Lin-Manuel Miranda has been waiting for a role like lamplighter Jack in “Mary Poppins Returns.” The Broadway superstar, best known for creating and starring in Tony winners “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” is making a slight career shift not only by appearing in a leading role on the big screen for the first time (and earning a Golden Globe nomination!), but in a musical he didn’t write.
An American actor of Puerto Rican descent’s film debut in a major Disney franchise like “Mary Poppins” reflects the growing diversity of the entertainment industry, which is what Miranda has always attempted to encourage in his writing. Alongside director Rob Marshall and co-star Emily Blunt after a recent screening of the film, he told the audience, “I started writing musicals because I really wanted a life in musical theater. And if you're not Bernardo [in ‘West Side Story’] or Paulo in ‘A Chorus Line,’ that’s sort of it for Puerto Rican dudes. So I started writing ‘In The Heights’ because I wanted to write the kind of roles I wanted to see, and ‘Hamilton’ is kind of the same thing.”
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So to take on a role in someone else’s project was not a point of contention for him but rather a celebration. “To be offered a chance to be in a movie like this, this feels like the fruit of 14 years of work as a writer. I just get to act, I just get to sing and dance!" It is this natural enthusiasm that not only makes Miranda a perfect fit for such a project, but is also undoubtedly what has made him a success. Jack, he joked, “is excited to be along for the ride. It was not much of an acting stretch for me to go there—I’d be like, ‘What, I get to have adventures with Mary Poppins? Great!’ ”
He also recalled working with the film’s songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman. “I remember going to their studio and I had such lyricist envy. Because Scott Whitman had a pile [of books] of British slang from the 1930s, cockney slang, rhyming slang. And I was just like, ‘You have all these wonderful books, with words!’ And watching him really craft this thing and then working it until it felt effortless, that was really the fun of that.”
Making a massive musical look effortless is certainly a skill that Miranda is all too familiar with, and proved particularly crucial on “Mary Poppins Returns.” “Every little throwaway moment here is a result of hours and hours of work,” he said. Even the tiniest details in a musical number require grueling work, commitment, and stamina. Case in point: the moment during the song “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” in which Jack throws his hat atop a lamppost. “I did it as a joke in rehearsal and it landed,” remembered Miranda. “And [choreographer John DeLuca] was like, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said—cocky me—‘Yeah, I can do that again.’ And I threw it and I did it again, and everyone [gasped]. And then I didn’t do it again for three months!”
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