“I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes.
If you remember A Raisin in the Sun as a play about a family that decides to buy a house, you might be surprised that the author thought its crucial line was about African decolonization. Lorraine Hansberry’s favorite character wasn’t Lena Younger, the stalwart widow who wants to use her husband’s life-insurance payment to move her family out of a cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side.
When Lin-Manuel Miranda started writing a musical about an ambitious, irresistible Caribbean-born striver who takes the New York political world by storm, he didn’t have to look far for a real-life model of relentlessness. “That’s Luis Miranda as much as it is Alexander Hamilton,” he explains in Siempre, Luis, a new documentary about his father’s journey from a Puerto Rican hill town to the centers of Democratic Party leadership on the mainland.