‘Musicals don’t have to be all Pollyanna and Oklahoma cornfields’: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda has dared to be different since mixing history and hip-hop in Hamilton – now he is doing a radical Lion King.

Lin-Manuel Miranda in Brisbane for Hamilton.

When Lin-Man­uel Miranda and I previously spoke in 2021, the musical powerhouse behind Hamilton was at the end of what was, even for him, a period of furious creativity.

He had been working on two gigantic projects at once, writing the songs for the Disney animation Encanto, including the ubiquitous We Don’t Talk About Bruno, and directing Tick Tick … Boom!, the movie musical starring Andrew Garfield. The two films would be nominated for five Oscars between them and that remains the only big award that the composer, performer and director hasn’t won, having amassed three Tonys, five Grammys, two Emmys and a Pulitzer Prize. Still fresh in the memory then were the songs he had written for another Disney movie, Moana, and his roles as Jack the lamp­lighter in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials.

What’s next, I asked, during a rare lull in Miranda’s technicolor chat. “I don’t know what it’ll be,” he said. “I’m looking forward to tucking my kids in, being a house husband and figuring out what the next major thing is.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. It turns out that Miranda already had a new project in his sights: writing the songs for Mufasa: The Lion King, a £50m ($100m) prequel to The Lion King remake of 2019. It’s the origin story of Simba’s father, Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre), in which he is taken in as an orphan by the family of a lion prince, Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr), who becomes his adoptive brother and will later be known as the fratricidal Scar.

A photo-realistic animation like its predecessor, the film is directed by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning maker of Moonlight. In previews it looks beautiful, showing a pride of white lions led by Mads Mikkelsen’s Kiros following Rafiki the “hallucinating baboon” across moonlit savannahs and snowy mountains. That a credible director like Jenkins has tackled a franchise movie bodes well, as it did when Greta Gerwig directed Barbie and Taika Waititi did Thor: Ragnarok. Jenkins sent Miranda the script while he was writing the closing number of Encanto. “I was surprised at every turn,” Miranda says, speaking from his plush home in New York.

“We all think of Mufasa as the super dad who lives in the clouds and sounds like James Earl Jones. Like, what’s to tell? But the Mufasa I met in that screenplay was so different from that, and his relationship with his brother was really interesting and not at all what I ­expected. And in reading that screenplay, I was kind of circling the song moments – it was just really clear what the songs needed to be. Maybe I was just in the zone because I was still finishing Encanto.”

Beyond Jenkins, there was much to recommend the project. It is written by Jeff Nathanson, who penned The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can for Steven Spielberg, and features Thandiwe Newton as Taka’s mother, Eshe, and returning stars including Donald Glover as Simba, Seth Rogen as Pumbaa and Beyonce as Nala, Simba’s wife.

Lin-Manuel Miranda as the lead in Hamilton.

Miranda, 44, didn’t get to fulfil his “dream” of writing a song for Beyonce because her character is just speaking in this film; nor is there a song for her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who voices Kiara, Simba and Nala’s daughter. “The folks I was most excited to write for were the ones I knew, which were Anika Noni Rose and Keith David as Mufasa’s parents,” he says. “Those are Broadway hall-of-famers, Tony winners and just incredible voices.”

Pierre, the British star of The Underground Railroad and The Morning Show, “was a bit like fellow Brit Andrew Garfield: ‘I’m not a singer!’” Miranda says. “Then you hear him singing and you go, ‘Yes you f..king are. Who hurt you and told you you couldn’t sing? They should be punished.’ Obviously, if you’re playing Mufasa you’ve got an incredible baritone already because you’re going to have to grow up into James Earl Jones. But I was so pleasantly surprised by Aaron’s voice.”

The afrobeat-influenced songs will be closer to the music of The Lion King stage show, although Miranda points out that the original film of 1994 also had African elements. “The first voice we hear in the original is Lebo M,” he says, referring to the South African composer who arranged the choral music for that film. “Naaargh!” he sings the opening roar of triumph. “That’s the thing you do when you hold up someone’s baby.”

As for this film, “there is a ballad that I’m as proud of as anything I’ve written”, he says. His benchmarks are the theme to Beauty and the Beast sung by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson, and Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight? from the original Lion King.

“The Disney ballad collection is an intimidating set of tunes. I’m very proud of my entry into the canon, but that might not be at all what people take away.”

Miranda’s affability doesn’t come with false modesty, but he is often amazed at which of his songs cut through. Most surprising was the success of We Don’t Talk About Bruno, an ensemble piece that moves between pop, hip-hop, show tunes, salsa and Cuban guajira, yet was the longest-reigning No.1 of 2022 in the UK and has been streamed half a billion times on Spotify. Miranda says: “I remember my son getting off the bus at school and being, like, ‘Daddy, everybody’s singing it. What’s going on?’”

