#that shirt has been like probably the proudest achievement of my life like no joke and everything I've put into it & my Etsy just got kille

[didnt-hear-cold-as-you-live]

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[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Hamilton is an insane idea, but the story works’

“Helen Mirren was one of the first people to see Hamilton,” recalls the 37-year-old Miranda, his voice urgent, conspiratorial. “She saw it very early and I said, ‘If we’re lucky enough to go to London, are they going to be bothered by King George?’ And she said, ‘Nahhh! We love it when you take the piss!’”

Miranda cracks up. “So I’m not worried,” he goes on. “I’m excited.”

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If Miranda is feeling any pressure about the transfer, he isn’t showing it. On the morning we meet, in the offices of theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh in Bloomsbury, he bounces into the room, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and running shoes, all blue. The ponytail and goatee he had on stage in New York have been clipped and it has the effect of making him look two centuries younger. Miranda is a prolific tweeter and he has provided regular updates on the new production since arriving in the UK in late November. After the first run-through, he wrote: “London, gird your heart. This company is not playing around.” A couple of days earlier, he gushed: “This company is so fuhuuucking good.”

None of the cast is a household name: Jamael Westman, one of a pair of Alexander Hamiltons, graduated from Rada last year and this is just his fourth credit. “It’s a similar mix of vets and newcomers as we had in our original company on Broadway,” says Miranda, who has no plans to step into Hamilton’s blouse and breeches in this run. “I can’t wait for London audiences to get in front of this show. I’m curious how certain things will play: there’s a couple of New Jersey jokes and I’m like, ‘That’s going to be huge…’” Miranda rolls his eyes.

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From the beginning, Hamilton has had a political agenda if you scratch the surface. The first time Miranda performed any material from the musical in public was in May 2009, when he was asked by the Obamas to participate in an evening celebrating “the American experience” at the White House. When the approach was made, the expectation was that Miranda would sing something from his debut musical, In the Heights. This was a semi-autobiographical tale of growing up on a multicultural block in New York that had won four Tony awards, best musical among them.

Instead, Miranda tried out “16 hot bars about Alexander Hamilton”. There’s YouTube evidence of the performance and it’s clear that Miranda, who’d never met the president before, is nervous; well, as nervous as Miranda ever gets, which is not especially. Still, in his introduction to the song, there’s more “ums” than usual and even a little stammering. When he explains the concept, people, including the Obamas, giggle, not sure if they should take him seriously.

“Yeah, it was really scary and it’s a little bit like showing the ultrasound at five weeks,” says Miranda. “I had a lot of people look at me like I was crazy for a very long time. I mean, you can kind of see the reaction in miniature at the White House. I state what I’m going to do and everyone just laughs at me. And I go, ‘You laugh but it’s true!’ Just trying to keep my cool, because I’m also performing in front of the leader of the free world for the first time in my life. And then you see people get sucked into the story. Then their heads start bobbing. And that’s been the story of Hamilton: it’s been an insane idea but the story works. The story is compelling, it’s a human one. And yeah, that’s that.”

For a piece of art that was “the musical of the Obama era”, according to the New Yorker, the Trump years were always going to present some challenges. The aftermath of the statement to Mike Pence was especially uncomfortable. “When the president sends a tweet he’s also sending trolls and bots your way,” says Miranda. “It is a way of targeting, so we had to deal with death threats for several weeks and we had to wait for that kerfuffle to blow over. So we lived through it. There was a bit of a pendulum swing, right; we were beloved by the Obama administration; we’re really not beloved by the current administration.”

Did Miranda consider putting “Highly overrated: Donald Trump” on the Hamilton poster? “Haha!” he replies. “There are certainly those who would wear that with a badge of pride, but I would not trade it for the stress of those weeks. These are just not normal times. We have a president who targets people and goes after them and that’s really without precedent and scary, but that’s where we are.”

