Originally published October 30, 2020 on WordPress, written by me, Rachel Beth Ahrens. Copyright 2021 Lady in the Blue Box Publishing, All Rights Reserved. Reader Discretion Advised, RAYOR.
The Continuation of The King of Broadway is Dead series. It’s back. Frak.
Again, age range is 16+ and reader discretion is advised.
Drat. Confound it, Rachel. Drat. Drat. Drat. Shut up shut up shut up shut up- freaking frak, not this AGAIN!!!
I was perusing the internet again, and this happened because of Election Day November 3rd, which is scarier than Halloween, to quote the Norah Jones song “My Dear Country”.
This is what happened. Courtesy of #HamiltonTownHall for a reunion of the Broadway musical, now available in its original format on Disney+, please vote for Biden and Kamala Harris to get rid of that bastard Scrump the traitor to America:
My god, they’re so good.
I love that thing that goes- “Oh, hoh?” “A quid pro quo?” “I suppose… Wouldn’t you like to work a little closer to home?” “Actually, I would…” … “We’ll see how it goes-” “Then let’s go-”
Aaron Burr: “NO.”
Company: “-One else was in the room where it happened! The room where it happened! The room where it happened!”
Ding, I love that part. Jazzy, snazzy, and classy, me likey.
And because I’m foolish, careless, and broke that I can’t afford Disney+ and not even a Broadway ticket either, I streamed the actual video from the musical ‘where it happened’ so to speak:
(Original video of "Room Where It Happened" removed due to copyright)
In the words of Lily Aldrin from How I Met Your Mother, again: Click boom- “SUUMBIIIIITCH!”
Did I hear a little of Dr. Facilier from Disney’s Princess and the Frog coming out of Leslie Odom, Jr. just now? He sounds like a PERFECT cold and cruel Disney villain just now!!! Scaryyyyy. “I got friends on the other side… Ha ha ha ha haaaa…” Now that is 21st century style music that’s John Kander meets Randy Newman style New Orleans Dixieland jazz. That’s my kind of party music to me.
No, Mr. Miranda, NO way in HELL did you write that song either! You couldn’t possibly have written all that by the time your son was born, I refuse to believe it. Grrrr.
But as I said on Twitter, because of recent events, there needs to be a part 5. Dahmmeeeeeet. Ah well.
Now, the reason why I decided on a part five, we didn’t discuss what happened to the original cast actors that went on to do other things. I often wondered what they did, if they ever got to do anything in the movies at all.
It’s because of something very, very cute that I watched recently, which had the cutest looking bunny I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s where we’re starting, which is going to be the theme of this blog entry. My love for bunnies and Asian culture, and how they’re both related by a Netflix movie that’s all the things I love combined: space, astronomy, sci fi, fantasy, Sailor Moon, Chinese myth, Chinese philosophy, and how cute bunnies are:
Netflix presents: Over the Moon, released in 2020, only a few weeks ago. It’s flipping ADORABLE. So. Much. Fun. Words. Can’t. Describe. 
When I heard this song, my jaw hit the floor, because it sounded so much like Katy Perry. I thought it was Katy Perry, it sounded like her style, with a little bit of a K-pop vibe, but the movie is actually based on Chinese myth.
But the voice of Chang’e, the moon princess goddess, was NOT Katy Perry, in my disgust.
It was flipping ELIZA HAMILTON. Phillipa Soo, the soft spoken pretty soprano from Broadway and former Schuyler Sister. WTF.
Still, her voice is PRETTY. I want to sing this song! But it’s been ages since I’ve hit notes like that, I don’t know if I can anymore. I’m rusty and out of practice. I haven’t been able to sing “Der Holle Rache” by the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute without hurting people’s ears in more than 15 years.
Compared to her, I suck.
And with that in mind, especially with the historical Hamilton musical, let’s look at the aftermath of the musical-that-must-not-be-named for some of the actors in question.
Aaron Burr (sir) was casted in a Sia music video, which is actually one of my favorites because of the rainbows and the cute kids:
I love the song too, and I’m going to use it in my Doctor Who performance at next year’s Shore Leave when Alex Kingston “Doctor’s Wife” River Song makes an appearance. Literally, the lady in the blue box, who’s wearing rainbows on her shirt and the inside of her coat. Love you, Jodie Whittaker!
Phillipa Soo is doing the animated cartoons, we know that…
And Lin-Manuel Miranda has actually slowed down his work due to COVID19, but lately… well…
He’s got a bunny too. One that’s very cute and talks. Not like Darci Lynne, doofus. It’s his soul, more like a daemon. Hester the bunny, from a book written by Philip Pullman.
