With the insanely popular and priced
Hamilton, show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda built a Broadway bridge to the American Revolution for minority audiences to cross over and inhabit the story. His new film
, In the Heights, after a year’s delay due to the pandemic, is both streaming on HBO Max and opened the Tribeca Film Festival that began Wednesday. I took the A train uptown to Washington Heights.
The great achievement of
Hamilton was that Lin-Manuel Miranda populated the heroes of the American Revolution with black, brown and Latino actors and used contemporary rap to let minorities live inside our foundational story. Latino Hamilton and Black Jefferson and Burr clashed over what kind of powers the new government should have, once Black George Washington left the scene. This sure wasn’t