"Lin-Manuel's dead!" Not really. But on May 23, that was a lyric to the song "Dead" from Dead Outlaw. Ham4Ham returned Friday with a special installment celebrating the deadly musicals currently taking Broadway by storm.
Lin-Manuel Miranda's Ham4Ham series, which takes place in front of the Richard Rogers Theatre where his show Hamilton is currently running, is a free outdoor concert. It features cast members from different Broadway productions. The May 23 performance featured cast members from 2025 Tony-nominated Broadway shows Floyd Collins, Death Becomes Her, and Dead Outlaw鈥攚ith special introductions by Tony nominee Louis McCartney from Stranger Things: First Shadow, Hamilton alum Ephraim Sykes from Our Town, Tony nominee Justina Machado from Real Women Have Curves, and Tony nominee Cole Escola from Oh, Mary!
To start things off, McCartney and Sykes introduced Tony nominees Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard from Death Becomes Her, who performed their TikTok viral song "Hit Me." Next up was Tony nominee Jeremy Jordan, performing "How Glory Goes" from Floyd Collins after an introduction by Machado.
Lastly, Escola briefly vamped before the band of Dead Outlaw, noting the similarities between all three of the casts that performed that afternoon: "Death Becomes Her takes the question, what if two dead bodies? And then some other writers came along and said, you know what? What if one dead body?" (Floyd Collins and Dead Outlaw also feature death as a theme.)
Then Tony nominee Jeb Brown took to the sidewalk stage, performing the show's ear-worm opener "Dead," alongside Tony nominee Andrew Durand in full costume as the shows titular corpse, Elmer McCurdy.
See the full video of the performances, which was live streamed via , above.
The outdoor impromptu concert series Ham4Ham was a mainstay of the mega-musical Hamilton in the year following its starry 2015 premiere on Broadway, with composer and star Miranda greeting hopefuls in line for each performance's discount ticket lottery with a performance on the steps of the theatre. Those performances were sometimes improvised, and often including guests from their neighboring shows.
A performance that took play May 13 featured Pirates! The Penzance Musical鈥檚 Jinkx Monsoon, Maybe Happy Ending鈥檚 Darren Criss and Helen J Shen, and the Tony-honored band from Buena Vista Social Club, introduced by Tony winner Kara Young. See the video from that performance here.
