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Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘21 Chump Street’ Makes Me Wonder Why I Ever Wrote One-Act Plays
Does everything this man touches turn to gold?
I thought I was a pretty big Lin-Manuel Miranda fan, but lately I’ve realized more and more that I don’t really have a great grasp on this virtuoso’s back catalog of work. I mean, it’s pretty telling that my first brush with Miranda’s In the Heights came from 2021’s film version.
A recent video made me aware that Miranda has a long history of music — and storytelling — that I’d never even realized existed.
Case in point? The one-act musical 21 Chump Street.
The musical, based off a series of real-life events, clocks in at 15 minutes — but it does so much in its short runtime. Every second counts with six cast members, five songs to perform, and a whole lot of social commentary to unpack. Basically — it’s a helluva accomplishment to do so much with the one-act structure.
Why does this feat surprise me so much? Not many people know this about me, but in college I wrote a few one-act plays that were chosen to be performed by a group of local actors. They were flimsy ten-page stories that could have used a few good rounds of peer review; even so, the actors brought those plays to life in such a way that I couldn’t help but feel a welling of pride to see my work on stage.
The experience made me gain so much respect for the whole realm of theater as a whole — and when I see it work flawlessly, as is the case with 21 Chump Street, I am just so utterly impressed.
(And of course there’s the niggling part of my brain that goes, “Why did you try to do this yourself again? Leave it to the real talent.”)
I won’t go into especially long details — it would be preposterously easy to spoil a story that’s complete in one act — but 21 Chump Street manages to be so many things at once: star-crossed love story, cautionary tale, cat-and-mouse game, social critique — so much in so little time.
Just watching the pivotal scene “The Money” near the end has so many undertones to it that I could cry about how perfectly layered it is. From a writer’s perspective, it makes me so happy to watch the plot (and characters) unravel even…
