The Supercalifragilistic Lin-Manuel Miranda [Lin covers Vanity Fair]
The first image you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a gas flame dancing in an old-fashioned street lamp, just before dawn. It’s an apt way to start the movie, which, more than half a century later, means to rekindle the spirit of Walt Disney’s 1964 adaptation of the P. L. Travers children’s books. Some would argue (well, I would) that the original Mary Poppins is the greatest of Walt Disney pictures—Disney, the actual man and studio head—so that crafting a sequel is a Herculean and possibly foolish task. Blame or salute director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods), screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi), and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray). But here we are.
The second thing you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a close-up of Lin-Manuel Miranda, tending the flame literally and figuratively as a Cockney lamplighter named Jack. Those of us happy just to have had tickets in the rear balcony when we saw Hamilton, the epochal hip-hop musical Miranda wrote and starred in on Broadway, or In the Heights, his first show and the rare Broadway hit with Latin music actually written by Latinos, may not have realized how expressive his big brown eyes are, especially on a movie screen. Here, with his face shorn of its customary beard and mustache, those eyes, no longer counterbalanced by whiskers, look almost ridiculously, Keane-ian large. They’ve been unleashed, like a pair of excited puppies—adorable and up for anything. In tandem with the gaslight, they seem meant to welcome us into the magical, innocent, sentimental world of Mary Poppins Returns, and they give us the first hint that this thing might work.
Rob Marshall and John DeLuca, Marshall’s producing partner as well as his partner partner, cast Miranda after seeing him in Hamilton,consciously following the template set by Walt Disney, who gave Andrews her first big-screen role in Mary Poppins after she had become a Broadway star in My Fair Lady and Camelot. “We were blown away by the spirit behind Lin’s work as an actor—there’s an unusual purity to it,” Marshall told me. “What’s so fascinating about getting to know Lin personally is that there’s not a jaded bone in his body, and we were looking for Jack to have an optimism, a child-like sensibility. Lin just has that ‘it’ thing, and it comes right through the lens.”
Not a jaded bone in his body. Sam Wasson, a friend of Miranda’s from their undergraduate days at Wesleyan, said much the same thing when he described Miranda as “a human gumdrop.” At Wesleyan, Wasson and Miranda worked on shows together, including an improv group that Miranda played music for. “He was game for anything,” Wasson said. “He had a little Mickey-and-Judy feeling in him. ‘Let’s go! Let’s do it!’ It’d be impossible to think of Lin as depressed in any way, which makes me hate him. You want to think, ‘Oh, genius comes with darkness,’ and I’m sure it’s there, but I haven’t seen it.”
Mary doesn’t age, right? Which makes her kind of like a Time Lord.” That was Miranda one afternoon this summer, explaining the ground rules of what I hope no one at Disney refers to as the Poppinsverse. “Time Lord” (I had to look it up) is a reference to Doctor Who and that series’s race of time-bending aliens who can also regenerate themselves whenever plot twists or casting changes demand. You can imagine the novel appeal of characters who have literally all the time in the world to someone whose signature work is about a man haunted by the specter of an early death; as Miranda’s Eliza Hamilton sings to her husband, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” It’s a refrain that underscores Miranda’s own life and work, well beyond Hamilton.
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