Lin-Manuel Miranda Performs at the White House Poetry Jam: (8 of 8)

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dehrmann · 2021-11 · Recommendation

The main sign it was going to be a success was a performance Lin-Manuel Miranda did at the White House. Listen for where the laughs are; they're not there when you see it on Broadway (and I assume The Public Theater). [VIDEO] That's important because the premise is high school cringy. Let's take a historical story and set it to rap! If it wasn't so well-executed, it would have come off as painfully gimmicky.

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svat · 2024-09 · Reference

Here he is in 2009, performing Shakespeare at the (Obama) "White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word": [LINK] (Othello's speech defending himself: [1]) (Incidentally, it was on the same occasion that Lin-Manuel Miranda first announced he was working on a hip-hop album about treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, to some laughter, before performing a sample: [VIDEO] — the musical came out six years later.) [1]: [LINK] .

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shadowgovt · 2019-10 · Reference

It's inspiring to observe how long the path can be between initial forays (or even middle-career forays) and publicly-recognized success. This seems a relatively universal truism with only rare exceptions (too rare to bet one's future on, certainly). I'm reminded of the video of Lin Manuel-Miranda performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009 [ [VIDEO] ]. The work he presented was already pretty well-polished, and the musical that included it wouldn't open for another six years.

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