Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘tick, tick…Boom!’ and ‘Encanto’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes Lin-Manuel Miranda, the multi-talented director, actor and songwriter, who has two projects premiering at the end of 2021. The Pulitzer Prize winner for “Hamilton” directed his first feature, “tick, tick…Boom!” on Netflix, and he wrote the songs for Disney’s new film “Encanto.” The film “tick, tick…Boom!” tells the story of the late playwright and composer Jonathan Larson, and Miranda says seeing a production of “tick, tick…Boom!” off-Broadway after Larson’s death solidified his desire to create his own art, even if no one would ever see it. Miranda says he was inspired by the “Golden Age” of Disney musicals in writing the songs for “Encanto.” And he says both the late Stephen Sondheim and rapper Jay-Z show the importance of making music reflect the way people speak.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.6	Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. And rather than be around the push, I'm going to give you three words that most of you public radio listeners probably know very well by now, Lynn Manuel Miranda.
0:23.4	We're going to be talking about a project of his, about an enchanted village with a protagonist waiting to realize their magical potential.
0:29.9	Now, of course, we're going to be talking about his song score for Encanto, but could also be talking about his directorial debut, Tick, Tick, Boom.
0:36.8	I mean, but they both have
0:38.3	those things in common. Somebody waiting for this thing to happen, and they can both kind of feel
0:43.4	time passing them by. Yeah, I suppose that is, I think a ticking of the clock is something a lot of
0:50.3	my characters feel aware of. And I think that starts with Jonathan Larson, honestly.
0:55.5	I was very aware that this was someone who changed musical theater and didn't live to see the change he made with his work.
1:05.0	And so a lot of characters I write end up being very aware of this ticking clock.
1:10.0	Yeah, I mean, that's even the case of
1:11.0	Hamilton, isn't that? Yeah, there's not a little bit of Jonathan Larson in Alexander Hamilton's
1:17.5	restlessness. But yeah, that idea of things in motion around these people who have to decide what
1:24.4	they're going to do, how far back does that go for you?
1:34.1	I guess it goes pretty far back. I mean, I think being a native New Yorker, you grow up,
1:39.6	you grow up with a spidey sense. You grow up like, okay, good subway car, bad subway car.
1:44.4	You grow up with just the sense of like mortality. You know, I would rifle through the Daily News and the New York Post to read the comics page,
1:49.2	and you see no short amount of trauma on pages four, five, and six of those things.
1:55.3	So mortality is something you're aware of at a very young age.
1:59.2	And so I don't think it's an accident that my
2:01.1	characters wrestle with it a lot. It's funny you said the comics page because I was thinking about
2:05.8	that opening for Tick-Tick Boom, where we're going through his apartment. And up on the wall is a
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