04.25.23: Notes on Lin-Manuel Miranda

Cringe wins.

Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve come around on the guy. I’ve mellowed. I’m diffused. I’ve contemplated this surrender for a very long time — years! I’ve been persuaded by small children and lobbied still more passionately by my wife. I had long talks, in a lush garden, with Jesus. I went to some of those classes that the Catholics make you do before they’ll let you take Communion. I’ve drafted my letters of resignation from a few different fraternal orders of haters. Like Big Sean, I decided. Lin-Manuel Miranda is, in fact, quite good.

So? what do you want? a cookie?

No, though I’ll gladly accept your subscription.

Today I’m finally getting over myself and allowing myself to appreciate the obvious merits of a profoundly talented writer of musicals; one of the greatest entertainers of his generation. I’m just trying to get right with God! But I’m inclined to show my work here. This is a newsletter of music criticism, after all.

In the Heights is good — with qualifications. The storytelling is all over the place. Usnavi is somewhat endearing, somewhat, but he’s also a rudderless protagonist whose big climactic reversal, at the last minute in the last number of the production, is a real eye-roller. The biggest fans of In the Heights fucking love these characters, but I dunno — the neighborhood dynamics just get a little too unwieldy for me. The chemistry in the performances, in both the original cast recording and the recent movie, is often much stronger than the underlying characterizations. The singing is often much stronger than the writing.

As for the tunes: In the Heights is a very ambitious musical that’s doing a lot of work to reconcile several different musical styles in a highly challenging format with its own entrenched conventions. It’s almost too successful for its own good, as it’s very easy to take homeboy’s innovations and subversions in this thing for granted. I’d say I enjoy the production overall, as an ecstatic survey of several genres, more than I enjoy the songs individually — though I do love “The Club” into “Blackout.” The former is a high-energy dance number that hits a lot of bold notes. The latter is a big ensemble outcry in the streets at night during a summer blackout, in a humid crush of passions and voices. It’s fun!

Hamilton is good — full stop. I’m still tempted to complain about feeling historically disoriented by many of its songs, but then I guess Schönberg’s Les Misérables doesn’t give a very straightforward overview of the June Rebellion either. The personal mythology trumps the national mythology in Hamilton, I get that — the passage of time and milestones just gets a bit too near-sighted for my liking.

The songs, though: so many hits in Hamilton are just straight-up headshots. I’m one of a thousand jackoffs who’ve each at some point cleverly compared this thing to Schoolhouse Rock, as a diss, but this was always obviously talking past the fact that Schoolhouse Rock was fucking flopless. Listen to “The Schuyler Sisters” — sure, those flows, those drums, and those scratches are 15 years out of fashion in hip-hop, and rapping about the Declaration of Independence is inevitably going to sound somewhat corny, so is singing about it in the style of girl-group R&B, but by the standards of musical theater this song is a goddamn miracle. You’re of course free to believe that the endeavor — to incorporate these influences in this genre to dramatize this history with this gloss — is fundamentally misguided. But ultimately it’s hard for me to find fault with its execution. At long last, I surrender.

Look, America was in a very strange state at the peak of the hype for Hamilton. It was the late 2010s, and many of us were understandably exasperated with the cringe-lib cultural residue of Yes We Can / I’m With Her. This was the eve of the total irradiation of American politics and entertainment, not to mention the terminal conflation of both. None of us heard this shit in a vacuum. It was totally valid for some fans of Hamilton to feel all warm and fuzzy about the Obama-ification of the whole phenomenon; and it was equally valid for some critics of Hamilton to feel a bit put off by same. My main regret, as a music critic and rap partisan who took an unkind view of Hamilton for a long time, is having closed my eyes, ears, and heart to a genuine breakthrough in two different musical genres of some importance to me. There’s criticism and then there’s petulance — I think Hamilton suffered a lot more of the latter. This was also a matter of Hamilton getting big and politicized enough to draw commentary from people who don’t necessarily enjoy or respect musical theater in the first place.

Moana is good — again with qualifications. The story basics are solid. The girl wants to go in the water! Let her go in the water! You’re gonna regret not letting her go in the water! But the execution is weak with a conspicuously listless middle and a weirdly abrupt, out-of-nowhere resolution. I respect the progressive determination to overcome the damsel romance tropes of this genre, but then you need to substantially replace those beats with something else; something other than Flight of the Conchords and an optional boss from Elden Ring. You otherwise have movie musical that’s really roughly on par with Mulan, if we’re keeping it a buck: a cool story for the first 30 minutes or so, degraded into a shapeless afterthought for the remaining runtime. But musically you haven’t lived until you’ve survived some measure of road-tripping with small kids and this soundtrack at max volume, on a loop. “Where You Are,” alone, did a lot to recover me from the dark side of the LMM discourse.

Encanto — OK, I was kinda bored by this one and also on painkillers while laid up with double leg injuries and distractedly watching it with a friend’s kid. You’re telling me the house is magic? And also haunted? John Leguizamo lives in the walls? And his theme song is “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” via “Despacito”? OK. You know what? Let me stop and not get ahead of myself only to end up back here in 18 months upgrading my regard for this one, too. Humility!

Last but not least, Miranda’s feature directorial debut, adapting Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical stage musical, tick, tick…BOOM! — kinda weird but very good. It’s inventive and anxious and overwhelming, the sort of movie that makes you want to move to New York despite mostly making New York out to be a slaugtherhouse for liberal arts majors. Rent is the first stage musical that I ever gave a shit about, for whatever that’s worth. This movie keeps a precious flame.

BONUS: Miranda co-wrote Bring It On: The Musical with Tom Kitt. I’ve haven’t watched the whole show, and I assume most people reading this newsletter haven’t either, but I’ve dabbled in the cast recording, and so far it’s only further affirming the wisdom expressed in earlier paragraphs. I likely rank this right up there with the musical adaptation of Legally Blonde — a newsletter subject for another day, perhaps.