"Tick, Tick... Boom!" isn't just a love letter to Jonathan Larson, but also to the late Stephen Sondheim. If you look closely, you'll find the film contains not one Sondheim but two.
Whenever Sondheim's character appears in-person, he is played by Bradley Whitford. Sondheim approved of this casting choice. "I don't know who that is, but he has a name like a Jane Austen character, and I love it," Sondheim said, according to Lin Manuel Miranda (via The New Yorker). In the same interview, Miranda shared Sondheim's email feedback on the film. The legendary Broadway composer thanked Lin for portraying him "gently and royally." But after hearing Whitford's character leave an encouraging voicemail for Larson at the end of the movie, Sondheim added that the voicemail seemed kind of cliche. "I would never say that," he said, so he offered to rephrase the message in his own words.
Lin was more than happy to accept feedback from the legendary composer (whom he and Larson both admired.) "It makes me weep to even think about [it]," Miranda told Entertainment Weekly. Whitford wasn't available to re-record, so the line was recorded by Sondheim himself. Since Bradley Whitford hadn't appeared since the beginning of the movie, Lin figured nobody would notice the difference — and for those that did ... well, "the folks who know will know," said Miranda (via The New Yorker). In the final film, the message is, "It's first-rate work and has a future, and so do you ... Meanwhile, be proud."
