Disney+ is streaming a live-capture film of “Hamilton.” It’s just the latest chapter in a deepening relationship between the company and the musical’s creator.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s relationship with Disney started inauspiciously. He wrote a song on spec for a holiday show. The company rejected it.
“It was a holiday song, called ‘Holidays at Our House,’ and I will never play it for you,” he recalled recently. “It was not very good.”
But in the years since, the partnership has blossomed, so much that Miranda recently joked about the idea that Robert A. Iger, the company’s executive chairman, might burst into his house if he talked too much about an upcoming project.
The company and the composer have a mutual fandom. Miranda named his firstborn son Sebastian, partly in honor of the crab in “The Little Mermaid.” And Iger said that among the reasons he was interested in acquiring the live-capture film of “Hamilton” was that “I wanted to strengthen the partnership we have with him.”
That “Hamilton” film begins streaming Friday, on Disney+. Here’s a timeline of collaborations between Disney and Miranda:
“I basically told them that I would run craft services to be part of the show,” Miranda told TV Guide. Instead, he was cast, by his own description, as a “pathetic loser” in an episode of “Modern Family.” The show aired on ABC, a Disney subsidiary.
He played Reggie the botanist in Disney’s “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.” Among his castmates: the rapper Common, who later told The New Yorker, “I will always remember us freestyling during lunchtime on the set and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is talented.
