Our time of COVID19 isolation has led to a wide range of unusual media content out there. But for me, nothing has been as cool as all of the Hamilton content that has sprung up in the last month.
As I wrote about earlier, the Broadway Cares charity put together a crowd-sourced version of the song “Non-Stop” from Hamilton featuring dozens of separate performances from singers of all ages as a charity fundraiser.
Another heart warmer, was when actor John Krasinski (The Office, Prime’s Jack Ryan, A Quiet Place) helped out a young girl who had to miss going to see Hamilton locally because of the tour being put on hold. He starts on his Some Good News show by telling the girl that he will fly her and her mom to New York to see Hamilton once Broadway reopens, but then Lin-Manuel Miranda joins in with the original cast of Hamilton to do the opening number from the show for the girl. Her reaction is priceless.
Now I like a heart-warming tear-jerker as much as the next guy, I have to say that my favorite COVID19 LMM content has to be Miranda’s streaming talk on how to apply the use of primary sources to analyzing historical issues for high school AP history students .
Or, in other words, how he went from writing a high school term paper on Alexander Hamilton to writing the definitive musical of the 21st century.
Miranda’s talk was part of the College Board’s AP Master Class Series. And once you get past the rather star-struck history teachers hosting the program (Confession time: How can anybody not fanboi/gurl out on LMM?) it turns out that LMM would have made a great high school teacher. (In fact, while he was writing his first hit musical In The Heights, he was a substitute teacher and an AP exam proctor.)
In addition to just the cool factor of hearing LMM talk about writing Hamilton, the master class is also a great discussion of the strengths and limitations of historical research. Some of the best 45 minutes of video you’ll find today: