Lin-Manuel Miranda On "Hamilton" And Puerto Rico

good morning I can't believe this is happening of course this is the sit-down the room where it happens here at am tedium I'm joined by lin-manuel miranda morning hi thank you for teaming so you for having me to talk to you about this literally would happen you sent me a direct message you were like okay I found an excuse to be on the show I want you to hear this new song yeah and all I knew was it involved five women that's all I knew until like this morning yeah and here we are on fire and here we are and we watch the video here we're debuting the video so we have a couple of questions before the video because I told him I was like listen I went put on my poet cap I'm grilling you yes that's why yes it's time so this is my question you've been doing the hem will drop you did some mixtape do you think of Hamilton as a living text like a living document like the Constitution no no I don't but I do know that it took me seven years to get to the final text of Hamilton and there's lots of fun side roads right and roads not taken alternate universes and I mean this month Hamill drop literally came because I was I was doing the Hamill cast which is a fan podcast that that has really sort of blown up and I wanted to play them goodies I was like here's some stuff that didn't make it a show play I played them this and I was like this is kind of dope I should do it so she was like can i play on the show said no I think I'm gonna do something okay and then I sort of brought it up to the people at Atlantic and I said why don't we use this to showcase some of the incredible people in our in our companies like we could have and this is this is where Tom McHale comes in because he always has the best idea okay so I said your question Fiona's yeah we could have one of one of the Eliza's in we could have the Chicago Eliza dude or we could have one of the tour Eliza's do it or Rachel in London and they said why do you have all five of them do it yeah I said yeah that's the best idea that was a question someone was like okay this is from Fiona nee how did you get the idea to use first burn and yeah it was the way I mean we were just debating between the first burn first draft of burn first burn just looking looks the nicer yeah salt the earth yeah I love it well let's let's take a look at we're about to debut the video I have to watch nothing is seen this which is very hard yeah I kept trying to peek but I didn't so we're going to watch the video first burn great now I think they're amazing [Music] between them yeah any boss I saw you I knew you were like you said you were like I thought you were why were already tearing up when I told her what you've done she said you married an actress he's wrong too close to the Sun don't take [Music] you can't you won't me you could stand over there if you want I don't know who you have so much [Music] wrote that is like mini initially and it's a piano figure in the final okay [Music] [Music] into our bed in clearing your name [Music] [Music] future is the future Wonder [Music] [Music] [Music] you did that they did that everybody did that that was oh yeah some incredible thing is you see in the video one Mike Elizondo on guitar who he'd produced extraordinary machine for Apple and stuff and so like he's been a friend of ours throughout the mixtape is amazing and then you know lacks incredible like stacking those chords for the joke those invoke don't okay because it's funny I think a lot of people point out Destiny's Child as a reference point and I care I hear like Schuyler Sisters sounds very yeah Destiny's Child but invoke that's what I was hearing this morning yes here in this morning so that's not the point it is no no I'm pulling from everything I love and I love and vote that and you know you have to like look at the great sort of heartbreak songs you have it's not right but it's okay in which i think is a definitive text all decisions at the piano at the beginning almost makes me thing at the piano did yeah and you know love should have brought us home last night boomerang soundtrack and you know but again this is the first draft right and i think it's it's a great i wanted to talk to you about it because you can talk about process with this so this is i'm sitting at the piano I'm trying to figure out what Eliza is feeling and it and it really is I mean I know that's like a Internet's Lions call it a mood but it is a mood it is like everything honest could be feeling in that moment so you get into the sister stuff right you get into sort of all of that but she burns the letter in the first verse yeah and so when I bring this to my team I go okay well it's a good song now how do you make a scene and frankly it was Tommy's idea to be like well she's got to get to the decision of burning that was my first question time because you know obviously there's the revelation you were never going to be present everything like that but when we see Eliza like is it the night of the revelation is she you know is it like was she out at dinner with her friends and they're like girlfriend you know or is it are we seeing her a few weeks later a couple of days has she had time to like walk around and think about it so on stage where are we seeing her in time compared to first mile yeah I don't know you don't I don't know I think you know in this first draft I actually thought Hamilton was gonna be on stage for it and sort of taking my grant of it because in the in the first draft you can hear Hamilton