fuck yeah jonathan groff

@BwayPR

GQ: The show appeals to a wide range of people who would never otherwise go to a Broadway show. To a lot of people, it made Broadway “cool.” Did you foresee that happening?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: There are people who only listen to Broadway musicals. There are people who only listen to hip-hop. And then most of us listen to a little of everything. To me, hip-hop and musical theater both share the fact that they’re adaptable. They can absorb styles and flip them for the storytelling. I think what Hamilton’s tapping into is the silent majority of people who like lots of different kinds of shit… Most of us just like good shit.

Jonathan Groff: My aunt and uncle, who are Mennonites, came to see it. They’re literal dairy farmers from the fields of Pennsylvania. And they were blown away. And I was like, “Did you follow, like, the rap and stuff?” And they were like, “Totally! We got all of it!” And [my uncle] was like, “It’s this, and Fiddler on the Roof. Best shows I’ve ever seen.” I was like, there you go.

GQ: What is it about this play that’s resonating so deeply with people who see it?

Daveed Diggs: The first time I did a workshop of it, Chris Jackson was playing George Washington, and it changed everything the first time I heard him sing as George Washington. Because he was so clearly George Washington. So all of a sudden, this guy that I know really well… this is George Washington! A regular person who looks like people who I know, who has many successes and many failures and is not a perfect human being but is a great, great man. All of a sudden I have a real connection to this Founding Father who’s been the dude on the money for so long… Having this living, breathing, real, passionate, and supremely virtuosic human being be the stand-in for what that person is in my brain—and that’s forever now. Any time I think about George Washington, it’s Chris Jackson. And if something similar to that is happening for people who come see the show, the effect really is profound, because that gives me a type of ownership over the history of this country that I didn’t have before.