I’m reading Golden Compass right now, I have an ebook copy and an Audible audiobook both on my Kindle Fire. I LOVE them! Lyra is wonderful!!!
Also, I love that he sings an indie country song from the last 10 years or so in the video with the bunny. It’s adorable. And balloons are awesome, especially hot air balloons that fly, and this one reminds me of a steampunk weather balloon that the very first aeronauts used to predict the weather. Unfortunately, that’s not a good enough reason to buy another subscription to another service, and that includes HBO, which His Dark Materials is broadcast.
After his second son was born, though, he instantly became busy with stuff for Disney movies. One of them was writing songs for a second Disney Princess, not Moana this time, the second time was for his favorite mermaid of all time, Princess Ariel: He’s still working on writing lyrics with Alan Menken to make Little Mermaid fly into a live action movie, hence why I was starting to use the Twitter hashtag #dontscrewupthemermaid, but then I stopped.
I stopped around here in 2019 when my dad got cancer. Dad told me about a new Mary Poppins movie two years ago. I scoffed and stuck my tongue out, saying, “I’m SICK of remakes!”
Dad said, “It’s a SEQUEL, not a remake.”
“Ok, sequels were a Michael Eisner thing. It’s gonna tank.”
Dad said, “Dick Van Dyke is going to make a cameo, we don’t know who yet…”
“If we have no Bert, then…”
Dad said, “Oh no, Lin-Manuel Miranda is going to be Bert’s semi-apprentice.”
Me making a disgusted face: “ICKH! I hate Hamilton!!!”
Dad being all coaxing and loveable: “Emily Blunt is in it… She’s Mary Poppins…”
Those words finally made me shut the fuck up.
Me: “SHUT YOUR MOUTH! Emily Blunt from Devil Wears Prada and Jane Austen Book Club? She’s Mary Poppins?! Take my money!!!”
I was about to lose my patience when the movie came out that Christmas, but we never had the time to go see the movie in theatres and my ex, back when we were still dating, never liked the P.L. Travers Mary Poppins stories at all. I gaped at him and said, “You DON’T love Mary Poppins? How could you say such a thing??? Julie Andrews is lovely!!!”
Hence me breaking into song, and I remember this perfectly and phonetically exact how this song begins: “Iiiiit’s… Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Even at the sound of it is something quite atrocious! If you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Um-de-li-li-li-lum-di-lye!”
NO, I did not need AutoCorrect or AZLyrics on Google for that one! I can spell that word without needing a dictionary, I’m that good of a Grammar Nazi. Ha ha. Face.
But even better than “Supercalif…” is the song I got into one day at college when I was feeling super low that spring, sometime after I learned my dad had cancer. Friend of mine said, “Please tell me you’ve actually seen the new Mary Poppins movie!” And when I said no, she said, “Oh, you’ll totally love the music- Do you love Broadway?”
I said my favorite musical was Waitress, but the last time I was in a community theatre musical was CCBC’s production of Music Man, and my favorite song to sing the alto harmony with our actress playing Marion Paroo backstage was “Goodnight My Someone”, which I made up my harmony completely on the fly by fortunate accident.
She said, “You’d TOTALLY love the music in Mary Poppins Returns! My favorite is ‘Lovely London Skies’, that one is so pretty, I love the high note it ends on. But you’ve got to see this- ‘Cover is Not the Book’ -it’s FULL of euphemisms! You’ll totally love this, it’s so funny!”
She pulled up the video clip of the exact scene. I told her I hated Hamilton and if Lin-Manuel Miranda was in it-
“Don’t be such a stiff! He’s GREAT in this!!! And Emily Blunt is so amazing. You’re gonna love this!!!”
She flipped open her laptop and this is what I got:
Did it lift my spirits? Yes. Was it similar to Vaudeville in the 1930s? Hell Yes. Were the singers actually good? YES. Were there penguins? My GOD YES!
