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@projectbway event 03 : not broadway — adam halpin as jervis pendleton in daddy long legs

“Solstice Party“

the secret, the secret of happiness is living in the now

Lin-Manuel Miranda, 'Weird Al' Yankovic Talk New 'Hamilton Polka' (Rolling Stone):

[. . .] Al, tell me your first memory of being aware of Lin.

Yankovic: I think it was when Lin actually contacted me. He wanted me to see In the Heights, but for whatever reason I wasn't able to do it at the time. But I wasn't really keyed into Broadway at the time. It was a big deal, but it wasn't part of my world. After that, I started looking into Lin's stuff and it wasn't too long after that. Help me out with the history here. Had you done the White House performance?

Miranda: That was 2009. We didn't meet until 2010 or '11 or so.

Yankovic: Then help me out. How did we meet?

Miranda: I think you were interested in maybe doing a musical-theater project. I waved my hand up immediately. I think we took a general meeting on that and just sort of kept talking.

Yankovic: We hit it off and became friends and were always thinking about what we could do together. That hasn't really clicked yet. But in the meantime, Lin got busy with this Hamilton thing. [Laughter] That took a little bit of his time.

I'm sure you saw that pretty early in the run. Yankovic: This is the hipster thing to say, but I saw it when it was in previews at the Public Theater. I saw it on Broadway and I saw the preview in L.A.

Miranda: What's crazy is that thanks to Facebook's On This Day feature, I actually know you saw it March 1st, 2015. You saw it three years ago today.

Yankovic: No kidding!

Miranda: I always look at the "What Happened On This Day" thing every morning.

Do you recall seeing him in the audience? Miranda: No. I remember seeing him after. He came backstage at the Public. I have a picture of the two of us.

Yankovic: I was sitting next to [Broadway legend] Joel Grey, which was pretty cool.

Miranda: That's an amazing story. Have you head that story? Joel Grey showed up. I only know this because a friends of ours was behind him in line at the box office. They heard him go, "I'm Joel Grey. I'm here to see Hamilton." They scrambled around and got him a ticket. He turns around and says to my friend, "I don't have a ticket." He just showed up and said "I'm Joel Grey" and they found him a ticket, which is the kind of thing only Joel Grey can do. That's one of my favorite stories.

What was your first impression of Hamilton? Yankovic: I thought it was maybe the greatest piece of art I'd ever seen. I went backstage and I gushed a lot. I might not have predicted it would become quite as big as it became, just because a lot of times the things that I love don't translate into mainstream because I'm kind of a freak and I like things that are different. I loved it more than I can even articulate, but I'm so happy that the rest of the world shared my opinion.

[. . .]

Walk me through the process. Did you always know it would be a polka medley? Yankovic: Lin pitched it to me as a polka medley way more hesitantly than you should have. He was like, "Would you want to do a polka medley?" I was like, "Of course I do!" It was the kind of thing I'd be pitching him if I didn't know him already.

Miranda: Listen, as a longtime "Weird Al" fan, that's a scary ask to make. I also know there's only been two other cases where he's devoted an entire polka medley to a particular artist. There's "Hot Rocks Polka" on the UHF soundtrack and the Queen polka ["Bohemian Polka"]. I cannot presume to be in that rarified air as the Rolling fuckin' Stones! But I asked.

Yankovic: But you are and here you are.

Miranda: I was thrilled when I heard it.

How do you take an entire Broadway production and condense it to five minutes? Yankovic: I didn't know it was going to be five minutes when I began putting it together. The score for it was like 80 pages long. I was getting scared and was thinking, "This is going to be like a 10-minute polka medley. That's pretty unwieldy." But it would be almost exactly five minutes. The first step was just figuring out what was going to be in the medley. I was intimately familiar with the soundtrack since I've heard it a gazillion times. Going through it I realized that everything in the first act is great and in the second act it gets really sad and dark. There's not a lot from the second act. I wanted to keep it very upbeat and not talk about people dying in orphanages.

My initial thought was, "This is going to be Hamilton in five minutes. It'll be a chronological, but scaled-down version of the show." But then I kinda gave up on that idea and realized it'll be a greatest-hits Hamilton, so I was picking a lot of the fan-favorite moments from the show and arranging them in interesting ways so they flow into each other to make it interesting either creatively or lyrically.

When did you do that and how long did it all take you? Yankovic: He called the first week in January. The whole process was about four to six weeks.

That must have been a busy time for you since you were also prepping your tour. Yankovic: Yeah. We were in the middle of rehearsals and there was another project we were working on at the same time. Lin was asking me to get it done a little earlier. That's the reason it wound up being February 30th because ...

Miranda: I wanted it to be the February Hamildrop.

Yankovic: He was like, "Can we please have it a little earlier." We crunched the numbers. We looked at the schedule and were like, "No." We delivered it the night of February 22nd. We mastered on the 23rd.

Miranda: His idea was like, "Why don't we just say it's February 30th?" I was like, "That's the most perfect 'Weird Al' creative problem solving possible. We're doing that."

[. . .]

How do you top this Hamildrop? There's still a lot of year left. Miranda: I have no idea, dude. We may have peaked in March or February 30th, as it were. Obviously this is a dream come true and fans of mine know, of course, how much I revere Al and his work. I don't know.

[. . .]

To wrap up here, are there any more childhood heroes of yours you want to meet and work with or is Al really the top? Miranda: Al is pretty much it. I'm good. It's funny. I posted teasers on Twitter today of what we were dropping tonight at midnight. On my private Facebook I posted, "Ten-year-old Lin has ascended. He is out of dreams. They've all been accomplished. We're good." 

more on the polka’s orchestration & Weird Al’s new tour in the full article!