go Eliza and then she goes I'm rereading your letters I don't you Eliza me and then was something we realized really quickly is we want to be alone with Eliza in that moment we're never alone with Eliza she's defined by her sister she's defined by her husband she's defined by her children so being alone with her was really important so that began to characterize sort of the rewrite of the song and - he won her through his words you know he won her in helpless it's all about I'm writing a letter nightly it's like he literally won her so it's also about morning I mean and then his writing is also what destroyed this showing in the Rye and she's like the paragraphs are senseless it's overtaken by paranoia like the letters ha ha do so so in the second draft it's also about mourning everything he's throwing away not just you up it's it's also like look at everything we had five alarm and and then giving her the agency to make that decision to burn the letters or not and there's suspense in that scene in in the final version but not being said like this is really fun to listen to and works as a pop song pop song you don't have a responsibility to go from A to B to C okay you have the responsibility to create a scene okay we have a greater responsibility to tie it into the larger themes of the show and and then there's that great moment at the end of this draft where she goes when will you learn that day or your legacy really likes it well that's the last song in the show so we can't give away the ghost and burn in a hole and yeah we can't you know give that up there because we're gonna have this incredible reveal at the end of the show that Eliza well then I want to survive him so interesting what about what about the line about her sister cuz that's not in that's not in the musical no right but she's like listen I have heard about whiskers I see the way you look at my sister witch okay bars first of all was there some thinking about her not alluding to that on stage and and why she would do it well it's a couple of things one there's the historical record in which we don't really have we don't have a historical opinion of how she felt about that we do know that her sister openly sort of enjoyed Hamilton and thought he was brilliant that line in helpless I'm just saying if you really loved me you would share that's based on a real letter she said give my regards to that husband of yours if you were a good sister you would share him with me the ancestors were some freaks but when people talk about like political scandal and I mean certainly now it's like oh this is just and I'm like um yeah they were nasty okay and as I was coming we don't have evidence that Eliza was upset about it but in that moment when I was being Eliza and and trying to react to the Reynolds pamphlet I got upset about it so I wrote it in but then it also is like we don't pay this off between the sisters we don't have time to because we have a lot more a lot more story so is it worth sort of opening that up if we're not gonna if we're not gonna really go there so and I have to say I'm glad you didn't because I think there was a huge risk in the narrative where we where it becomes the sisters turning against one another right and and Hamilton kind of getting off the hook and so it was interesting to see her centered her allude to her awareness of being a woman in history she's like listen to historians I'm gonna have to figure this out I'm not gonna be your pawn right and then it's all shouldered back on - yeah yeah and I always think about something Renee used to say when we were sort of in the show in the first year this this is a this is a love story between two sisters as well and that's so much more interesting than my sister who did me wrong and and that we've seen that so many times and that's the easier place to go as opposed to Eliza really taking stock of everything and then making this decision yeah there's also very nuanced I mean because it really it's not necessarily in my opinion the affair that Eliza is most upset about it's about the way he's addressing him that he's so paranoid uuugh he's so obsessed about his reputation it's incredible selfishness on Hamilton's part I mean believe me Hamilton gets dragged and we will all the time and can I tell you I had to live with him for six years I deliver this trifling-ass for six years I had to play all the parts around him so I share it and so but yeah I mean and so I think that line in the first draft your enemy whispers so you have to scream that's the that's the brunt of the argument against Hamilton dropping the Reynolds pamphlet and there was another cut song called congratulations where Angelica takes him to task the same thing this thing three people were talking about you blew it up by quote tweeting it the rebels pamphlet you know one would have seen it that guy has 12 followers you think anyone is like cyntha strike two Melania right like they whisper you scream like that I don't think a lot of like am i dude the the the story of American politics is littered with quote unquote The Good Wife TM of people who have had to stand by while men up you know what I mean and so that's everything past is present and that's that's not new it's not new well so as I was thinking about I'm excited to talk to you this weekend and my pleasure my joy my pleasure was interrupted as it so often is by white people and this damn White House Correspondents Dinner agir okay I was minding my business just Hamilton ting it up and I was like what is happening