Broadway and its fans are just weird. Tons of popular movies have been bastardized into musicals for some reason. The success of Hamilton baffles me. The "songs" are delivered lifelessly and with no emotion. With other musicals, I can at least understand why some people like them, but every clip of Hamilton I've seen is just. so. dull. And yet it's got Disney sucking Lemon Meringue Amanda or whatever his name is's dick.
So, here’s the thing about *Hamilton*. It’s like someone took Broadway—this big, traditional, jazz hands kind of world—and smashed it together with modern music, like *‘90s hip hop,* and somehow it didn’t blow up in their face. It’s like if you made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but instead of jelly, you used sriracha sauce, and people went, “Hey, this is amazing! I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can’t live without it!”
So what happened? You’ve got all these people who would never touch a Broadway show with a ten-foot pole—like, they wouldn’t be caught dead at *Cats* unless they were dragged there by their grandma. But then they hear *Hamilton* and think, “Wait, this is history and rap? At the same time? I’m in!”
And it wasn’t just the theater nerds who got into it. Oh no, suddenly you’ve got hip hop fans, pop fans, R&B fans, all listening to the same cast recording like it’s the new Drake album. Why? Because their favorite artists are jumping on the bandwagon to get that shiny EGOT, which, for those of you who don’t know, is like the *Infinity Gauntlet* for entertainers. They want that golden trophy so bad, they’ll do anything, even put on a colonial wig and rap about the Federalist Papers.
Now, because of all this, *Hamilton* doesn’t just make a lot of money—it makes *all* the money. We’re talking a billion dollars. That’s the kind of money you only see in superhero movies or if Jeff Bezos dropped his wallet on Broadway. And let’s not forget, this was at a time when Hollywood looked at musicals like they were a bad ex. They’re like, “Musicals? We tried that once. We’re not going back there.” But then *Hamilton* walks in, and Hollywood’s like, “Oh, hey there, maybe we were too hasty…”
And then Lin-Manuel Miranda’s like, “Hey, what if I did this with a Disney movie?” And boom! You get *Moana* and *Encanto,* and now he’s basically the golden ticket of entertainment. People are throwing Oscars at him, Emmys, you name it. And yes, let’s be real, he’s also scoring a lot of minority brownie points because Hollywood’s like, “We love diversity… as long as it makes a billion dollars.”
Alan Menken doing Disney
Lin-Manuel Miranda doing Disney
Bonus:
I get the idea but it doesn't work because Alan was in charge of the direction of the music for the remake, LMM was tasked with just doing lyrics for the new songs but the former basically had a say in everything that happened.
It got so bad that Alan even condemned the original songs lyrics that he and his partner made almost four decade ago lol.
