![]() He’s been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant and appeared in the Time 100 as one of the world’s most influential people. ![]() He’s won five Grammys, two Emmys, three Tonys, a Pulitzer Prize and has been nominated for two Academy Awards. Among his hits are the massive Billboard Hot 100 number one and debilitating earworm We Don’t Talk About Bruno, and the Moana hits You’re Welcome, We Know The Way and How Far I’ll Go. Since its debut on Broadway in 2015, Miranda has also become one of the world’s most sought-after movie songwriters, creating the songs for films including Moana, Vivo and Encanto. Miranda with Jason Arrow, who plays Alexander Hamilton in the Australian production of Hamilton. As one reviewer wrote, “The first half of Hamilton alone contained more bona fide bangers than Lloyd Webber wrote in his career.” It is not an exaggeration to say that, with Hamilton, Miranda changed the face of the musical. There is more than one reason for the level of maniacal fandom Miranda inspires (organisers of the Sunday morning Q&A received 30,000 applications for the 1800 free tickets), but the main one is Hamilton, a musical containing many innovations, including telling much of its story in rap and using an almost entirely non-white cast to tell an all-white story in an overwhelmingly white artform, while ultimately delivering a work of genius, and not in some abstract “artistic quality” sense, but in an “I am instantly and intensely in love with everything about this” sense. Many of the journalists prefaced their questions with expressions of fandom (“Big fan”/“Massive fan”, etc) and one journalist tried to ask his question in a Miranda-style rhyme he’d written, but he got overexcited, fudged it and Miranda had to ask him to repeat it, then started answering before the journalist had finished, so the whole thing was generally very awkward. He received a standing ovation from the 2000-strong audience as he walked to his seat prior to the sold-out Saturday night show, another when he walked out on stage three hours later for the curtain call, another the next morning when he walked out on the same stage for a sold out Q&A with celebrity interviewer Leigh Sales, another when he left the stage an hour later, and another that afternoon when he arrived at the press conference (not all the journalists were standing, but several were whooping). Two weeks ago, its creator and creative genius Lin-Manuel Miranda travelled to Brisbane to get his first glimpse of the Australasian cast performing it. In two months’ time, Hamilton, the greatest musical of the 21st century, will make its New Zealand debut. Lin-Manuel Miranda faces an adoring media contingent in Brisbane.
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