21 Chump Street: The Musical

Composed in one week for the radio series *This American Life*, Lin-Manuel Miranda\'s 15-minute mini-musical is a funny, bittersweet, morally ambiguous true story about a high school student (Anthony Ramos) unluckily infatuated with an undercover cop. Ramos sings and raps lines like \"She was a light-skinneded Puerto Rican-Dominican—long hair, mature in the body, like whoa!\" with sympathetic sensuality. Lindsay Mendez, as the cop \"making life safer one school at a time,\" brings all the skills of her Broadway stardom to Miranda\'s melodic miniature.