Miranda, though, does not shy away from a fight, either. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September, killing at least 500 people and destroying the electrical grid, he was furious at Trump for his inaction. While the president quickly offered reassurance and funds to Texas and Florida after the natural disasters that affected those states, he was much quieter about Puerto Rico, which is an unincorporated US territory. Nearly three months on, a third of the island remains without power. Miranda’s response was to tweet Trump: “You’re going straight to hell.”

“What does that tell the people of Puerto Rico about the person who is supposedly in charge?” he asks. “Those are 3.5m American citizens. So that’s when the rhetoric is heartbreaking: you know relief could come with one signing of the pen and it’s just not. Because he doesn’t care.”

Miranda, who has raised $2.5m for the relief effort from a charity song, also recently announced that he would be taking a production of Hamilton to Puerto Rico in early 2019. He did a similar tour in 2010 with In the Heights and it remains one of his proudest achievements. “I find it hard to talk about it without tearing up,” he says and it’s true, he looks like he might cry. “Growing up, I’d get sent to Puerto Rico for a month a year where I was the kid with a fucked-up Spanish accent who couldn’t really speak it well enough to hang with kids my age. I was like the weird exchange kid. I loved Puerto Rico, but I never felt at home with it. Then to have In the Heights be embraced in English, the way I wrote it, it closed some hole in me that I didn’t know was open.”

These are manic, sometimes confounding times for Miranda. Hamilton took the best part of six years to write but now life seems to be happening in fast-forward. So far, he has only been accepting offers “that are just so bonkers that you’d kick yourself for ever if you didn’t jump at the chance to do them”. These have included a pivotal cameo in the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and a six-month spell in London to shoot a lead role in Mary Poppins Returns, which will be released Christmas next year. The film is directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and stars Emily Blunt as the umbrella-wielding hero, as well as Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer.

“Poppins was both incredibly hard work and sort of this joyous vacation,” says Miranda. “Because I had just been in Hamilton-mania in the States, it was starting to get to the point where I couldn’t ride the train without having a conversation about Hamilton. So the only sane response is to chop off all your hair and leave the country. I was really very anonymous here and that was a wonderful thing to reclaim, to ride the tube around and take my kid to Lady Di park. To sort of do normal things was wonderful, because it was getting weird. Like, famous-person weird.”

This is just the tip of it. The Weinstein Company had optioned the film rights to In the Heights, so Miranda is endeavouring to extricate himself from that. (“So monstrous,” he says. “I met Harvey several times. I knew he was never going to win a nice-guy competition, but I didn’t know about all of this other stuff.”) Miranda’s first child, Sebastian, was born two weeks before rehearsals for Hamilton started in 2014 and he revealed last week that his wife Vanessa Nadal, a corporate lawyer, is expecting their second. He would also like to start work on a new musical, but he probably just needs to lie in a pool to figure out what the subject is.

“You’re right,” he exclaims, “I should take more vacations, thank you! Yeah, that is the hardest lesson to take hold of: the good idea comes when you are walking your dog or in the shower or resting. And waking up from sleep. I don’t believe it’s an accident that on my first vacation from In the Heights, the best idea of my life shows up. So I have a couple of ideas, but I’m waiting to see which one grabs hold and doesn’t let go.”

Until then, Miranda will keep on doing what he’s done every day since Hamilton opened in New York in early 2015: field requests for tickets for the show. In London, it is sure not to be any different. Miranda made some good friends here when he was filming Mary Poppins Returns –Whishaw and the chef Yotam Ottolenghi among them – and he is excited for them to see the show. Otherwise, there’s only so much he can do. “People tweeting me, ‘I can’t believe I paid $2,000,’” he says. “I didn’t charge you $2,000! I don’t know why you paid that.”

What about the royal family? “Oh, I’ll give Prince Harry some engagement tickets, that would be an absolute treat,” Miranda smiles. “Obviously that would be an honour for us.” Let’s just hope he isn’t too offended by the portrayal of his great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.