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Lin-Manuel Miranda changes Hamilton lyrics during Puerto Rico show to stop audience member filming

The Hamilton creator has asked fans: 'Please don't make me do that s*** again'

Clémence Michallon

New York

Thursday 17 January 2019 15:38 GMT

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Jimmy Fallon joins Hamilton cast for special Puerto Rico episode

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda changed the lyrics to one of his own songs to stop an audience member from filming a recent performance.

Miranda explained on Twitter that the incident occurred during the 16 January, 2019 show, while he was rapping the song “My Shot”, one of the first few songs in the musical.

He was in the middle of an early verse during which a young Alexander Hamilton exposes his ambitions for the future, during his first meeting with Hercules Mulligan, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette.

As usual, he rapped: “Imma get a scholarship to King’s College / I prob’ly shouldn’t brad but dag, I amaze and astonish”

Then, instead of delivering the usual line, which goes: ‘The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish”, Miranda changed it to: ”LADY FILMING IN THE 4TH ROW, PLEASE STOP IT”

He went back to the regular lyrics at the next line, rapping: ”I gotta holler just to be heard”

Miranda asked fans on Twitter to refrain from fiming future live performances, writing: “Please don’t make me do that s*** again.”

He added: “Anyway, having to think that fast within ‘My Shot’ takes a year off my life, please just enjoy the show. Otherwise you were the best crowd we ever had!”

Hamilton is running for three weeks in Puerto Rico. Miranda, who played Hamilton in the original Broadway cast, has reprised the role.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast appear onstage at the opening night curtain call for Hamilton at the Pantages Theatre on 16 August, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images) ((Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images))

The composer, singer and actor has in the past railed against audience members caught recording live performances.

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10. Girls & Boys, Royal Court

One of those plays that had you staggering slightly as you left the stalls. This one-woman show was performed with amusing self-possession and fierce grace by Carey Mulligan, as a woman recounting how she met her husband, and how they navigated her more successful career and having a family. Dennis Kelly’s play began deceptively light and funny, but its snark turned to harrowing tragedy via a twist that left you winded – and delivered a howl against the conditioned violence of men. Designer Es Devlin’s painterly approach to light and colour was perfect and also paid painful dividends.

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9. Fun Home, Young Vic

This American musical was keenly awaited – and didn’t disappoint. An adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about her in-the-closet father who ran a funeral home, and her own journey towards coming out, it felt important to see such a story onstage – and was so very beautifully told, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music Jeanine Tesori (who also scored the terrific musical Caroline, or Change, which stormed London in 2018 too after opening in Chichester last year). Although the show doesn’t totally burn in the memory, Zubin Varla was magnificent as the father, and Eleanor Kane’s song of sexual discovery and first love – “Changing My Major” (to Joan) – was one of my favourite moments of the year.

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8. Dance Nation, The Almeida

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7. Company, Gielgud Theatre

I spend more reviews than I’d like moaning about old-fashioned musical revivals that fail to tackle #problematic material. Stephen Sondheim’s musical about Bobby, whose friends harp on at him to get married, could have been one – but Marianne Elliott unlocked it with a smart, coherent approach to gender-swapped casting. Bobbie as a woman in her mid-thirties made a lot of sense, as did the switcheroos in several other couples, which gave a fresh fillip to the show’s meandering investigation of relationships. The score sounded divine, Rosalie Craig was a glinting Bobbie, and “Getting Married Today” had me actually breathless with laughter.

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6. Sweat, Donmar Warehouse

A late addition: Sweat has just opened, although after rave reviews tickets are in short supply – catch it if you can before 26 January. Lynn Nottage’s play – about factory workers in Pennsylvania whose friendships and families fracture when job losses loom – was always likely to be good; it won a Pulitzer, after all. But Lynette Linton’s production was ferociously good. Plumbing the emotional depths of Nottage’s heart-breaking story, it had fine, firmly controlled performances and a terrific set by Frankie Bradshaw. And while this incredibly empathetic play has plenty to tell us about blue-collar America, it couldn’t have struck harder in Brexit Britain either.

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5. Misty, The Bush/Trafalgar Studies

A game-changer, this show built up a thrilling momentum, galvanising audiences and transferring to the West End, allowing us to kick once and for all the bone-headed notion that there isn’t an audience for “black plays” into the long grass. And how: Arinze Kene’s piece of gig-theatre explored and exploded exactly the notion of a “black play”, with the mesmerising Kene playing himself as a writer struggling to work out if he’s pandering to what producers expect of him by writing “urban safari jungle s**t”. This was art about art that felt pressingly topical, and while there were rough edges to it, there was also vital vim and intent.

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4. John, National Theatre

American playwright Annie Baker’s much-hyped The Flick left me a bit underwhelmed; this swept me up completely. A synopsis – a fighting couple stay in a strange, kitschy B&B filled with uncanny china dolls – doesn’t do it justice. Here was the finest dissection of a floundering relationship and look at how gender politics infects us all. Here, too, was a kind of metaphysical mysteriousness that was truly stirring – John wasn’t quite a ghost story, but rather, it eerily tilted towards the darker depths of the human soul. It was long, it was slow, and I loved every minute.

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3. The Writer, The Almeida

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2. Ear for Eye, Royal Court

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1. Summer and Smoke, The Almeida

If you’d told me in January that top of my list would be this lesser-known Tennessee Williams play, surely the least enticing show on the Almeida’s absolutely stellar programme, I might have scoffed. But Rebecca Frecknall’s direction of this tale of thwarted love was as delicate and distinctive as it was wonderfully heart-squeezing. Matthew Needham was a burningly intense leading man, but it was Patsy Ferran’s incredibly detailed, funny performance that rocketed this to number one. The best news? It transferred to the West End, where you can catch it until 19 January.

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In 2015, he said in a tweet he had “caught and kicked someone out for audio recording”.

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The previous year, Miranda had explained on Twitter that he believes “a bootleg, with terrible audio and shaky visuals doesn’t preserve my work, it MISrepresents it”.

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