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Ahead of the release of his feature directorial debut tick, tick…BOOM!, Lin-Manuel Miranda opened up about recent criticisms of previous projects like In The Heights and Hamilton.
In a new interview with The New Yorker, Miranda explained that once he became a well-known Broadway figure, people had higher expectations regarding his work. “People go, ‘Yeah, but what about this? And what about this?'” he said. “And that’s fair! I do that with art I find lacking. It’s not cancellation. That’s having opinions. So I try to take it in that spirit. You try to take all of it, and whatever sticks to your gut is what you bring with you to your next project.”
When Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Miranda’s Tony Award-winning play In The Heights was released this summer, the movie was criticized for failing to feature any darker-skinned Afro-Latinx actors in major roles. In June, Miranda released a statement saying that he was “truly” sorry for the film’s lack of “sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation.”
The director also spoke about recent controversies related to his smash-hit musical Hamilton, but declined to comment on trans performer Suni Reid’s allegation that they were harassed for requesting a gender-neutral dressing room (“I can’t really comment on it, because it’s legal,” Miranda noted).
In particular, Miranda spoke about revised choreography surrounding Hamilton characters Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. In one musical number, Hemings turns her back on Jefferson, who is widely considered to have assaulted her and fathered her children while she was enslaved.
“There was a larger discussion around that moment, particularly when the movie came out on Disney+,” Miranda said. “Sally Hemings, although we are Black and brown bodies playing all these characters, is the only historically Black body that is named in the show. And [director] Tommy [Kail] said, ‘I want to revisit this’… And what a silver lining, that we all had a new rehearsal process and the chance to explore something new.”
