Musical Non-Stop Genius: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda is an award-winning composer, lyricist, and actor. He burst onto the Broadway scene with his first Tony Award-winning show In The Heights (2005) , and is most notably known for producing the smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton. On top of writing and composing both these musicals, Miranda also showed his talent in singing and rapping as he took charge of their respective leading roles Usnavi de la Vega and Alexander Hamilton. He’s had projects beyond Broadway including songwriting for Disney’s Moana, acting as Jack in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns, and starring in multiple television shows.

Miranda was born in New York City on January 16, 1980 to Puerto Rican parents. His father was a political consultant to several New York City mayors, and his mother was a psychologist. He grew up to the sounds of salsa and show tunes in a Hispanic neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Every year, Miranda would spend at least one month in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, with his grandparents. He spent his school years attending Hunter College Elementary School and High School, but it wasn’t until 1999, when he was in his sophomore year at Wesleyan University that his creative mind started drafting what would be his very first Broadway musical In The Heights.

The hip-hop and Latin music that heavily influenced Miranda in his childhood served to be the life of In The Heights. With freestyle raps and salsa numbers, the 80-minute, one-act show captured the attention of two Wesleyan seniors and two alumni who were interested in expanding the play into a Broadway production. During its run on Broadway, In The Heights won four 2008 Tony Awards and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Miranda’s performance as Usnavi also earned him a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

The show’s intermediate success became a breakthrough for Miranda’s career in musical production. After In The Heights, he continued to delve into other theatrical and non-theatrical projects. He worked as an English teacher at his former high school, wrote for the Manhattan Times as a columnist and restaurant critic, and composed music for commercials and political ads. In 2003, he co-founded Freestyle Love Supreme, a hip-hop comedy musical improv group.

Miranda’s non-stop work ethic eventually carried him into one of the biggest milestones of his career; Hamilton: An American Musical. It all started with a leisurely reading of Ron Chernow’s 995-page biography of Alexander Hamilton, published in 2004. “I knew about as much as anyone did about Alexander Hamilton, before I picked up Ron Chernow’s incredible biography,” Miranda said in an interview with CNBC. Hamilton’s story about having come from such humble beginnings to helping shape his young nation as an immigrant was enough inspiration for Miranda to get to work. This work inadvertently took him seven years to write, with the second song of the show, My Shot, taking a full year as he repeatedly revised it to capture the vastness of Alexander’s character. Miranda’s hip-hop influences once again bleed through the traditional catchy show tunes rhythm of the musical, giving the story a modern twist and a lively feel. The production garnered a record-breaking 16 Tony Nominations, winning 11 Tony Awards including two personally for Miranda for Book and Score of a Musical. It was also awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album among many other prestigious honors.

According to the CNBC article, Miranda said that the audience can take away a number of lessons from Hamilton. “I think one of them is: your story will be told by those who survive you, you have no control over that. You can only control what you do and what you put into the world,” he said. We can see throughout the musical Alexander’s awareness of his limited time, consistently fumbling about his legacy and hearing “the ticking clock.” Miranda himself is no stranger to this sense of mortality as he reveals that he is “drawn to characters who are very aware of it.”

Back in Miranda’s childhood, he experienced the heartbreaking tragedy of losing his best friend. “I have this memory of nursery school of just six months of grey – of my friend, who used to go to this class, didn’t go any more. And I remember the morning my mother told me. When that hits you early, you’re aware of the ticking clock earlier.” This experience affected his outlook on life and at the same time shaped his plays and inspired his work.

Years later, Hamilton has continued to affect people’s lives, creating an avenue for diversity and putting people of color in the forefront of musical theatre. Miranda has made emphasis on casting the main roles with non-white actors despite it being historically inaccurate. “Our cast looks like America looks now, and that’s certainly intentional. It’s a way of pulling you into the story and allowing you to leave whatever cultural baggage you have about the Founding Fathers at the door,” he told the NY Times. This deliberate celebration of diversity is what makes Hamilton resonate so well with the modern generation, and Miranda continues to use his social influence for advocacy long after Hamilton, supporting the relief efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in September 2017, and creating the benefit single Almost Like Praying, benefitting the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS Disaster Relief and Recovery Program.

Miranda’s story is about a child born to immigrant parents who carried his talents, love for music, and pride for his heritage into the work that would landmark itself as a theatrical phenomenon, such as Hamilton did. How he merged history and hip-hop, past and present, into a two-and-a-half hour long lyrical experience is nothing short of brilliant. When Miranda played Alexander, one of his lines in the musical once said, “I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.” With such astonishing success this old retelling of history has become, we can very much say that Miranda’s legacy is secure.