He puts its success down to TikTok. “When you listen to it in 15-second clips, it’s 10 songs,” he says.

“It was uniquely suited for this technology and people went crazy with it.”

The young Mufasa in Mufasa: The Lion King.

It’s impossible to predict things like this, he says, remembering Stephen Sondheim, his former mentor, being “totally perplexed that Send in the Clowns was his biggest hit. It’s such a character-specific moment in Act II of A Little Night Music.” Miranda once forwarded Sondheim an article about an ice-cream van that only played Send in the Clowns. The composer replied: “Very upsetting. Thank you so much.” Miranda uses that phrase all the time, he says. “Somebody sent me a video of some kid rewriting Hamilton using ‘riz’ and all the Gen Z words and I wrote: ‘Very ­upsetting. Thank you so much.’”

Miranda was born in New York to middle-class Puerto Rican parents: his mother was a clinical psychologist, his father a political consultant. After high school on the Upper East Side he went to Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where he started writing In the Heights, a musical set in Washington Heights, the neighbourhood in upper Manhattan where he still lives with his wife, Vanessa Nadal, who is a lawyer, and their sons, Sebastian, 10, and Francisco, 6. In the Heights made his name, opening on Broadway in 2008 and winning four Tonys.

That was nothing compared with the success of Hamilton, the 2015 musical about the founding father Alexander Hamilton that combined 18th-century history with hip-hop rhymes and a virtuoso chronological elasticity.

Miranda played the title role in the original Broadway production, which won 11 Tonys, the second most in history after The Producers’ 12.

This year he bridged the gap between rap and musical theatre again in Warriors, a concept album inspired by The Warriors, the cult film from 1979 about a street gang “making their way through the hellscape of New York City at three in the morning”. Created with the playwright and composer Eisa Davis, it featured Lauryn Hill and Marc Anthony, the ex-husband of Jennifer Lopez, singing the roles of gang members while superstar rappers personified each of the New York boroughs the Warriors pass through – Nas was Queens, Busta Rhymes was Brooklyn, and RZA and Ghostface Killah were Staten Island.

“I’m really taking a page from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice on this one in the way they released Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita as albums,” says Miranda, who must be one of the few people who is equally familiar with the work of Lloyd Webber and Wu-Tang Clan.

The idea was to assemble a “dream cast” for a musical that would never be staged. “Nas is a genius, but he’s not doing a Broadway schedule. But he would spend an afternoon with me, singing these lines I wrote.”

Miranda was thrilled when Nas, who generally writes his own lyrics, approved his.

Agustina San Martin and her mentor Lin-Manuel Miranda during a work session at the drama book shop in New York. Picture: Rolex/Arnaud Montagard

Over the years, Miranda has copped some flak for the dearth of dark-skinned Latinos in the 2021 film of In the Heights (“I just have to do better on the next one,” he said) and the lack of acknowledgment in Hamilton that most of the founding fathers were slave owners. Rolling Stone also pointed out that “every female character, almost without exception, is defined solely by their desire to bang Hamilton, as played by Miranda”.

He’s a hard man to dislike, though, despite levels of success that should be annoying. When he talks about The Room Where It Happens, a song from Hamilton, becoming a phrase bandied about in political shows and Serena Williams posting a picture of herself in bed with Moana bedsheets, the tone is of geeky delight, not ­smugness.

His amenability, he says, comes from him falling in love with musicals when he was doing school plays. “The thing about school plays is you cannot hire, fire or pay anyone involved. So your job is to make the thing as fun as possible.”

Does he see himself as a standard bearer for musical theatre? “When Steve Sondheim passed away I think I probably doubled the number of letters from young writers I responded to because I was like, ‘Shit, our encourager-in-chief isn’t here any more.’”

Some people can’t stand musicals, Miranda knows. “I have a couple in my family. It’s because they didn’t grow up with it and don’t understand the leap from speech to song. Other people associate it with a kind of earnestness that they wouldn’t be caught dead liking. I’d direct them to watch All That Jazz by Bob Fosse – there are plenty of cynical musicals. It’s not all Pollyanna and Oklahoma cornfields.”

Coming up he has an acting role opposite Richard Gere, Diane Keaton and Blake Lively in The Making Of, a movie about married film-makers who, according to the blurb, “cast over-emotional actors as their younger selves”. He would like to direct another film himself, but not something huge. “I’m watching my friend Tommy Kail direct the live-action Moana and he’s doing an incredible job but, man, he has a lot of meetings about effects and water. That’s not interesting to me. I just want to work with actors and sing and dance in a room.”

It sounds pretty quiet on the work front, but Miranda doubtless has another humungous project up his sleeve. House husband? Don’t believe it for a second.

The Times

Mufasa: The Lion King opens in cinemas today.