On Saturday November, 19 The Times shared an interview to Lin-Manuel Miranda, where he talks about his latest projects, tick, tick… BOOM! and Encanto.
In our Gallery you can see a new portrat, while below you can read some highlights from the article.
“I definitely hear a ticking clock in my life,” Lin-Manuel Miranda says. “I think that’s clear from a lot of the work I’ve done.” In 2015 the goateed New Yorker somersaulted to the top of the musical-theatre tree as the creator and star of Hamilton. The bravura, hip-hop-powered tale of Alexander Hamilton, one of the more obscure founding fathers of America, became a stage sensation in New York, London and Sydney and won Miranda two Tonys, an Olivier and a Pulitzer, plus an estimated fortune of £60 million. “You write like you’re running out of time,” one of the songs in the show, Non-Stop, said of his restless title character.
Does he ever feel overwhelmed? “Well, I chose to do it,” he says via Zoom from his home in New York, where he lives with his wife, Vanessa Nadal, and their sons, Sebastian, 7, and Francisco, 3. “That’s an important mindshift sometimes. What I learnt from my time at university [he went to Wesleyan in Connecticut] was, ‘Oh, these things can be in conversation with each other. What I’m learning here is applicable there.'” Besides, he adds, “I don’t feel like I’m running out of time so much as that’s the fantasy. Non-Stop is the fantasy of what a writer’s life is like. It’s much more tedious and slow than that. I’m incredibly impatient to get my work out into the world, but I also work on projects that take years to complete.”
One of the things that attracts him to magic realism, he says, citing Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, is “the ways in which magic presents itself as an expression of character”. So the gossipy sister in Encanto has enhanced hearing and the nurturing aunt cooks meals with magical healing properties. “As a songwriter that’s very exciting: to establish themes for all these characters, to dig into how they see themselves or how the family sees them,” Miranda says. “That’s stuff you talk about with your shrink — to write Disney songs about it is really fun.”
Read the whole feature under the cut.
