blocked on Friday night because of this. Am I the only one who felt that way when they saw all of those fans on the street blocking traffic? So rude!