okay so here's the thing as I was thinking about the response to you know Michelle wolf and fellow jokes telling her jokes she was high in my opinion she was hired to tell jokes and she did it yelling just played your card and showing that you either didn't read the handmade sale or watch the show because the way she talked about aunt Lydia was about her being an enforcer anyway it made me think about the Hamilton cast confronting Mike Pence and 2016 and then you know Trump said you know they harassed pence in a safe space that the either and now it seems like another echo of that so we have comedians and an art is always being told anytime they address this administration that it's harassment I have a lot of questions most of which I'll just DM you later if you could say anything to Michelle wolf this morning what would you say I would say great job it was really funny you did your job and and I thought she sort of punched all around she didn't depressed she ding Democrats she deemed Republicans she the president who's supposed to sit there by the way like that's been the tradition is that one sit there and enjoy it and so that was an abdication of responsibility of not being there to take the joke and so she's a great also her like Turner handles like Michelle isn't Woolf so I'm like she told y'all she told you yeah do your research before you hire your talent I guess but you know I was also thinking obviously like Puerto Rico and you're in it I admire you and you know you're collaborators that you were still doing work for the relief effort in Puerto Rico it also breaks my heart and I find it deeply embarrassing that you had to in the first place right that that was speaking to an absence of presence but also that you still have to all of these months later Maria without a September September September and here we are in April and it's still necessary so I just wanted to ask you how is the relief effort going how do you feel at this point and what can people do yeah you know we kind of just keep digging in our sandbox you know with the Hispanic Federation we are we're constantly working between short term and long term efforts there are still real relief efforts that are needed there are still people in the mountains of aguado who are or waiting for power and waiting for service and need short-term relief aid like water filtration systems and then we have you know we were we're really what's really amazing we raised over thirty million dollars that's a drop in the bucket in terms of what Puerto Rico actually need the frustrating part is that you know with a wave of a pen the government could do so much more that being said we also have these long-term projects the that we're doing these multi your grants called Aman si and it's everything for long term recovery from the island from organizations working in prenatal health care to rebuilding roofs to replanting agriculture so many crops were lost as a result of the hurricane and and we're working with organizations that already exist I'm not trying to reinvent them that's all yeah and we're working we're also working with local mayor's like that's the that's the goal as we go to the mayor and say what your constituents need so we're really trying to be as direct and transparent as possible and so you know we continue doing that and and that's the logical response to natural disaster the man-made disasters are the ones that are frustrating right right absolutely I just I can't believe we're still having to talk about it yeah and hurricane season is coming do you mean and also that yeah also that friends well obviously we will continue to have reported Rico as much as we can and address it and I guess just you know us we can just sit here in Kiki all day I have to be good although I'm moving apartments tomorrow so I like literally oh my like go take care of that you know you are involved in so many projects Mary Poppins and you know I was watching the Magic School Bus okay I recorded in the same studio record Peppa Pig and I was a little like oh my god I'm I'm where peppa pig was oh I love it oh my gosh that's pretty I don't know you know I know the only people that scare me perhaps more than Beyonce I think are Disney is there anything you could say about Mary Poppins oh wow what can I say well I'm I'm thrilled that they sort of put out that commercial I'm really excited it's just um here's here's what I can say no here's my commercial for Mary Poppins returns I saw a rough cut of the movie with my wife my wife who did not cry at the end of It's a Wonderful Life I know she's like not human she she cried like five times in that movie and we had lunch with Rob Marshall afterwards and then her water broke and we had a baby so that's how emotional Mary Poppins returns it's well I think we'll just leave it with her the entire control room exclaim all right well shout out to that hey shut up your wife yeah that's right because you she's got a song she could play you could get all the lives of course I walk the straight path friend anyway then thank you so much for joining us everyone go listen to the Hamill track first burn watch it it's out there keep tweeting us questions you all had wonderful wonderful thoughts more ang diem is up next [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: AM to DM

Views: 4,746

Rating: 4.9774013 out of 5

Keywords: Hamilton, KqOR, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Puerto Rico, news

Id: nadn5xk4rxk

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018