Lin-Manuel Miranda has sent everything from a Pulitzer to five Grammys straight to his figurative pool room, but the accolade that most impresses his two kids is distinctly Australian.
Following Miranda’s appearance in the crowd of his musical Hamilton the night prior, and after former ABC anchor Leigh Sales rattled off other prizes – three Tonys, two Academy Award nominations – to a packed Lyric theatre in Brisbane on Sunday, he made one addition to his own CV.
“And a cameo on Bluey,” Miranda said.
“It was really special, really kismet, that the show that got us through the pandemic and, really, the only show everyone in our family can agree on … is made here in Brisbane.”
Not that an audience of hardcore fans who’d travelled from Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales and who’d been selected by lottery from about 30,000 applicants needed it, but Sales reminded us that Miranda played a horse in an episode that aired mid-last year.
“Excuse me,” Miranda said with mock indignation. “I played Bluey’s first horse. Two lines and I’ll never top it.”
Asked if he “went method”, Miranda replied that he was “in the field for days”.
“I learned to gallop,” he said.
Clearly the experience left a lasting impression on the Puerto Rican New Yorker, whose preconceived ideas of the Queensland capital were entirely “two-dimensional”.
“I see the trees from Bluey everywhere here!” he tells Guardian Australia from his hotel room in South Bank. “But that was really about it. I really didn’t know anything.”
Brisbane, it seems, knew plenty about Miranda, however. He only needed to enter the Lyric on Saturday night to watch Hamilton – the first and only time he would watch the production in Australia – to receive a standing ovation.
At the show’s close he was at centre stage receiving yet more rapture, crowds lurked in corridors and by car park entrances trying to steal a glance and, perhaps, even a signature.
At the afterparty, a dancefloor materialised around Manuel immediately upon his entry, despite the fact the rapper, playwright, pianist and actor freely admits his dancing abilities don’t reach the heights of his other many, prodigious talents. Teenagers screamed and sobbed in his presence. An air of Beatlemania hung heavy around the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
Is Manuel ever surprised that a musical about Alexander Hamilton – the first US secretary of the treasury and another old “white dude” on a dollar bill – could generate such hysteria and resonate so strongly in Brisbane in the year 2023?
“It certainly looks bad on paper,” Manuel says before quoting the African American rapper who won a Tony for his dual role as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton.
“Daveed Diggs loves telling the story of being like: ‘bro, it’s the worst idea I ever heard – I’m in.”
But Manuel believed Hamilton’s story was “uniquely suited” to continue the work he began in his first musical, In the Heights – set in a largely Dominican neighbourhood in contemporary New York – of bringing hip-hop into musical theatre.
Hamilton, he says, was a “prototypical hip-hop star”, born poor in the Caribbean and writing his way out of the island, conjuring success with only his wit, words and lived experience as tools.
And just as Manuel’s lived experience colours his reimagining of Hamilton’s story, so too its Australian-based cast have sprinkled “local flavours … into the sauce”.
Manuel says he laughed and cried during the Brisbane show, but was particularly tickled by a moment featuring Māori actor Matu Ngaropo, who plays the first president of the US.
“No where else in the world will you see a George Washington doing haka movements during the battle of Yorktown!”
