Miranda’s in the mood for more music
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jack the cheery lamplighter in Mary Poppins Returns, paid careful attention to his surroundings on set.
He watched how director Rob Marshall set up intimate moments and the sumptuous musical numbers.
Miranda’s probably better known as the creator of the multiple prize-winning theatre phenomenon Hamilton — he wrote the score and lyrics and played the founding father alexander Hamilton both off and on Broadway.
The actor, producer, composer and cultural visionary was observing Marshall with interest because, ‘i’m equipping myself to direct my own movie musical’.
Sometime in 2020 Miranda will direct a film version of an early work by Jonathan larson, who wrote Rent.
Miranda will make a picture based on larson’s Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, an autobiographical piece about an artist who wants to create something of worth before he hits the age of 30.
larson died aged 35, days before Rent opened in downtown new York. it went on to win a Tony for best musical . . . and a Pulitzer prize.
Mary Poppins Returns is set in the Thirties during ‘ the Great Slump’. Miranda said it’s no accident ‘ given the state of the world’ that movie musicals are coming back (he mentioned la la land, Mamma Mia! Here We Go again and a Star is Born). Screen musicals were prevalent in the Thirties and Forties, when folk needed cheering up, same as now. ‘They perform a cathartic function for us,’ he said.
Miranda opens the new Poppins film with a number called underneath The lovely london Sky which cleverly embraces the audience. He said it’s the equivalent of Oklahoma! opening with Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, which was revolutionary for 1943. ‘it didn’t start with a big bang and a line of chorus girls. it lets the audience breathe and relax,’ he said, adding that the secret of the number is that Jack’s singing about being under the lovely london sky ‘but that sky is grey . . . rainy’.
That tells us we’re with a character who will guide us to the light. Miranda moved his family — wife Vanessa nadal and son Sebastian, now four — to england for ten months while he worked on Poppins. By the time they left, ‘we knew we were having our second child’. Francisco was born in February — on the same day the couple watched an early cut of the film in Rob Marshall’s office — and is now ten months. ‘Francisco is my Mary Poppins baby,’ Miranda told me proudly.
in The Heights, an early Miranda work, will film next year with Jon Chu, who made Crazy Rich asians, directing and Miranda producing.
a film version of Hamilton is a long way off, Miranda told me, although a movie of the original Hamilton cast
was filmed over three days in 2016 and fully edited by the show’s director Thomas Kail. But, ‘it’s locked away in a vault’. it will eventually get a cinema release, he said; but no time soon.
‘Our goal is to let as many people see Hamilton as a stage show in theatres, in as many cities around the world, as we can find. and when we feel the time is right, the idea is to get the film out of the vault and put it in cinemas.’
even further off is the possibility of a proper film treatment of Hamilton. Miranda stressed that there are ‘no plans for an adaptation any time soon’.
Meanwhile, he can be found lighting lamps and kicking up his heels with emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins from next Friday.