‘Hamilton’ Is Coming to the Small Screen. This Is How It Got There.

In the spring of 2017, a production executive withdrew an encrypted hard drive from a Midtown Manhattan vault and boarded a flight to London.

A year before, a film crew had shot two of the final “Hamilton” performances featuring most of the original cast, and the plan was to lock the footage away for five or six years, until the time felt right to share it with the public.

But a cut was ready to show the person whose opinion mattered most: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s laureled creator and star.

Miranda was in Britain, filming “Mary Poppins Returns.” (He played the lamplighter.) So the “Hamilton” movie’s brain trust flew over, renting a private screening room in a hotel basement that the star could readily access during a break from Cherry Tree Lane.

The team didn’t have to wait long to find out what Miranda thought. As the screening got underway, he periodically interjected his approval, and when the final number began, he took off a shoe and threw it into the air.

“I thought, ‘OK, we did our job,’” said Jon Kamen, chairman and chief executive of RadicalMedia, which produced the film. “If he starts throwing his shoes around the theater, it’s pretty special.”