I don't really understand referring to In The Heights as a hip-hop musical. In going through the song list, I only count three out of 23 songs that have rap in them - the title song, 96000, and Benny's Dispatch. The rest are either salsa or pop/ballad styles. If we are counting partially-rapped scores with a small fraction of the songs being rapped, then shows like Into the Woods and The Music Man could qualify as well. But i think of In The Heights more as the first heavily salsa-based musical that became popular (not familiar with The Capeman, but i read that it starred Marc Anthony and Ruben Blades, so maybe that one also? I've never heard the score). On Your Feet has a couple of salsa songs including Mi Tierra, but i don't really know of any other shows. There are a couple of shows with one mambo scene (Damn Yankees, Guys and Dolls), but those don't really sound like salsa as in ITH and OYF; more like highly stylized musical theatre versions of mambo.
Anyway, the point being simply that Hamilton and ITH don't sound that similar, as has already been said, and both have a range of styles within them already. So yes, LMM has written non-hip-hop genres successfully already.
Updated On: 4/26/16 at 12:41 AM