That year, Miranda was nominated for a Golden Globe as Jack the Leerie. Good call, Actor’s Guild and Film Academy. Because in the song “Trip a Little Light Fantastic”, he went through six months of nonstop rehearsing the song in singing, dancing boot camp, blocking, swinging around a lamp post, twirling a burning torch, sliding on a bike, and had to film the entire 8-minute scene choreographed and directed by Chicago‘s Rob Marshall, in 10 DAYS- Babe, you must be exhausted. Being an actor in that Disney movie is hard, better give him an award. He’s a liner away from full EGOT status. Just- I-
And thus, my newest obsession began. Because both Mary Poppins and Jack the Leerie in Mary Poppins Returns got me to cry halfway through the movie. It takes a lot for me to cry, because I’m normally very stoic when watching movies, unless there’s comedy, then I can’t stop laughing. But on “Place Where the Lost Things Go”, I lost it, because dad was having trouble going to the bathroom on his new commode at that point, combining that when Mary is singing to Georgie about his dead mother in saying- “gone but not forgotten is the perfect phrase…” My heart was broken in a million pieces in that scene.
That wasn’t the end of it, it so happens that Lin-Manuel Miranda is the busiest and highest paid man in Broadway, for he just came out with three documentaries for three different subscription services, including an episode of Song Exploder for Netflix (which I watched by myself, because my parents now finally have a Netflix-Hulu-Amazon Prime account with their subscription to Comcast Xfinity, and trust me, it was a BITCH to set up!), and an episode of a new documentary series called “Dear…” for Apple TV, where he’s reading some powerful fan letters, some very poignant from successful people- and one of them made him cry in the actual trailer for the 10 episode series. His eyes are bloodshot and he’s holding his breath and sniffing while reading a fan letter where she quoted his musical In the Heights, which was supposed to be a movie in theatres this year in the summer 2020, but got pushed back to May 2021 because of Corona Virus.
He’s definitely got a squishy soul, as my college friend Tiffany Caplan from CCBC would say. Tough skin on the outside, because he’s a New Yorker (you can hear that Manhattan-almost-Brooklyn accent underneath his Latino American voice), soft and squishy on the inside. Awww.
The first documentary that he released was on Freestyle Love Supreme, documenting 15 years of improv comedy in rap music style, released on Hulu. Sadly, I can’t get to Hulu because my mom’s TV isn’t hooked up to it that it demands a password and I don’t know my dad’s password. My dad’s TV in the living room is the only one with Hulu, and because my parents are always destroying every spare moment I can get to a television, I can never finish watching that movie, but I at least watched the first 20 minutes of it, or so. It’s impressive, in a good way. I do love spoken word/ free verse poetry. That’s what freestyle rap is, free verse spoken word poems. Lyrics and poetry are one and the same thing, it’s always been my firm belief.
The second was the movie capture of the entire stage performance of Hamilton, the entire 3 hour musical with credits and surprise performance by Jimmy Fallon’s band The Roots, all music produced by ?uestlove, my favorite R&B drummer of all time and the coolest dude in The Roots band. That show is on Disney+, and there’s no way in hell I can grab access to see that, no way in hell.
Unfortunately, that goes for another documentary that follows Lin’s dad, politician Luis Miranda, Jr., in Siempre Luis. Though my knowledge in Spanish is a little rusty, some Spanish words stick out like a sore thumb to me- “siempre” is the word for always, or “love always”, more accurately, and both father and son, Luis and Lin-Manuel, both use “siempre” to sign off on all their letters, emails, and texts, as a way to say ‘I love you forever’ to their friends and family. The documentary trailer itself is cut and dry, for it follows Lin’s dad Luis Miranda for a year, specifically the year after Luis suffered a massive heart attack, but after making a huge recovery, he’s been busier ever since, especially after Luis’s hometown of Puerto Rico got severely damaged by Hurricane Maria later that year. He and his family, including Lin and his wife Vanessa, all ran to Puerto Rico to rebuild the island of their second home other than New York, you even see Lin behind the counter of a disaster relief kitchen and serving the homeless people of Puerto Rico hot meals and coffee in their efforts of restoring these people’s homes.
And as a method to restore the island, Lin reprised his role as Alexander Hamilton on the theatre stage in San Juan to play his biggest Broadway success, 100% of funds going to restore the arts and culture in Puerto Rico from the natural disaster. He raised millions of dollars in ticket sales to help underfunded artists in his father’s homeland.
Shit, that’s dedication. That’s super cool.
And yet, Siempre Luis is available only on HBO. Dammeeeeeeeeet. Another reason to get HBO Max, to watch that documentary and His Dark Materials, oh yeah, and the Harley Quinn adult cartoon series (because Harley Quinn is my favorite DC antihero/ villain, she’s badass and got the prettiest supervillain costume and makeup, love her, and because of Big Bang Theory, I love Kayley Cuoco too, and she’s the star of the show!), but three shows is not good enough to buy a subscription to HBO, honestly. Sorry. There needs to be a LOT more reasons than three to buy a subscription.
