The soundtrack album is available, and has *almost* everything in it. There are certain elements Lin-Manuel reserved exclusively for the live stage production...
I don't know how much of the Genius notes you will be able to make sense of, but there are COPIOUS notes on various elements and how they fit together like this.
I'm coming to realise that this guy may - through a combination of creative genius and the times he's growing up with - is, when the boot meets the board, not better than Shakespeare, better than Shakespeare *could have been*. There are tons of history jokes - Jefferson's crack about missing 80's music - that work *just because* of the happy accident that the time that his audience remembers as part of their personal history just *happens* to map decadewise to the history of the play. There are audio jokes that work ("chick-a-pow!") because Rap is a Thing; rap wouldn't be a thing for 400 years after Shakespeare's heyday. The juxtaposition of symphony and contemporary music. The fact that the entire historical cast is lilly-white, and the only white dude on the stage is King George singing bad pop? Not possible in 1600. Heck, you couldn't even have *women.* Here? Half the ensemble is *women dressed as men*, including The Bullet. And yet, the way he uses the music, the layering of voices, the interleaving references, the way the play is designed to re-use actors and to have those double roles have layers of meaning....
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2018-01-17 08:04 pm (UTC)The soundtrack album is available, and has *almost* everything in it. There are certain elements Lin-Manuel reserved exclusively for the live stage production...
I don't know how much of the Genius notes you will be able to make sense of, but there are COPIOUS notes on various elements and how they fit together like this.
I'm coming to realise that this guy may - through a combination of creative genius and the times he's growing up with - is, when the boot meets the board, not better than Shakespeare, better than Shakespeare *could have been*. There are tons of history jokes - Jefferson's crack about missing 80's music - that work *just because* of the happy accident that the time that his audience remembers as part of their personal history just *happens* to map decadewise to the history of the play. There are audio jokes that work ("chick-a-pow!") because Rap is a Thing; rap wouldn't be a thing for 400 years after Shakespeare's heyday. The juxtaposition of symphony and contemporary music. The fact that the entire historical cast is lilly-white, and the only white dude on the stage is King George singing bad pop? Not possible in 1600. Heck, you couldn't even have *women.* Here? Half the ensemble is *women dressed as men*, including The Bullet. And yet, the way he uses the music, the layering of voices, the interleaving references, the way the play is designed to re-use actors and to have those double roles have layers of meaning....
Pure.
Timeless.
Genius.
I can't wait to see what he does next.