![]() ![]() They became friends as Miranda kept working on that idea and as McCarter moved from New York magazine to write about culture for Newsweek, feeling "that after six years of reviewing plays I had said everything I have to say. We were probably drunk, but he wasn't joking." "For a second I thought we were sharing a drunken joke. Understandably, Miranda admired the review and soon the two met for drinks: "Late on a hazy night in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda told me he wanted to write a hip-hop concept album based on the life of Alexander Hamilton," McCarter writes. On the contrary: It's one of the most satisfying old-timey book musicals in years." And, "(Miranda) adores Broadway's past and present and holds an easy, Obama-like confidence that the two can gracefully mix." And, "(Miranda) has found a way to achieve in art what New York is forever trying to achieve in life." Then with New York magazine, he wrote, "It's not a boom-bap assault on Broadway sensibilities. He wrote a rave review and did so again when the show moved to Broadway (and eventual Tony Awards) the next year. ![]() So there I was and within five minutes I knew. Hip-hop is a uniquely powerful musical way of telling stories. But I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop and loving it and often wondered why theater was not using it more, not using the music to reflect what was going on in society. I'd never heard of any of the people involved in it. ![]() "It was playing in a little theater on the far west side and I went there not expecting much. One of those shows was Miranda's first, "In the Heights," in 2007. "At 25 I was reviewing Broadway plays, which I had no business doing," he says. He was then hired as the drama critic for the short-lived but, as he puts it, "small, odd and wonderful" New York Sun newspaper. He was exercising his long-held passion for theater by directing plays - "Thank God I never got bitten by the acting bug," he says - when he met Robert Brustein, the critic, producer, playwright and educator who was then at Harvard.īrustein became his mentor, and after graduation McCarter worked for a couple of years as an intern at The New Republic, where Brustein has been theater critic since 1959. He has been there from the show's birth.Ī native of Pennsylvania, McCarter was a student at Harvard University toying with pursuing a career in law or diplomacy. ![]()
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