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
At the helm of the NYPD, the nation’s largest police force, which is acknowledged as an international model for its cutting-edge crime-fighting techniques and facing down terrorist threats, is Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a former Marine who likes a challenge.
Ray Kelly recalls how when he was only seven years old. he’d often hop on the subway and travel down the West Side of Manhattan alone to have lunch with his mom who was a coat check girl at Macy’s, the nation’s biggest department store.
His dad, James Francis Kelly, spent twenty years as a milkman, first driving a horse-drawn carriage over cobblestone streets and later upgrading to a standup motorized half wagon.