Wednesday, February 17, 2016

From an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda

Link:
Hip-hop isn’t the standard Broadway music. And you’ve incorporated this nearly all-minority cast rapping, hip-hopping. This is about guys who wore powdered wigs. They wrote the federalist papers. How does it work, why does it work?

“The casting is not ‘minority.’ Your piece is going to be dated in about five years when we’re the majority. So you might want to say ‘people of color.’

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Are there lessons from the election of 1800 for voters of 2016?

“Every election is a remix of the one before. It only feels contemporary because we’ve been fighting about the same thing for some 200 years. The election of 1800 was the first contemporary election. It was even more ugly, even more bitter than what we’re seeing today. I know that sounds crazy, but ‘twas ever thus. And that gives me hope as an American. It means we haven’t fallen from grace. You had Adams and Jefferson calling each other hermaphrodite and one accusing the other of being dead and hoping news would travel quickly to win the election. It got dirty right away. It’s always been a really elbow-throwing time every four years or so. So that gives me hope as an American because ‘twas ever thus.”