Photo Credit: New York Times
What if you went to school one day and found Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill posing as your classmates because Ice Cube told them to? Yes, this is loosely the premise for the movie 21 Jump Street, but some students in Florida know that it’s not just fiction. In May 2011, a group of young police officers did, in fact, go undercover as students in high schools in Palm Beach County, Florida to stop the buying and selling of drugs on the campuses. The public radio show This American Life reported about this incident as part of a Valentine’s Day special in 2012 since one of the students fell in love with one of the undercover officers. The podcast below is not that broadcast, although you can check it out here if you so desire, but one aired just a few months ago. In the Heights star and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda took that piece of journalism from 2012 and turned it into a 14-minute Broadway mini-musical, 70-80% of which is verbatim quotes from interviews about the incident.
From This American Life’s “The Radio Drama Episode,” here is 21 Chump Street: The Musical. Enjoy!
And if you want to see what it looked like on stage, here’s a video of the opening number, “What the Heck I Gotta Do.”