In case you missed it, Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson decided to become a YouTube star a few months ago. Over 1.4 million subscribers later, it looks like he’s done it. Johnson also recently starred in Disney’s Moana, which features music by Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the two apparently had so much fun together that they decided to ride their momentum and create a new theater production: Millennials: The Musical.
This certainly seems like one of those “in depth trailer for a fake production that’s never actually going to happen” kind of deals, but at the end of the video, it says that Millennials will premiere on The Rock’s YouTube channel next week. Before that happens, though, we have this eight-minute “making of” video that explains the humble origins of the musical: “When a brilliant young artist named Michael Palomar DM’ed us on Twitter with his vision for Millennials: The Musical, we couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough,” Miranda explains.
The play suffered its share of hurdles, like a complete re-write seven days before the premiere, recasting the main roles as the cast falls apart. To be honest, the production seems like it was completely off the rails, but there’s no way The Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t pull off something fantastic, right?
Check out the teaser above, and also be sure to check out our recent conversation with Miranda, in which he talks about writing “a David Bowie song for Disney” to be sung by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement.
Unbelievably, this track is one of the few songs Miranda composed for the film that didn’t make the final cut, which may serve as a kick up your butt to give the Moana soundtrack a listen, because if this is the chaff, what is the audio wheat like? But it did make it onto the deluxe edition of the motion picture soundtrack, so thankfully for us, it hasn’t been lost to history forever.
