“When I showed [Stephen Sondheim] the finished film, he said, ‘You treated me gently and royally, for which I’m grateful,’” says [Lin-Manuel Miranda]. “And then he wrote me and said, 'But the last phone message to Jon, the language feels a little trite. I don’t feel like I would ever really say that. Can I rewrite it?’ I was like, 'Gosh, a rewrite from Stephen Sondheim — do I accept this?’”

There was only one problem — [Bradley Whitford] had already wrapped his work on the project and was unavailable to re-record it. Sondheim offered to record the new version for Miranda, and it’s his voice that audiences can hear in the final cut.

“It makes me weep to even think about,” gushes Miranda. “Because he was such a mentor to Jon and generations of songwriters. But yes, he rewrote that message and recorded it himself and just sent it to me." (x)

next to normal + name etymology (insp.)

“By implicitly equating Eliza’s acts of narration with [Hamilton’s, Lin Manuel Miranda is] acknowledging the women who built the country alongside the men. You’re left wondering whether the “Hamilton” of the title isn’t just Alexander, but Eliza, too.” – Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)

““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”