Hence why my life sucks.
I have to hand it to them, these people Lin-Manuel Miranda works with are truly talented, and somehow similar to the underdogs of our nation, for they all have different backgrounds and similar levels of struggle, for on Lin’s Twitter, someone made an inference on the FLS documentary that Utkarsh/ “UTKTheINC”, who’s actually from my side of town, Baltimore, Maryland, before he came to New York and helped build Freestyle Love’s act, had an addiction to substance abuse before the show’s end. Before the last minutes of the doc, UTK tells Lin and the other rappers in the comedy-rap show that he’s officially one year sober- How wonderful, and sweet. I love it. It inspires hope too.
Also, judging by the “Twitter Cypher” bump where six members of the FLS team live tweeting about the Freestyle Love documentary all video recorded themselves on Twitter, Utkarsh’s freestyle rap was one of the coolest raps I ever heard, until his buddy Lin-Man took over and started rapping about the documentary and then going into the pictures of the “lip biting” that the people on TikTok were bullying him about.
And after that, the TikTok people and the rest of social media went through a shitstorm, BULLYING Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter and all the other social media sources, except for Facebook, since most of the “twiggy looking millennium babies” are not on Facebook, and they constantly scream at me that if I was born in 1988, that means I’m a millennial (I hate that word!) and I’m too young to have Facebook, because- “Facebook is for OLD PEOPLE!”
That’s the reason why Lin is no longer tweeting G’morning-G’nights on Twitter and he’s very, very rarely on social media anymore. Because of the nasty toxic people on social media constantly harassing him with stupid tweets and making him look like a sex icon-
Come on, morons! HE’S MARRIED! He’s 40 years old and he has CHILDREN! LEAVE HIM THE FUCK ALONE.
#loveislouder. #stopthehate.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is why I don’t have TikTok and I have no Instagram either. No, it has nothing to do with Trump either or the ban on TikTok in the United States. The only thing on TikTok worth watching anyway is the cute videos of the celebrity singing dachshund Moonpie Starbox and her baby puppy sister Buttercup. I love the video of Moonpie squealing, “I’m a PRINCESS!” Too adorable, I want to stuff her in my pocket and snuggle. That, and her shouting, “Skirtle!” as she’s watching the window, hunting for squirrelers. Dachshunds do not like skirtles- squirrels. Like the puppies in Secret Life of Pets, exactly.
The biggest reason why I have no TikTok and no Instagram is because social media people are MEAN. I can trust Facebook up to a point, but only because the people I know on Facebook are actual REAL live people I know in the REAL WORLD. Twitter, eh, I can trust it, but if a random stranger sends me a DM asking me if I’m single and asks me if I want to get together as friends or go on a date- BLOCKED FOREVER. I have a boyfriend, I’m monogamous, there is not a gay fiber in me so I’m not bisexual, and that means stay out of the way- that means NO, and I really mean no.
So… Why has my Twitter followers ticker gone from 1,460 followers to 1,452 in a week? Why are all of a sudden people are unfollowing me or even blocking me? Is it something I said?
I planned on reaching 2,000 followers by December 31, 2020, but that may be impossible now, because it’s end of October now. Eh. What the hell.
In the words of Emma Stone in one of my favorite movie turned musicals: Here’s to the fools who dream, crazy as they may seem.
As for poor Alexander Hamilton, as Lin-Manuel Miranda, you might be onto something here, sir. I think you’re very convincing enough. And I admit, you’re clever and super talented. Never stop at amazing starving writers like me. Bravo. Can’t wait for what you’re going to do next.
I’m proudly applauding you and rooting for you to make the best mermaid movie ever.
I love you. Siempre, your Thumbelina, Rachel Ahrens.
Playlist selection- A cartoon and a pop song at the same time! I never liked Ke$ha or appreciated her until I saw this video from one of my favorite cartoon animator/artists, Vivienne Medrano, aka Vivziepop, the woman who created my new #1 favorite adult cartoon comedy series called Hazbin Hotel. This fan-made video of Ke$ha’s hit song “Die Young” is from the only cartoon that Vivziepop made that’s actually child-friendly, because it’s from her kids’ cartoon series ZooPhobia, a new project she released summer 2020:
Unleash the furries!!! (PS, please donate to Vivziepop and her crew of animators for Hazbin Hotel on Patreon! She’s the BEST!)
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